Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

‘Intuitionist logic’ seems to contrast what is provable with what is non-provable rather than contrast what is true with what is false — so there is a similarity here with logical positivism (explored in more detail in Chapter 14). However, there would have to be some notion of a ‘higher truth’ in order to be able to discern what is provable or non-provable. ‘Intuition’ is a term that has changed meaning somewhat. To know by intuition is often now taken to be a way by which we perceive mystical or occult knowledge, but it previously meant something like being able to apprehend ‘innate’ truths. (We might, for instance, recognise the Platonic forms by intuition. It’s worth pausing here to note that innate can mean innate to the universe or it can mean innate to people. It’s also worth noting that innate does not necessarily mean unchanging.)

Or otherwise, there is scepticism (which I’m not considering to be a type of truth-seeking at all). For David Hume, things are either: True or false by definition (that is, there are ‘innate truths’), or: Dependent on experience (empiricism), or: Nonsense (scepticism). This is known as ‘Hume’s fork’. Hume went for the middle of the fork — observation, empiricism. For Hume, people don’t really perceive or apprehend the real substance of the world at all — all that’s received are sensations. And the reason for this, he concluded, is that there’s no substance! (So we are back to the same argument given above — we only perceive qualities — and the sceptic’s conclusion is that this means there cannot be anything beyond them. It was this that ‘awoke Kant from his slumbers’ in order to try to show that substance really is there at the

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