FOUNTS OF KNOWLEDGE PT. 1

In WHITE NOISE I addressed two types of knowledge. I'll continue to call these "knowledge by acquaintance" and "knowledge by description" after Bertrand Russell, with the stipulation that I'm not following his system, given that I've barely read Russell's work. I have read quite a bit more William James, and admire his work above what I know of Russell's philosophy, but I also have not read the particular work I cited in NOISE, the 1895 PRINCIPLES OF PHILOSOPHY.

It stands to reason that even if James and Russell were among the first to frame the problem in these terms, many philosophers before them had grappled with similar questions. For instance, I quoted James's reference to perceptual and conceptual knowledge in PRINCIPLES, categories which appeared in Schopenhauer fifty years earlier (albeit in German).

Now, I've addressed something akin to the "acquaintance/ description" duality in my writings on symbolic complexity. My concerns were never epistemological, as I believe to be the case for both James and Russell. Rather, in my early definition of my terms "functionality" and "super-functionality," I was concerned with the ways in which literary constructs display complexity or its lack. Still, in one passage from DON'T FEAR THE FURNITURE I touched on the epistemological matters:

....even the most avant-garde artists can't do without some representational functionality. If James Joyce wants a character to go through a door, and doesn't have it in mind to discourse on the doorness of doors everywhere, then the door through which the Joyce character steps will be no less functional-- or even "conventional"-- than the one through which a Poe or Holmes character steps.

Within the context of a purely fictional story, a merely functional representation of a door is no more real than, say, a door in another story that embodies "the doorness of doors." But the purely representational door is supposed to function within a story's diegesis as if the person seeing it knows it purely through "knowledge by acquaintance." A door that was "super-functional" would have to have its "Platonic qualities of door-ness" explicated via "knowledge by description."

In 2011 I glossed my Frye-derived remarks with my reading of Philip Wheelwright's THE BURNING FOUNTAIN. This book is also more concerned with evaluating literary works rather than epistemology, though I suspect that Wheelwright was familiar with the two forms of knowledge described by James and Russell-- not least because both of them are cited in FOUNTAIN, and one James reference is to PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY. Without re-reading Wheelwright's book in toto, I can't be sure that it has no epistemological concerns. However, this passage from METAPHOR AND REALITY seems to imply such concerns in the author's formulations of "stheno-language" and "poeto-language:"

…meanings that can be shared in exactly the same way by a very large number of persons—in general, by all persons using the same language or the same group of inter-translatable languages. Examples are so obvious that they may be mentioned without explanation. Common words like child, parent, dog, tree, sky, etc., are steno-symbols, and their accepted meanings are steno-meanings, because what each of the words indicates is a set of definable experiences (whether actual or only possible) which are, in certain recognizable respects, the same for all who use the word correctly. (Metaphor and Reality, p. 33.)

 In this paragraph, Wheelwright is not talking purely about functional representations within a poetical work, but about the way said representations are built up in human society. It seems evident that all of the "common words" Wheelwright lists are common because everyone knows basic representations such as "dog" and "sky" through what Russell calls "acquaintance." More complex chains of associations, however, can only be built up through a process of description. No sky has ever looked like the representation of the Greek Ouranos, but Greeks understood the idea of Ouranos through a process of describing the sky-god's nature-- though in some ways the word used by Kim Stanley Robinson, "discursive," may fit the topic better. This is also one of the terms utilized by Ernst Cassirer in his PHILOSOPHY OF SYMBOLIC FORMS, which I'll discuss somewhat in the next post.