F. S. C. Northrop - Ideas

Ideas

Northrop’s major contribution to philosophy is in the area of epistemology, specifically his theory of concepts. He divides all concepts into two kinds: intuition and postulation. For Northrop, the source of the meaning of the concept is the source of its difference. This can be seen from the definitions of these concepts. A concept by intuition is one which denotes, and the complete meaning of which is given by something that is immediately apprehended. Northrop gives blue in "the sense of the sensed color" as an example of a concept by intuition. (The Logic of Science and Humanities, p. 82.)

The other kind is concepts by postulation. A concept by postulation is one the meaning of which in whole or in part is designated by the postulates of the deductive theory in which it occurs. Blue in the sense of the frequency or wavelength in electromagnetic theory is a concept by postulation. (The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities, p. 83.)

According to Northrop, these two types of concepts exhaust the available concepts (i.e., providing terms with meanings) from which any scientific or philosophical theory can be constructed and therefore provides a means to do comparative philosophy, analyze and solve the problem of world peace, tame nations, provide a philosophical anthropology, explain why economists from Smith to Marx were incapable of providing a dynamics to supplement their statics, and to ground art and religion as well as legal and ethical theory. Northrop substantiates these claims in his The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities.

There remains one crucial notion: what is the relationship between postulation and intuition. For Northrop the relation is epistemic correlation. Northrop provides the following definition:

An epistemic correlation is a relation joining an unobserved component of anything designated by a concept by postulation to its directly inspected component denoted by a concept by intuition.

(The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities, p. 119.)

The sensed color blue is related to theoretical color blue by an epistemic correlation. Note what this relation is not. It is not the relation of causality or identity. Concept-by-postulation blue does not cause concept-by-intuition blue. As Northrop reports in Science and First Principles, (pp. 251–252) concept-by-intuition blue is a multivalued relation. One relatum of concept-by-intuition blue is the angstrom number currently associated with concept by postulation blue. To assume that only one of the relata of a relation could cause that relation is as silly as assuming that the female (or the male) member of a marriage causes the marriage.

Nor is the proper relation between postulation and intuition "identity", as can easily been seen using "blue". Concept-by-postulation blue is not identical with concept-by-intuition blue, but is just one among many relata that go to form this complex secondary quality.

Neither identity nor causality is the proper relation between sensed blue and theoretic blue.

Note that the problem is: "what is the epistemic correlate of one's directly inspected visual image?" The problem is not what is really real. Unlike (certain interpretations of) Plato and Plotinus, there is in Northrop no propensity to degrade or downgrade the world-as-it-is-sensed in favor of the world-as-known by concepts-by-postulation. To experience the visual image of blue is as epistemically valuable and irreducible as knowing blue postulationally. The two sources of all our knowledge give information that is both complementary and supplementary. Without concepts-by-intuition we could never know the world in its particularity. Without concepts-by-postulation we could never know the world in its universality and necessity.

We now have enough information to give a name to Northrop's epistemology. He calls it "logical realism in epistemic correlation with radical empiricism." In other words, reason (in the form of concepts-by-postulation) epistemically correlated with the senses (in the form of concepts-by-intuition).

The consequences of this theory cannot be overestimated. It has ramifications for psychology, epistemology, religion, culture and philosophy. Not only will the world now come to be seen as something that can be known both by theory as well as by sense perception, but the knower can also be known by both methods. Humans are not only what the latest science has postulated them to be, but also what they sense themselves to be.

One early claim by Northrop in Ch. 2 of "The Meeting of East and West" was that Eastern Thought in general (really most applicable to Chinese thought) is that Eastern Thought deals with the world as an “undifferentiated aesthetic continuum.” That is, reality is all connected and unified, not separated into distinct objects (undifferentiated continuum) and is in reality qualitative as perceived (aesthetic = perception, but later related to theory of art). Some Chinese have dismissed this as racist and simple-minded. Others have embraced it as a correct characterization. What Northrop contrasts with it in the west is an abstract, mathematical or formal conception of reality along with an atomistic conception of reality as fundamentally separate objects. Concepts are in the west “by postulation,” while in the East “by intuition.”