• Forms of knowledge
• Forms of social organization of knowledge
• Forms of knowing
If we overlap these concepts there is the
science/imagination/common sense opposition.
How to study them as parts of a whole?
Forms of knowledge: a story
In Greek philosophy inherited by western culture, there were
hierarchies in the different forms of knowledge in relation to
experience and to interpersonal, as we would say today, or
shared knowledge.
Forms of knowledge
• knowledge from experience (praxis),
• knowledge from art (techne),
• knowledge from science (episteme).
Aristotle develops
Plato’s epistemology
in three different types of knowledge:
Forms of knowledge
Doxa is a good-working truth, which is commonly confirmed by others’ agreement and by successful experience.
Episteme is about causes, and namely first causes, or real essences of things.
True knowledge must go beyond phenomena, everyday language and common sense. It must be somehow formalized, mathematized and follow logic rather than practical rules.
Then Galileo Galilei comes out, reconciling the realm of experience and the realm of abstract speculation, that of physical and that of non-physical.
The way was paved to modern techno-scientific mode of thought and natural philosophy.
Different kinds of truth
“Truth” (verum), which only pertains
to God
“common sense” (verum certum) which is the practical
knowledge and belief achieved through practices and consent
“truth through making” (verum factum), which is the scientific knowledge about all the
products of human activity
A unique phenomeon:
The Fontanelle Cemetery in Naples, Italy
How imagination is made through signs Any product of human activity creates an universal and abstract representation of life starting from very situated individual acts. Such institutionalized representation, which is at the same time epistemological, ethical and aesthetical, becomes a tradition - that is the framework distanced from the individual immediate experience - within which the meaning of the experiences to be make sense in return.
Irreversible time
The Supper of the Lamb (Robert Farrar Capon, 1969, 106-107)
Satan was upset and convened the council of Hell. “What are we doing to speed up dehumanization of mankind?”. All the heads of Departments, Luxury, War, Avarice, Envy, Pride made excellent and prolix states of advancement. But Satan got bored and thumping the table shouted: “The same stupid chatting! Nobody has new ideas?”.
The youngest devil raised the hand and said: “We should create the Department of Desubstantiation. We failed because we didn’t address the essence of humanity, that is the relationship with concrete objects that give pleasure and surprise, providing energy to mankind. We should replace concrete things and beings with their abstractions, schemes, spiritualizations. Things will no longer be an end in themselves but shall have a simbolic value, they shall serve to something else”. “Excellent!” Said Satan, “let’s go ahead!”
The double bind of language
The constant (re)novation of the social world is made possible through the complementary movement of abstraction and reification as feature of language, also in science (intelligence).
BUT IT IS JUST A MATTER OF LANGUAGE?
Abstraction
Reification
Abstraction
Reification
The eternal (hierarchical) return in irreversible time
For Aristotle, imagination is a faculty in humans and most other animals which produces, stores, and recalls the images used in a variety of cognitive activities, including those which motivate and guide action "The soul never thinks without a mental image [phantasma]”. (De Anima). We can imagine only what is grounded in history.
Jan Van Eyck The Arnolfini’s ,1436
Imagination as alternative to hic et nunc
Alternative views on imagination
Plan of reality
Plan of Imagination
Where this comes from
Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) first argued that the distinctive feature of human nature is the capability of creating products of civilization -namely divinity worship, marriage and burials- as self-regulatory systems that are able to act “on the bestial passions” of primitive men and “transformed them into human passions“ (Vico, 1744/1948, 90).
This process followed multiple contextual pathways, generating the “world of nations in all the extent of its places, times and varieties” (Vico, 1948, 92).
The mental activity of connecting, recollecting and elaborating experience (topica) is progressively crystallized in language, grounding reflection (critica).
The distinctive characteristic of human psyche is its capability of imagination, what we call today symbolic capability.
Vico’s theory of psyche
Imaginative capability is based on 3 fundamental functions of the mind:
fantasia, the capability to imitate
and change
ingegno, the capability to
create correspondence between things
memoria, that is the capability to
remember
Psyche is po(i)etic
Axiom LXIII, “The human mind is naturally inclined
by the senses to see itself externally in the body,
and only with great difficulty does it come to attend
to itself by means of reflection. This axiom gives us
the universal principle of etymology in all
languages: words are carried over from bodies and
from the properties of bodies to express the things
of the mind and spirit”
Cannot use culture to explain Culture is not a variable we can use to explain and generalize, is just a frame (sarcophagus model).
We cannot recognize ourselves in a story TOLD BY another, but we are able to recognize ouerselves in a story ABOUT another.
Italian mummy
European culture
Italian culture
Definition of common sense
“Human choice, by its nature most uncertain, is made certain
and determined by the common sense of men with respect to
human needs or utilities, which are the two origins of the
natural law of nations”. “Common sense is judgment without
reflection, shared by an entire class, an entire people, an
entire nation, or the whole human race”. And “Uniform ideas
originating among entire peoples unknown to each other
must have a common ground of truth.
Anchoring and objectivation
Axiom I opens with: “Because of the indefinite nature of
the human mind, wherever it is lost in ignorance, man
makes himself the measure of all things”.
Axiom II is: “It is another property of the human mind
that whenever men can form no idea of distant and
unknown things, they judge them by what is familiar and
at hand”.
(ABSTR)ACTING
Vico tells us that through imagination we build things acting as they were abstractions, and build abstractions acting as they were real things.
The psychologist’s ontological fallacy
Individual imagination and collective imagination can promote or inhibit action
Skulls altar, Templo Mayor, Mexico City, Aztechs
Hans Hemling, Doom’s day, 1472
Hieronymus Bosch, The Wickeds, 1490
Imagination and resistance: the strange couple
Imagination could not develop without a resisting/resistant surface
•Iconicity and absence of iconicity are
complementary forms of sense-making.
•Change and resistance to change are
complementary forms of development.
Incarnation without re-incarnation in irreversible time of individual life
In this specific moment in time • Can do (be) but won´t do (be) • Cannot do (be) but will do (be) • Cannot do and won´t do • Can do and will do • Cannot do now but…. • Can do now but…. • Can do like but… • Cannot do like but… • Could do ……
IMAGINATION IS THE GENERAL PSYCHOLOGICAL PROCESS THAT ELABORATES, SIGNS PROMOTING/INHIBITING CHANGE THROUGH RESISTANCE.
If we want to find out the elements and laws of mental life it is not enough to study the single individual in its special states. A study is also required of human works and ideals, in which the nature of mental life is revealed throughout the ages. There exists no mental life in general. It appears in different forms at different times and places, and it strives to develop itself as fully as possible in every one of these forms, though the totality of its elements has a different timbre in every special case. (…) We cannot deduce pedagogics, aesthetics and practical ethics from psychology. But we can observe the spontaneous development of the art of education, of aesthetic production and of ethical life, and the ideals and points of view which are revealed in this development may be understood by the help
of general psychological laws. (HAROLD HOFFDING)
