Abstract

Human skin is the one authentic criterion of the universe which philosophers recognize when they appraise knowledge under their professional rubric, epistemology. By and large—except for a few of the great Critics and Sceptics—they view knowledge as a capacity, attribute, possession, or other mysterious inner quality of a “knower”; they view this knower as residing in or at a “body”; they view the body as cut off from the rest of the universe by a “skin”; all of which holds for philosophizing physicists and physiologists even as for the professionals of the arcanum itself. If this assertion seems crude, one may recall that there are times when a bit of crudity is a fair physic for an inflamed subtlety. In the case before us the factual crudity lies in the use of “skin” for a criterion, not in our calling attention to the fact. The “skin” that is so used is, indeed, that of ancient anatomical schematism, unaffected by the transformation of understanding which modern physiological research has brought about. Yet if philosophers cease thus crudely to employ it, all their issues of epistemology will vanish, and the very type of attack they make on cognition will be discredited; whereupon the task of determining the status of knowledge itself will pass from their hands to those of the scientists who have taken over so many regions of philosophical arrogation in the past. This is what I propose here to show.