Facts, Words and Beliefs

Book excerpt: First published in 1970, Facts, Words and Beliefs is concerned primarily with formulating the following question and suggesting the right way of answering it- how can a few stray images or muttered words running through our mind constitute our envisagement of situation perhaps remote in time and place from our present position? From a practical point of view the moments when we envisage the nature of some situation which we believe to exist may not be of any great importance. It would seem that our belief in the existence of such situations lies in some sort of adjustment of our behaviour to them which will be useful if the situations really exist, from the point of view of survival and comfort. The author suggests that these moments of conscious envisagement of such absent situations may be rather a sign of such successful adjustment than a factor in bringing it about, hence of no practical value in themselves. However, if knowledge has any sort of intrinsic value, it must surely lie in those moments when one does consciously envisage some aspects of the world more or less as it really is, and to try to understand the nature of these moments is to try to understand all that is of intrinsic value in knowledge. This book is a must read for scholars and researchers of philosophy.