Specific Human Knowledge

It is physical reality, itself, that is the object of specific human knowledge. But we do not have a penetrative intuition of physical reality. Let him who is a realist and claims to have it tell science what electricity is and not merely what it does under different conditions. It easy to feel inclined to maintain that the intuitional notion of knowledge as an ideal is incapable of bearing reflection of an analytic sort.

A concrete knowledge of the bio-psychological setting of human knowledge lays bare its impossibility and its consequent absurdity. Knowledge has its place in consciousness, which is, itself, in an organism reacting to its environment. Such knowledge necessarily has its inherent limitations, which becomes evident in countless petition samples. But because it is knowledge, conformable to physical reality, it guides the human organism in its perilous effort at adaptation to, and control of, the parts of the universe in which it finds itself.

Knowledge of other minds—knowledge of other consciousnesses is different from knowledge of the physical world. It is knowledge through asserted identity of content, whereas knowledge of the physical world is information about its object with no assertion of identity of content. Thus, when an expression is discovered on the face of a friend as meaning amusement, one uses the expression as a symbol of an experience which is regarded as in its essentials contentually the same for the friend.

Words which the friend uses are likewise admitted symbols of contents sufficiently identical in character. Such identity of character does not conflict with the numerical difference of existence of the two states implied. Other consciousnesses are, therefore, objects of our knowledge. They are affirmed to exist and cannot be intuited, but they are interpreted by means of contents present in the knower's consciousness.

For this reason, it is usually said that they are inferred by analogy. There are decided objections to such an explanation if it is taken in a technical way. The passage from behavior to the assumption of an idea back of it corresponding to the idea back of similar behavior on our part is instinctive and is confirmed by language and tested conduct. It is better to call it a natural assumption or postulate rather than an inference.

Of the general assurance that this instinctive postulate is justified by a careful study of communication and cooperative behavior connected therewith there can be no doubt. It is only the idealistic tradition which assumes that the object of knowledge must be something given in the knower's consciousness that casts skeptical shadows upon this knowledge of the content of other minds.

And this very implication of idealism, far from raising any effective doubt as to the existence of other minds and our knowledge of their contents, should cast doubt upon the validity of the idealistic theory of knowledge itself. The critical realist finds that the demands of the situation fit in with what he is prepared to admit.

That we have knowledge of other minds and that this knowledge influences our own ideas in complex ways is a set of facts we are prepared to admit. Science is a cooperative achievement, and so are literature and law and custom. Men do have knowledge of the same objects and know that they agree or disagree, as the case may be, in regard to their ideas of these objects.

The mechanism, so to speak, of this mutual understanding is a recognized knowledge of one another's opinions and beliefs founded upon the data of perception and judgment. We must remember, however, that such accordant beliefs involve no literal overlapping of the respective consciousnesses of the participating individuals in, as an example, petition letters.

The striking difference between knowledge of the physical world and knowledge of the contents of other minds requires emphasis. Both are cases of claims to knowledge of something extramental, that is, something outside of the particular knowing mind. In both instances, again, this claim is attached to an idea in the mind of the knower.

At this point, however, a marked difference enters. In the case of knowing the idea in the mind of another, we carefully build up an idea which we take to be sufficiently identical in its meaning to the postulated idea and then regard it as the content of the knowledge-claim whose object is this selected external idea.

When we think of the two ideational contents as separate existences in the minds of two individuals, we are apt to speak of them as similar just as we speak of two physical things as similar in this regard or that. When we think only of the characteristic content, we can speak of the two ideas as identical or largely identical. The object and the knowledge-content are, then, similar or identical, as we wish to phrase it, in this kind of knowledge.