Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: Thirtieth-Anniversary Edition (Princeton Classics)

by Richard Rorty

This objection gives me a chance to introduce a final point to round out my account of the origin and nature of the idea of a “department of thought concerned with the origin and nature of human knowledge.” Plato, in my view, did not discover the distinction between two kinds of entities, either inner or outer. Rather, as I have remarked earlier, he was the first to articulate what George Pitcher has called the “Platonic Principle”—that differences in certainty must correspond to differences in the objects known.38 This principle is a natural consequence of the attempt to model knowledge on perception and to treat “knowledge of” as grounding “knowledge that.” If it is assumed that we need distinct faculties to “grasp” such different objects as bricks and numbers (as we have distinct sense-organs for colors and for smells) then the discovery of geometry will seem to be the discovery of a new faculty called νου̂ς. This in turn will generate the problem of reason discussed in chapter one.

October 25, 2020. Page 156.