Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

3. Truth and Knowledge

‘The man who tells you truth does not exist is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.’

Roger Scruton — Modern Philosophy

In the last chapter, truth was divided into a number of foundational types. In this chapter we’ll be looking at a few of them — empiricism, rationalism, coherentism and correspondence. We’ll be picking up on the others later in the work.

Knowledge is often defined as justified true belief. On this account, not only do things need to be true, but we must have some justification for claiming that they are true and we must also have a belief in their truth. True belief (from Plato’s, Theatatus) is ‘logos’ (Greek for reason). Plato saw ‘noēsis’ (Greek — of the mind, intellectual) or ‘nous’ (intellect) as the highest type of knowledge. For him, this meant direct knowledge of the forms. (We’ll come onto the Platonic forms a little later on, but note that this is the continuation of the ‘mysterian’ view of form we encountered in the last chapter.) The ‘forms’ date back to the ancient Greeks, but even then there was a difference in treatment — Aristotle simply saw form instanced by each and ever object, with no need for a separate world.

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