Although the denial of the possibility of knowledge seems to be the
logical outcome of the premises, it is not the conclusion reached by
Bosanquet. At the outset of his treatise, Bosanquet propounds the
fundamental question we have been considering in these words: "How does
the analysis of knowledge as a systematic function, or system of
functions, explain that relationship in which truth appears to consist,
between the human intelligence on the one hand, and fact or reality on
the other?" His answer is: "To this difficulty there is only one reply.
If the object-matter of reality lay genuinely outside the system of
thought, not only our analysis, but thought itself, would be unable to
lay hold of reality." (Pp. 2, 3.) The statement is an explicit
recognition of the impossibility of bridging the chasm between a reality
outside the content of knowledge and a known real world. It brings
before us the dilemma contained in Bosanquet's treatment of the subject
of the judgment. On the one hand the subject of the judgment must be
outside the realm of my thoughts. If it were not, judgment would merely
establish a relation between my ideas and would give me no knowledge of
the real world. On the other hand, the subject of the judgment must be
within the realm of my thoughts. If it were not, I could never assert
anything of it; could never judge, or know it. The stress he lays on the
first horn of the dilemma has been shown. It remains to show his
recognition of the second horn, and to find out whether or not he
discovers any real reconciliation between the two.
Bosanquet sums up the section of the introduction on knowledge and its
content, truth, with the following paragraph:
The real world for every individual is thus emphatically _his_
world; an extension and determination of his present perception,
which perception is to him not indeed reality as such, but his
point of contact with reality as such. Thus in the enquiry which
will have to be undertaken as to the logical subject of the
judgment, we shall find that the subject, however it may shift,
contract, and expand, is always in the last resort some greater or
smaller element of this determinate reality, which the individual
has constructed by identifying significant ideas with that world
of which he has assurance through his own perceptive experience.
In analyzing common judgment it is ultimately one to say that _I
judge_ and that _the real world for me, my real world, extends
itself_, or maintains its organized extension. This is the
ultimate connection by which the distinction of subject and
predication is involved in the act of affirmation or enunciation
which is the differentia of judgment. (Pp. 3, 4).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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