John Deely on the Epistemology/Ontology Distinction

The famous problema pontis, the problem of building a bridge from what is in our individual mind to what is outside of our mind (which of course includes the mind of other humans), on the terms of modern philosophy, proves insoluble. The problema indeed is that there is no pons possible! In Bertrand Russell's famous summary,[1] "we can witness or observe what goes on in our heads," indeed, but "we cannot witness or observe anything else at all." 

That is where what the moderns came to call "epistemology" leads.[2] Of course the conclusion—solipsism, the isolation of every self within itself—is unacceptable to "common sense" and incompatible with common life in the every day. [...]

Behind the evident terminological diversity you will find underlying not a dime's worth of difference among any of the modern treatments of epistemology. Absent a placing of the understanding of the singularity of relation front and center in the treatment of knowledge, there is no way out of the modern dilemma, as our redefinition of medieval philosophy will show; for only the singularity of relation as circumstantially transcending the difference between ens reale and ens rationis, and thus also transcending in the contrast of a relation's fundament to the relation's terminus the distinction between inner and outer, do we find the basis for the prior possibility of the action of signs enabling all knowledge, brute or "rational", thus including the human awareness of things at once in their difference in principle and partial coincidence in fact with objects.

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Notes: 

 1. [ftnt. 7] Bertrand Russell, My Philosophical Development (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959), 26; second italic added.

2. [ftnt. 8] The division of philosophical study into "epistemology" as the study of knowledge and "ontology" as the study of being seems harmless enough, a merely descriptive distinction of areas of study. But the modern "epistemology", coined perhaps in Ferrier 1854, turns out to be a study which shows, explicitly in Kant but implicitly already in Descartes and Locke with the reduction of objectivity to mental self-representations, that in fact human knowledge cannot go beyond itself to grasp being in its own subjective and intersubjective structures—"as though", Maritain remarks of this modern implication (Jacques Maritain, Distinguish to Unite, or The Degrees of Knowledge, trans. Gerald B. Phelan (New York: Scribner, 1959), 66), "a philosophy of being could not also be a philosophy of mind".   

In fact, [...] with Aquinas and others, animal awareness in sensation does not begin with mental imagery, but originates rather in relations (the relations [proper] to common sensibles, in fact) that do not neatly fit the contrast between mind-independent and mind-dependent being, but descriptively and analytically antecede that division in providing the common root of objectivity as it will subsequently branch within perception into entangled mind-dependent and mind-independent aspects.   

For this reason, I prefer Maritain's description of the study of knowledge as "noetic" rather than "epistemology", in order to escape from the start the implicit consequent in the modern coinage of "epistemology" as a technical term within philosophy.

Source: John Deely, Medieval Philosophy Redefined (London: University of Scranton Press, 2010), xxvi-xxvii.