I’ve been studying Spanish with a good bit of dedication lately. I had taken some Spanish courses in college, and I tend to be around a lot of Spanish-speakers in my professional environment. I would like to have the ability to converse with native speakers in another language, and, given my preexisting knowledge base in Spanish, I decided to start with that.
When studying Spanish grammar, I was realizing that my English grammar knowledge was a little rusty. Like most adults, I can implicitly use proper grammar most of the time because saying it a certain way “just feels right”. But, I have difficulty saying why a particular word combination in a sentence is the grammatically correct combination. For instance, saying: “the brown dog ran,” is correct in English, not: “the dog brown ran”. (In Spanish, this is what you would say: “El perro marrón corrió.”)
Thinking about grammar then got me to thinking about what, exactly, is the difference between it and epistemology? It also reignited a question I asked myself years ago, but I don’t think I ever explicitly answered. How is epistemology different from logic? Both grammar and logic seem to be similar to epistemology, but also seem to be different and serving different functions. This is a comparison and contrast of the three with an attempt by me to subsume them under a broader category.
Definition of Epistemology
A standard dictionary definition of epistemology is the following:
“the study or a theory of the nature and grounds of knowledge especially with reference to its limits and validity” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/epistemology
According to Objectivism, the connection of our concepts to reality is an important aspect of the study of epistemology:
“The issue of concepts (“known as the problem of universals”) is philosophy’s central issue. Since man’s knowledge is gained and held in conceptual form, the validity of man’s knowledge depends on the validity of concepts. But, concepts are abstractions or universals, and everything that man perceives is particular, concrete. What is the relationship between abstractions and concretes? To what precisely do concepts refer in reality? Do they refer to something real, something that exists- or are they merely inventions of man’s mind, arbitrary constructs or loose approximations that cannot claim to represent knowledge?” (“Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology”, “Forward”, Ayn Rand)
Everything I know about this field is through my study of Ayn Rand’s philosophy, so I will approach it from that standpoint. If someone has a different viewpoint, or thinks that epistemology represents something else, I am happy to hear what they have to say, however Ayn Rand’s discussion of concept formation in “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology” does seem to relate to the mainstream definition of epistemology from the dictionary quoted above. Whether concepts refer to something in reality does seem to have to do with “…grounds of knowledge…” and “…its limits and validity…”.
Epistemology doesn’t seem to relate to any particular knowledge, but to “knowledge” in general or “knowledge” considered as a concept itself. It asks how does any concept that exists in our head come to be in the first place? It presents a particular mental methodology, or “roadmap”, for how to form valid concepts. For instance, we can have a concept of “ghost”, but most people would say that is not a valid concept, while a concept of “atom” is a valid concept. The former refers to nothing real, while the later refers to something that there is good scientific evidence for the existence of. That implies a methodology for validating concepts. Epistemology would be concerned with that mental methodology.
There are other mental methodologies that don’t refer to anything concrete in reality, but seem to serve a similar purpose of validating certain content. Two of these are “logic” and “grammar”.
Definition of Logic
Logic is defined in the dictionary as:
“a science that deals with the principles and criteria of validity of inference and demonstration : the science of the formal principles of reasoning…” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/logic
Logic concerns a method of dealing with propositions to determine their validity. (Propositions being made up of individual concepts.) For instance: “All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.” That is a particular way of arranging propositions leading to a valid conclusion.
Note that when I discussed the concept of “atom” above, I said that can be shown to be valid using scientific evidence. The existence of atoms was inferred from various scientific experiments and observations. Democritus inferred the existence of atoms through the use of a thought experiment and decided that there had to be a point beyond which you couldn’t divide something, and called that indivisible unit an “atom”. But, he didn’t have any actual experimental observations to verify that. John Dalton noted that chemical compounds, no matter the amount of that particular compound, always had the same ratio of elements in them, which also suggested an indivisible unit for each element contained in a compound. (I’d also note that what would be considered valid scientific evidence seems to be connected more to the field of “logic” than “epistemology”.)
Definition of Grammar
Grammar is defined in the dictionary as:
“…the study of the classes of words, their inflections (see inflection sense 2), and their functions and relations in the sentence…”
“a study of what is to be preferred and what avoided in inflection (see inflection sense 2) and syntax (see syntax sense 1)…” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/grammar
Grammar deals with the study of the different types of words in language and how words are arranged into sentences and paragraphs to make a coherent writing or speech. For instance, grammar classifies words according to whether they are “verbs”, “nouns” , “adjectives”, or “adverbs”. It also studies how these different categories of words are used in conjunction with each-other to produce a coherent sentence, such as the “subject” and the “predicate” in a sentence.
Grammar would also be connected to logic and epistemology. A series of words could be a valid group of concepts without being grammatically or logically correct. Simply stating a string of valid concepts does not form a grammatical or logical sentence. Randomly saying: “grass, book, runs, red, girl” is not a coherent sentence. If you arrange the words so that they say: “The girl with red hair runs through the grass with a book,” then you’ve said a coherent sentence. You could also state a grammatically correct sentence that would be disconnected from anything in reality: “The ‘slog’ with the ‘tig’ ‘grosh’ ‘blarns’ through the ‘gald’ with a ‘igot’.” Here, I’ve substituted non-sense words with the original sentence. It’s still grammatically correct, but it has no connection to reality, because the words don’t represent valid concepts.
What should we call areas like grammar, logic, and epistemology, that all seem to deal with a set of mental methods for dealing with or arranging certain mental content according to certain rules or standards?
Ayn Rand says these are “concepts of consciousness”. Just as one can form a concept of some external phenomena, like “rock”, “bird”, or “planet”, so too can you form a concept based on certain psychological phenomena. For instance, “love” is a concept formed by isolating two or more instances of the psychological phenomena, that is, instances when you feel some form of “love”, then retaining its distinguishing characteristics, while omitting the object and the measurements of the process’s intensity. So, you might feel some love for your pet, and you might also feel a more intense form of love for your wife. What you feel for the pet is less intense than what you feel for your wife (hopefully), but the feeling is similar. From these two introspectively observed psychological phenomena, you can then retain the distinguishing characteristics, the feeling, but omit the intensity of the feeling, and then define love as something like: “A feeling of positive esteem for someone or something.” (You can also probably just define love ostensively, by demonstration, in terms of the feeling which you feel. This is similar to how you know the feeling of “pain” without needing to give it a verbal definition, or you know the color “blue” just by pointing to examples.)
In her book “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology”, Ayn Rand goes on to say that certain categories of concepts of consciousness “…require special consideration. These are concepts pertaining to the products of psychological processes, such as ‘knowledge’, ‘science’, ‘idea’, etc.” (“Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology”, “Concepts of Consciousness”, Ayn Rand)
She then says that a sub-category of concepts pertaining to the products of psychological processes can be characterized as “concepts of method”. She seems to distinguish this sub-category by the fact that concepts of method are systematic courses of action devised to achieve certain goals, where the action can be entirely psychological, or it can involve physical action, too. Unlike concepts such as “the science of physics” or “knowledge”, a concept of method is aimed at achieving a particular goal. (Id.) An example of a concept of method would presumably by something like “the scientific method”, which allows for adding content to the concept that is “the science of physics”.
Logic is then a concept of method aimed at achieving knowledge, in any subject, through systematic and non-contradictory identification. Epistemology is a concept of method aimed at showing a connection between the concepts in one’s head and the facts of reality, such as by showing that abstractions are ultimately the product of observed concretes through a process of measurement-omission. Grammar “…is a science dealing with the formulation of the proper methods of verbal expression and communication, i.e., the methods of organizing words (concepts) into sentences.” (Id.)
Hopefully this little foray into the topic of grammar, epistemology, and logic, and how I think they are related to each other, has been useful.