<研究論文(原著論文)>推論としての知識

Abstract

In this paper, I show that the fundamental form of empirical knowledge is inference from generic to singular judgment. The first part (§§2-4) of this essay examines two ideas from John McDowell's Mind and World. One is that perception provides its subject with a factive and self-conscious justification of the corresponding judgment; the other is the minimal empiricism, i.e. the idea that perception and judgment are two acts which are intelligible independently from each other. As these ideas can be shown incompatible with one another, I retain the first and abandon the second. The second part (§§5-7) discusses how to understand perceptual knowledge without minimal empiricism. In §5, I show that the concept of judgment as rational activity involves the self-consciousness of judgment. Moreover, it is shown that the concept of judgment is the concept of knowledge insofar as the “I think” is the “I know”. This doesn't mean that all judgments have the status of knowledge but that the concept of knowledge is the power of knowledge which explains knowledgeable and non-knowledgeable judgment in two different ways. In §6, it is shown that the concept of the power of knowledge articulated in §5 is still abstract and doesn't suffice to make empirical knowledge intelligible. I will show that the power of knowledge is, in its concreteness, generic judgments and that their acts are inferences from generic to singular judgments. In §7, I argue that an inference from generic to singular judgment is itself an act of perception and that the power of perception can't be a power of knowledge along with a body of generic knowledge. This marks my departure from my antecedents, i.e. Andrea Kern and Sebastian Rödl, who suggest that perception is an independent power of knowledge.