Logos

“How do we know?” “What is the nature of humankind?” Since the beginning of Western philosoophy we have been confronted by the complexity of both of these question. Various questions about knowledge have very different answers: “How do we know the density of water?” “How do we know what causes anorexia nervosa?” “How do we know what causes homosexuality?” “How do we know who ruled England in 1066?” “How do we know how to communicate with each other?” “How do we know who we are?” “How do we know whether or not God exists?” “How do we know what is beautiful?” “How do we know what is right?” These questions have different types of answers, different strategies that must be adopted in order to respond to them as meaningful questions at all.

When we move into considering ethics we will focus on two different questions: “What is the good and how can we attain it?” and “What should we make our ultimate concern?” Obviously these questions enfold those questions about knowing. Any claim about what is good and about what should be our ultimate concern must answer the questions how do we know what is good? How do we know what should be our ultimate concern? So before we make any preliminary attempt to respond to the questions of the second semester, we had better make sure that we have some clear ideas about the answers to the first.

Given that there is a plurality of answers to the questions “how do we know. . .?” we might conclude that knowledge itself is plural: that there is no one thing that we can call knowledge. We have to ask, what is knowledge? Is there an essential attribute to all examples of knowledge that unites them all? During the earliest era of Western philosophy Plato (427-347 BCE) considered this question. What must be the case, he asked, for the sentence “I know this,” to be a true sentence? First, it must be that case that I believe this. Obviously. But, equally obviously, that is not all. No amount of believing that the world is flat will make the world flat. The most strongly held belief is still distinct from knowledge. In order to be true knowledge, the statement that “I know this” must involve not only belief, but true belief. That is, not only must I believe “this,” but “this” (whatever it might be) must be the case.

Is that it? Is it simply the case that knowledge equals true belief? Well, no, you knew it couldn’t be that simple, didn’t you? Imagine that, in an earlier age when perhaps the belief that the world is flat was widespread, you met a man who told you that the earth is, in fact, round. Aha! You think, someone who knows the shape of the world. After all, he believes that the world is round and you, with your 20th century technology and pictures from space, know that his belief is a true belief. Thus it is “knowledge,” is it not? But then your gifted confidant tells you how it is that he knows that the world is round. He has noticed that the insoles of his feet are slightly concave, and he reasons that God, who designed the human frame with care and intelligence, would not give us curved feet to walk upon a flat surface. Therefore, the surface of the world must be curved, therefore the world must be round! Aha, you now think, not only does this guy not know that the world is round, but I wonder where he can get psychiatric help here in the Middle Ages.

The point here is that belief does not become knowledge simply by virtue of being true, it becomes knowledge if and only if it is justified by an acceptable explanation. That is, knowledge is not just true belief, but adequately justified true belief. For “I know this” to be true, it must be the case that I believe this. It must also be the case that “this” is true, and, finally, it must also be the case that I can, as Plato put it, give the logos for this. (Well, he would, put it that way, wouldn’t he? He was Greek, after all.)

But what is this “logos,” this “justification” which magically transmutes the leaden metal of mere opinion into the pure gold of knowledge? Logos is the root of our word “logic” as well as of all of those “~logy” endings like biology or psychology or geology. It is the noun from the Greek verb legein, which generally means to say or to speak, but also has the sense of to organize or to arrange. Certainly it means to speak with forethought, consideration, and organization. To give the logos for something meant to locate that something in an extended matrix of description. It meant to be able to elucidate a theory about why your belief is not only true but also justified, to say why something is the way it is, not just that it is that way. You might say that it is to give the intellectual history of an item of knowledge or fact. It is not simply a coincidence that the French word for history, histoire, also means “story” in French, or that the Italian, storia, likewise means both history and story, and is essentially the same as our word “story.” That piece of information that makes the claim to knowledge must be believed, it must be true, and it must come complete with a narrative that starts with something which we could experience and moves from this to a support of that claim. At least that was Plato’s claim, and he told a pretty good story.

Is a “story” just any kind of supporting narrative or is it different from other different styles of narration? Plato specifically distinguished between logos: that reasoned, sensible history that conformed to all the other logoi and followed the rules of the world of known experience, and mythos: that irrational, fantastic story that conforms to nothing but itself and breaks all the rules of the world of our experience. This principle of conformability is of considerable significance. The bigger, the longer, the more detailed the logos, the better the justification, the more true the truth, and the more certain the knowledge. Lived human experience functions as an arbiter, a standard to which a story must conform in order to be added to the similarly conforming, mutually supportive, and thus unified group of logoi and excluded from the contrary, mutually non-supporting, and thus isolated mythoi. If a piece of information can be seen to be supported by a “story” or explanation which conforms to human experience, it can be seen to be supported by all the other such explanations. Whereas any explanation which goes beyond the bounds of human experience remains isolated and can make appeal only to a small group of mythoi.

I will take my lead from this analysis of Plato, then. Although I, personally, can accept the elements of belief and narration, I still find that the inclusion of the category of “truth” in Plato’s narrative is a problem. What exactly is “truth?” Isn’t it precisely what makes a piece of knowledge, knowledge, and isn’t it thus just as mysterious an entity as knowledge? But we can avoid that additional headache on the grounds that it is the same logos which makes a claim true as makes a piece of information knowledge. So, that leaves us with the idea that knowledge is belief supported and justified by an extended and coherent group of narratives that conform to human experience. “Truth” is a characteristic of a proposition that is believed based on an extended and coherent narrative of the world of experience and knowledge is what is given by that proposition to the one who believes in it. Narratives can be “story-like” in the sense that they have plot and character development (remember Washington and the Cherry Tree? that was a story, a piece of fiction, told so as to communicate the truth). Or they can be “scientific,” like an account of the genetic roots of homosexuality. But in order to lay claim to the status of knowledge, they must conform to the yardstick of human experience. To be perfectly clear here, I do not want to be mistaken for an empiricist or positivist. That is, I do not mean to imply that they must conform to human sensory perception or physical experience. I have experienced love, justice, honor, and virtue, along with a few less pleasant abstractions, and I did not experience these with my bodily senses. You cannot see, feel, smell, taste or hear these things, yet you experience them nonetheless, so I do not intend to reject the abstract as part of the world of our experience, as we will see.

Repeatedly we encounter“ stories” that are told about beliefs, which are effective means of reinforcing their truth and supporting their claim to the status of knowledge. The claims of the prisoners in Plato’s allegory of the cave about the nature and status of the shadows were coherent and were supported by their narratives, until challenged by the more compelling narrative of the escaped philosopher. The accounts given by victims of anorexia and bulimia about their own appearance are the logoi which narrate their self-image into the status of perceived truth. Alice Walker’s belief in her own inferiority was reinforced by her self-narration about the “glob” in her eye and her loss of beauty, and it almost became true until counteracted by the innocent and compelling verbalization of her daughter that there was a world in her eye.

In order to attain the status of logos, that is, to be an effective and genuinely supportive narrative, these accounts must conform to the world of human experience. They cannot contradict that experience; they must partake of the same organization as that world. The elements of the narrative must reflect and be reflected by the external world in which we live. They must be organized and organizable in the same way. The main organizing principles of our lives and of our narratives are abstractions like those that I was earlier at pains to retain in my analysis: like love, justice, honor, virtue and, of course, their counterparts, hatred, injustice, corruption, and vice. (Although these counterparts can easily be seen as nothing in themselves but the absence of the positive virtues, it is nonetheless interesting that these abstractions always come in binary pairs.) And, of course the greatest abstraction of them all—the heading under which all these pairs can be arranged—is the couplet of good and bad. For Plato himself the idea of the good was the single great Ideal Form upon which all other forms depend, and this, of course, leads us to the first of ethical questions: “what is the good and how do we attain it?”

What I mainly want to point out here is that it is crucial to our ability to assess the status of a narrative in supporting the claim to truth or knowledge that we have a consistent understanding of good and bad and the other abstract characteristics organized under this heading and of any other abstract classifications by means of which we organize our narratives about the world of our experience. Yet in order to know what is the good, we have to support our propositions concerning the good with narratives, logoi, which justify them.