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How do we know something is true? This has been the subject of much debate in philosophy and the study of it is called epistemology.

e·pis·te·mol·o·gy

noun PHILOSOPHY

the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope. Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion.

My favorite figure to address this issue is John Henry Newman (now St. John Henry Newman). In my favorite of his works ‘Grammar of Assent’ he lays out two different ways in which we tend to know things. What he calls ‘real assent’ and ‘notional assent’. Real assent is to experience something and notional assent being through rational thought.

The two categories actually go back to Enlightenment-era debates between the rationalists and the empiricists. The rationalists said we can know things by reason alone. The empiricists said we know things by experience alone. What makes Newman so special is he doesn’t make the mistake of pinning one against the other. The rationalists degraded the value of experience and the empiricists devalued ideas. He tells us rather that one fuels the other. Experiences leading to concrete ideas about the world. He says both are valid ways of knowing things with one caveat, he says real assent is more accurate than notional assent. Placing experience higher than reason in a way siding with the empiricists. He echoes Hume and other empiricists, arguing that all ideas and reason come from experiences. Experiences contain the ideas we take from them and a thousand more. They are more dense than ideas. Nevertheless he embraced both ways of knowing with the simple warning that ideas can be wrong experiences can never be wrong. Again ideas we take from experiences might be wrong but the experiences themselves are fully true.

Newman didn’t want to live in a cold world of rational deductions divorced from his everyday life. Nor did he want to live in a brutish way that refuses to draw objective truths from his experience.

This was a real problem with empiricists like David Hume who argued that we could never really deduce concrete truth and that we only have a “conventional” understanding of the world. Consider gravity, for example: Newton realized that objects fell to the earth and deduced a law of gravity. For Hume such observations can only lead to us knowing how things conventionally work. He would argue that we have no ability to know how that same object might act in the future (maybe one day it would rise upward or not fall at all). So with Hume you lose the concrete repeatability of knowledge that science has so greatly blessed our lives with.

On the other end of the spectrum you have the error of the rationalists like Descartes. Descartes main goal was just the opposite, to degrade our trust in sensory experiences. A common example would be what happens when you plunge a straw into water.

Our sensory experience tells us the straw is bent. However upon removing it from the water we see it is straight. How would Newman who believed sensory experience was the basis of all knowledge respond to such criticism? Well first he would concede that our senses may at times mislead us, but he might point out that the only way you know the straw is straight is by removing it from the water and looking at it. Point being regardless of the being misled while the straw is in water, the only way to discover it is indeed straight is through the sensory experience of taking it out of the water. We still are always dependent on experience for knowledge. The scientific method is just that, someones experience under certain conditions and what they draw from it. In short, don't be dismiss your experience, for as Julius Caesar said "Experience is the teacher of all things".

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“I’ve always been interested in this idea of the work that’s bigger than a specific person who created it. Heidegger talks about this and says that a true “work” does not have an individual author. Something is created where you no longer know who the author is or where it starts or ends, similar to a ritual or Margaret Mead’s “patterned activity.” It’s something bigger than the individual”

-Tino Sehgal

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CORPUS CHRISTI

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