About

It Is Perspicuous is my favourite phrase from modern philosophy.  I picked it up from Descartes' Meditations, wherein he repeatedly asserts that we can know things to be true because they are clear and perspicuous.  I was also studying Latin at the time and fascinated by the intensifying properties of prepositions - per+spicio - to see clearly, enduringly.

One of the things one does learn by reading philosophy in bulk is that whenever anyone says 'clearly' during an argument, they are frequently jumping over a problem puddle.  Certainly*, that is what Descartes was doing.  Having undone our ability to rely on our senses for information by means of positing daemons that deceive us, he must claw his way back to being able to know the world and he did this by relying on perspicuity as the epistemological criterion.

I am not being quite fair, of course.  Descartes was valourising the techniques of the scientific method and investigation over reliance on authority and tradition for knowledge about the world.  This has had some good results, I'd say, and someone had to start the argument from somewhere.  But he was knocking down one epistemological privilege in favour of establishing another - that of observation and interpretation and objectivity and evidence.  We continue to live in this epistemological environment: science and seeing are assumed to be the best ways of understanding the world.

I think it is safe to say at this point that science is not a perfect solution to problems of epistemology.  Neither would I argue that a return to privileging authority and tradition would be an improvement.  I don't know exactly what would be better.  I am interested in the gaps and effects of scientific epistemological privilege; I think that it is through pondering these and learning to spot them (so many are clearly invisible) we can both have better science and (possibly, possibly) get closer to the truth.  Of course, how will we know when we get there?

It Is Perspicuous is my way of thinking out loud and, I hope, hearing from others.  There are a lot of people out there, writing interesting things, touching multifariously on the problems of aesthetics and epistemology and technology and economics and just what all this means and what does it mean right now.  Are we about to have a major intellectual shift akin to Descartes' times?  Or is this more on a par with the advent of Scholastic philosophy; a final or hemi-demi-semi-penultimate refurbishing of Modernism?  It is impossible to tell.  But either way, we seem finally to be leaving post-modernism and I, for one, am too interested not to join in.


*the word 'certainly' has just about the same function in academic writing as the word 'clearly'.