Phil Elmore: Individual Authoring Services

How To Know Things
By Phil Elmore

Those who belong, philosophically, to the schools of subjectivism and moral relativism are fond of telling us, "We can never truly know anything." This is self-defeating (when meant earnestly -- often it is used as an intellectual dodge when the "known" makes the subjectivist uncomfortable). Of course we can know things. The keys to knowledge are context and logic.

(Beware the man who'll tell you that a great difference exists between the statement, "We can never truly know something" and the declaration, "We cannot know anything." The latter is the logical end of the former, which is why these attitudes are so self-defeating.)

Human beings are conceptual creatures. Our faculty to reason enables us to take data available to us, apply logic to it, and integrate the data into concepts, through which we make conclusions about the world around us. Rationalism and Empiricism come together in this process, enabling rational human beings to reach beyond what is directly available to them (the limitations of Empiricism) while avoiding becoming lost in rationalizations untied to objective reality (the limitations of Rationalism).

How, then, can we know, when our senses are limited and often flawed? Through logic, applied as ruthlessly and consistently as possible, we can overcome these problems. Logic is, after all, the science (some would say art) of noncontradictory identification. The most basic of axioms, often misunderstood as tautology, is the statement "A is A." A thing is itself, constrained and defined by its nature. This means that through careful application of noncontradictory identification, we can define the thing's nature within any given, explicitly defined context.

When contradictions occur, they do not invalidate the validity of the senses or smash our attempts to know. Contradiction is, in fact, handmaiden to the process of knowledge -- because contradictions tell us where we have made mistakes or failed to perceive, pointing us in the direction we must travel until we eventually define accurately the nature of the object of our concerns.

Any attempt to undermine the validity of the senses -- to declare that we can know nothing or question whether we can "truly" know anything -- ultimately depends on the senses to make the assertion. Even the declaration, "We can never truly know anything" is the assertion that we can know that this is true. This is why subjectivism and moral relativism are such dead ends -- destructive, self-defeating philosophies that may appear deep pools of wisdom from far off, but which are little better than puddles of nihilism on close examination.

Fundamental to knowing is exercising judgment. Moral relativists ask the question, "By what right do we presume to judge? By what moral authority do we, for example, presume to use force?" Answering this question is much like answering the question, "Have you stopped beating your wife?" Both questions rest on a false assumption that we must reject (provided we are not wife-beaters), thus invalidating the question itself. No agency, no external force, grants the right to judge. Moral judgment is something all human beings must exercise if they wish to live rationally. It is the responsibility of each human being to exercise judgment -- not a privilege bestowed by another.

The "authority" to use retaliatory force is indeed granted by any entity who initiates force against you -- but this is semantics, for what has really happened is that the initiator has relinquished his own sovereignty by violating yours. The "authority" to judge that this has occurred is not an "authority" at all, but a responsibility -- for it is something you simply must do to exist within reality as a rational being.

Beware any man who presumes to tell you, "We can never truly know anything."

Ask him how he knows that.