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Escaping from the Cave: A Reply to Dunn and Suter1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Zeno Vendler
Zeno Vendler*
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego
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Extract

Those who disturb the hornets’ nest better be thick skinned. Keeping that in mind, thus far I kept my silence in the face of the adverse reactions my essay “On What One Knows” has provoked in the literature. As to the merits of the various objections, moreover, I trusted the judgement of the philosophical community to sort them out, and either recognize their futility, or make the necessary adjustments in my arguments without the need to reject the conclusions.

In the case of Dunn and Suter, however, I decided to make an exception. The reason is that they indeed succeeded in pointing out certain difficulties in my position, which are not due to misunderstandings, conflicting linguistic intuitions, or other superficial sources. And, second, meeting their objections gives me the opportunity of proposing a significant refinement of my theory, the need for which I increasingly felt in the meanwhile myself.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , March 1978 , pp. 79 - 87
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1978

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Footnotes

1

DunnRobert and SuterGeraldine: “Escaping from the Cave: A Reply to Dunn and Suter1”, this Journal 7 (1977), pp. 103-14.

References

2 In my Res Cogitans: An essay in Rational Psychology, Cornell University Press, 1972, chapter V. An earlier version is included in Language, mind and Knowledge (Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. VII), ed. Gunderson, Keith University of Minnesota Press, 1975, pp. 370-90Google Scholar.

3 Dunn and Suter, op. cit. p. 114.

4 My notion of “objective” is obviously related to the notion of “factive,” gaining importance in linguistics since the appearance of “Fact” by Paul, and Kiparsky, Carol (reprinted in Semantics, ed. Steinberg, Danny D. and Jakobovits, Leon A. Cambridge University Press, 1971, pp. 345-69).Google Scholar

5 Ibid., p. 109

6 Ibid., p. 105.

7 According to my distinction in Res Cogitans, chapters II-III.

8 Since causes are objective, the second member of the original trio drops out as redundant.