Journal of the History of Philosophy

BOOK REVIEWS 165 How Language Makes Us Know: Some Views about the Nature o] Intelligibility. By Emmanuel G. Mesthene. With a Foreword by John Herman Randall, Jr. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964. Pp. xiii § 111. Guilders 3.50). The professed aim of this essay, written as a doctoral dissertation at Columbia University , is to provide a "modern and operationally meaningful answer" to the question raised by Aristotle in De anima III, 4-5, of what causes the human activity of thinking. According to Mesthene, Aristotle was on the right track in his analysis of sensation, where he was able to give a "physical" and not merely a "dialectical" account of the processes and agencies involved ; but being unable to exhibit thinking and knowing as a natural process of interaction between the human organism and its physical environment he fell back on the "Platonic myth" of the nous poietikos, as a principle transcending the realm of nature and becoming, "separate and impassible and unmixed." As to what this active intellect is, and how it operates to produce human knowing, Aristotle had little to say; his answer to the question of what makes us know, consequently, amounted to little more than the statement that what accounts for thinking is the act of thinking. The "modern answer" proposed by Mesthene is that the poietikon, or agency which makes us know, is language, lie credits Randall with this proposal, since Randall had said, in his book Aristotle (New York, 1960, p. 102), that "what Aristotle ought to have meant.., in terms of his own thought" is that the "active intellect is language." Mesthene concedes that Aristotle did not mean this, or even consider it, the reason being that "he did not and could not in his time know enough about how knowing occurs to be able to say it" (p. 11). He had only the logical or dialectical analysis of knowledge formulated in his Topics and Posterior Analytics, and lacked a "functional and empirical" analysis such as would have enabled him to account for knowing within his general theory of natural becoming. For such an analysis, and "for the more sophisticated conception of language on which it would have had to be based," Mesthene says, "we must look...to a much more recent Aristotelian" (p. 46). This more recent Aristotelian turns out to be John Dewey, and the second main chapter of the book undertakes to show that the account of how language functions in inquiry, provided by Dewey's Logic, yields a modern answer to Aristotle's question. The final chapter seeks to exhibit Dewey's instrumentalist account of knowledge as an appropriate answer, consistent with and demanded by Aristotle's metaphysics, to the question of what causes us to know. The general theme is that knowing and thinking are "natural processes" involving no transcendent realm of mind, and that they consist essentially in the use of language as instrument of interaction between the human organism and its environment, whereby operational powers present in the existent world are actualized through experimental procedures. The author disclaims any intention of reading this "modern answer" to Aristotle's question into Aristotle's own texts, and says that he is only trying, "with the help of Aristotle and John Dewey, to suggest some characteristics that the world must possess for knowing to occur in it" (p. 1). Yet the whole essay is couched in terms of an effort to show that Dewey's analysis of knowledge as an instrument of practical action and of change is consistent with the basic principles of Aristotle's metaphysics, on which account Dewey can be characterized as a "modern Aristotelian." Whether a thesis as to what Aristotle, or John Dewey, ought to have said, pertains to the history of philosophy, is a debatable question; but since the thesis is presented in historical terms, rather than by independent argument, it seems fair to consider what sort of a case Mesthene has made for his higher synthesis of Dewey and Aristotle. The first thing that must strike the reader of this essay is that the question Aristotle asked, in De anima III, 4-5, is not the question that Mesthene is concerned to...