Sensations Without Knowledge

>The problem of universals has been for the human mind one of the most perplexing yet acquainted phenomena. We come into contact with them on a daily basis through every object we know. Whether it be cars, mirrors, or even human beings, we never know an experience now without universal concepts. Language is a great example of this. When engaging in philosophical discourse or scientific thinking what we are using are not particular objects or things but abstract universals derived from our experience as a whole, building up knowledge akin to a statue. What we have as a life form, however, is not the mere utilization of concepts and universals, but a broad, rich, and confusing sensory field. We take information from the outer and inner senses and meld them as interconnected concepts. For instance, in touching a hot stove, we do not just experience a “blank” sensation devoid of characteristics. In fact the experience tells us something about ourselves, that I am in pain, and something about the stove, that it is hot. Upon moving my hand to a cold surface, it is not hot, but something the contrary, deemed cold. The point being that these sensations are not without their universal, or conceptual counterparts. We require conceptual understanding before knowledge of the senses takes place. Pleasure and pain seem to be integrated at birth as receptors for primitive, or sense-knowledge, but as we move past the earliest developmental stage of life we develop concepts and thus can acquire knowledge beyond pain and pleasure. Even a baby touching a stove is in pain, but does not necessarily know that it is hot. Thus, in this essay I will argue for a position that holds that knowledge beyond pain and pleasure requires concepts as a mediator to the body’s sensory field and particular objects. Firstly, I want to begin with a distinction between sensory knowledge, and as Hegel refers to it, sense certainty. The former is the aforementioned way we gain knowledge through our senses via concepts and understanding. The sense of vision is a good example of this. Let us suppose that Adam, a complete human being with the full capacity for every sense is placed into the world without any experience whatsoever or even utilization of cognitive capabilities. That is, he is hypothetically devoid of concepts. Would we suppose that if a car stood in front of him he would know what it is? Or what it does? Or even that it’s a complete object at all and not a collection of parts? Very likely not. Therefore he does not know what to do with said object nor anything about it. However, we would not say that Adam is not experiencing the car at all. Obviously he is in contact with it. His eyes are picking up its colors & shapes. If he were to walk over to it he could touch it and feel a variety of tactile sensations. What we have here is an example of sense certainty. Even though Adam does not have the knowledge of what the car is, what it does, or even what the sensations he feels are categorized as, he is still nevertheless certain that these are sensations he is having. Certainty of the senses, however, does not bring us knowledge of what the thing really is. If our goal in knowledge justification is to provide meaning as to what a thing is, then sense certainty does not give us that criteria. We could say, opposed to Adam, that with concepts, even if we do not understand every inner working of a cars interior and their relations, we could see any “car” and drive it. The concept does not limit itself to any particular object that resembles a car, but to cars in general. Thus, let us hypothetically say that we implant into Adam the knowledge of what this singular car is. That is, he knows that it’s function is to drive from locations with much greater speed than manual walking. He may even learn how to drive from point A to point B with various body mechanics. But without the concept of “car” not denoting any particular car, Adam would not know what to do upon seeing another car of completely different build, make, and model. His body would not know how to respond to it but he would certainly notice consistencies between the former and this current one (it is not just the mind that utilizes concepts, but also the body). Over time, Adam would develop the knowledge of “car” and no longer see it as a sensory manifold nor as a mere object without a function. This is how we operate in our world. Every particular thing we come into contact with we have seen before in some form or another. It may be an exotic animal, or a mysterious life form in the distances of our galaxy, nevertheless we never approach these objects as mere sensations. We never take them in as just what our eyes are seeing or what our hands are feeling. They are conceptualized into greater or less degrees of knowledge. This is what perception is, not sense certainty. For instance, the exotic animal that we have never laid eyes on is not a collection of random visual stimuli, but an animal, or life form, or object. Or, if we know more about it, we could classify its taxonomy, or understand more of its function and way of life. We could go more or less general, but regardless we require these already learned concepts in order to have knowledge of things, or particulars, at all. I want to conclude with some questions that pose issues with the aforesaid claim. The primary one being, if knowledge of particulars requires concepts, then how can we develop concepts from particulars in the first place if we already require knowledge to do so? In other words, how is it possible to move out of the sense certainty stage? To this, I’d say it’s possible due to the already implicit knowledge of pain and pleasure. We don’t have to learn that something is painful, we just know. Through pain and pleasure in infancy, I believe we are able to organize information relating to the various objects at our disposal, such as our mother, food, toys, etc. Through these initial stages of organizing via pain and pleasure we then develop in the human brain greater capacities for abstraction and thus more information is added to the organized objects such as those that are not directly seen in them, such as their function. Our sensory field thus becomes divided and conceptually organized into the world as we know it. Indeed there are some potholes here in this explanation and even if this is not correct, it is evident from the developmental stages that infants do not utilize concepts or general thinking, whereas adults and adolescents do. Their experience thus should be categorized initially as not knowledgeable, but as sense certain, even if self-awareness has not yet arisen. They are obviously still seeing objects, feeling them, hearing them, smelling them, tasting them, and sensing pain or pleasure in their body. However, as I have been arguing, this does not equate to the knowledge of a thing, but rather the certainty of experiencing that thing, even as non-unified sense data. References: Goldman, A. I., & McGrath, M. (2015). Epistemology: A contemporary introduction. Oxford University Press. Pojman, L. P. (1998). Classics of philosophy. Oxford University Press. Harris, H. S. (1998). Hegel: Phenomenology and system. Hackett.