Abstract

Philosophers have taken several approaches in attempting to silence this question once and for all. Some have started from the reality of ideas and attempted to trace them back to some basic sense datum which would contain its own justification. Others have sought to discover the basic components of the content of thought, contents basic in the sense of not needing epistemological underpinning. Yet neither approach has met with success or acceptance. Recently, a more promising suggestion has been advanced in Professor A. Danto’s Analytical Philosophy of Knowledge. The proposal is made that we examine the representative content of thought while insisting on the lack of any logical connection between content and truth. On this basis, we would reject all hope of discovering any privileged content of thought, any sense datum intrinsically privileged in virtue of its basic character. If there be no logical connection between content and truth, then all thought and all sense data may be either true or false. Once we set out to answer the epistemological problem against such a background, the problem is displaced. If no content of thought is intrinsically true, the problem becomes one of discovering what "true" means in "true thought." I propose to examine this new approach to see whether it can indeed silence the ghost of Descartes.