Percepción, pensamiento y lenguaje. El realismo radical de Reinhardt Grossmann y el realismo moderado de Fernando Inciarte

Abstract

In a scenery in which studies on cognitive science and researches about the physiology of knowledge are becoming the most common kind of investigation on mind, this work makes explicit a reflection about the metaphysical nature of knowledge which is implicit and must be presupposed by all those studies of mind which take place from a more or less physical or material standpoint. From this radically different and fundamental perspective, the metaphysical one, this investigation aims at a clarification of the acts of knowing. It focuses especially on perception and thought and, correspondingly, its subject and objects. The structure of mind becomes a fundamental topic as soon as one is brought before the question about an irreducible distinction between kinds of knowledge in human being. With respect to this topic, we contrast the theories of knowledge of two contemporary philosophers, Reinhardt Grossmann and Fernando Inciarte, who share the basic premises of realism (the common believe that there are universals in reality, that the mind is related with its object through the nexus of intentionality, which connects these two terms directly and without the need of an intermediate entity, and so on). As they both take part in a greater or lesser degree in the school of thought of analytical philosophy and share an ontological concern, the similarities of the philosophical frame from which they carry out their work are outstanding. However their differences are also deep with reference to their epistemological positions. On one hand, the study of mind and the subject who is its bearer arrives in these authors to different results, in which the traditional notion of substance receives a crucial weight, whether to be accepted, or rejected in favor of a less-assuming notion of bare particular. On the other hand, being is treated in this investigation as the object to which mental acts are referred and that which conscience presupposes, and is understood in a Thomistic way following Inciarte with its analogical character in its radical difference to the mere fact of existence that corresponds in the same univocal way to all things which have being. Grossmann's main thesis in his theory of knowledge, which makes him deserve the designation of radical empiricist, asserts that perception and experience -that are according to him the only (sensible) faculties of mind- are capable of acquainting us with abstract entities, so that there is no need of any other special (intellectual) faculty to become acquainted with them, against what a considerable part of the tradition has thought. He also maintains that perception is propositional, and has therefore always states of affairs instead of isolated things as object. In contrast to this, we examine Inciarte's idea that the classical distinction between two distinctive faculties of knowledge is necessary and cannot be avoided. His account of intellectual knowledge rests on the assumption that there are two kinds of it and, correspondingly, two operations of intellect (signifying a thing, and signifying about it, which must not be confused nor mutually constituted). The first one, whose mental content is a concept, has its origin in an operation of the intellect which is called, following the tradition, abstraction. Through the study of the main epistemological thesis of both authors -and of some other philosophers whose conceptions are close to them, as it is the case with Bergmann, in the case of Grossmann, or Millán-Puelles, who shares very similar premises with Inciarte-, we see that they rest on some different ontological assumptions, that can be summed up under the title of a moderate realism, in the case of Inciarte, and a radical or exaggerated one, in the case of Grossmann. These different positions concerning the way universals find themselves in reality have important consequences on the way of understanding our knowledge of them. In analyzing the objections which arise with respect to both accounts of knowledge, we turn to the main insights of Millán-Puelles or Robert Sokolowski, which are in this case closer to Inciarte than to Grossmann. In the case of the first, for example, its classical approach to this topic helps to point some facts which seem to speak against Grossmann's radical empiricist idea of the sensible knowledge of universals. Sokolowski sheds some light in the concrete process of acquiring knowledge, which is parallel to the process of acquisition of language and is based on the evidences of perception (whose origin rests, according to him, on action, on the use of something as something, which in turn implies a distinction between a thing and its aspect or mode of manifestation). While making a comparison between the two ontological positions, moderate and radical realism, we analyze the origin of the epistemological differences that are associated to them, and discover that they have much to do with the different points of view from which both authors philosophize and their different conceptions (a narrower or a broader one) of perception. One of the most important results of the investigation consists in the determination of intellectual knowledge as the activity -which presupposes the fundamental distinction between the essential and the accidental- of recognizing essentials in things, that has its origin in the acknowledgment of two or more things as being the same or identical and not merely similar to each other. Furthermore, it is maintained that this is not given to mere perception, as it is shown in many experiences. We analyze the reasons that make Grossmann defend its radical empiricist position, and see that we can preserve its aspect of truth and avoid at the same time the problems that can be deduced from such an empiricist conception, by adopting, instead of the "fourth way" that Grossmann proposes -which is a combination of realism and empiricism-, an intermediate Aristotelian way of conceiving knowledge that rests between two extremes: on one hand, that which assumes what Grossmann calls a Platonic dogma that separates two different kinds of knowledge appropriate to objects of different nature that are said to take place independently from each other, and, on the other hand, that of Grossmann's radical empiricism that rejects all kinds of knowledge apart from the sensible one.