What Do You Really Know?

Philosophy Professor Richard Moran explores the role of trust in the development of beliefs

By Marvin Hightower

Gazette Staff

Picture yourself at the corner of Mass. Ave. and Brattle Street. You are familiar with Harvard Square, so you don't check the street signs, much less wonder whether they are still in place. You know where you are. Long ago, a reliable source -- in person or on paper -- first directed you to this lively locale, and that settles that. . . .

. . . Unless you are like Philosophy Professor Richard Moran. He can get plenty of mileage out of this everyday scenario, and his point of departure is the nature and power of trust, the elusive quality that allows us to accept received information as truthful.

"Much of what you think you know about yourself comes from external sources," he says. "Just knowing where you are -- that you are in Cambridge -- rests on a vast chain of relations of trust of one sort or another."

From that geographic center, Moran spins out an intricate web of questions that have long intrigued him. "What is it to take another person's word for something? What is the nature of trust involved when you give your word for something?

"In what sense is it legitimate to say that if you know something and you tell it to me and I believe you, then I thereby know it too? I have gained knowledge, even though I didn't go through any of the investigations to ground that knowledge claim. What makes that knowledge so easily transmissible, if, as philosophers are wont to do, you think of knowledge as having strict requirements?"

It's a centrally important question, Moran suggests, since "all of the scientific and historical knowledge [including critical personal knowledge such as one's birthdate and parentage] that people take themselves to have comes through this network of testimony." Graduate students will pursue these and other points at length in Belief, Trust and Testimony, a seminar that Moran is teaching next term.

Moran joined the Philosophy Department last summer after spending the past six years as an assistant philosophy professor at Princeton. He earned his Ph.D. (1989) from Cornell with a dissertation on Attitudes Toward the Self and has since written extensively on topics such as first-person versus third-person narrative points of view and the unique authority that each person claims in knowing his or her own states of mind.

Like many other American students, Moran did not formally encounter philosophy before college (B.A. 1977, Dartmouth). Already interested in literature and the arts, he discovered in philosophy a welcome freedom to explore topics such as history, politics, natural science, and theories of mind alongside dimensions of literature that his English classes did not touch. Immediately after college, Moran spent three years reading and writing on his own, trying to find his own philosophical voice. Only then did he feel ready for further philosophical explorations in graduate school.

That independence of mind still shapes Moran's scholarship and teaching. In his spring-term undergraduate course on Philosophy and Literature, for example, students will examine various issues of literary criticism, interpretation, and authorship. But the course will challenge thrice-familiar theories about the written word.

"Literature is a verbal art form, and we quite naturally talk about things like meaning in relation to it," Moran explains. "It's very natural for people to assume that the study of language as such has a very central place for the understanding of literature." Semantic theories have spawned many varieties of literary interpretation, for example.

Moran, however, believes that linguistic models "lead us astray," and his course seeks to expose their inherent limitations. "We have a very rich descriptive vocabulary for talking about the structures of natural or artificial language, and it's very tempting to use this vocabulary and structure in discussing literature because, after all, it's language too," he says.

"But once you've done that, you end up with a very abstract and formalistic understanding of what literature is and what its important features are, so a lot of the ordinary person's responses [e.g., emotional or personal reactions] to literature are discredited or given short shrift."

For Moran, philosophical teaching and research share a unique resonance. "If you're an historian or a biologist and you're teaching at the introductory level, you are not teaching at the level of the issues that you are doing your current research on. You are going through the rudiments of the French Revolution or basic cell structure one more time."

But in philosophy, a beginner's questions are the inexhaustible wellspring of the field. "Philosophy is not a matter of expert knowledge," Moran insists.

"It's not like a science in that way, and it's funny that there should even be such a field that's not a matter of expert knowledge. In a sense, Socrates's position vis-à-vis the people he spoke with has maintained itself as a model for much of philosophy, in that philosophical questions are questions that anybody might have -- 'Why do anything rather than nothing?' -- whereas questions about quantum theory are questions that only a quantum physicist would have."

The result? Philosophy quickly engages students as "a game that anyone can play right away -- and you're playing the same game that the big shots are playing."

Recently, Moran has been writing about the distinctions between ancient and modern concepts of metaphor, with Aristotle's Rhetoric as the baseline text. "How does Aristotle see the functioning of metaphor?" he wonders aloud. "How does it do what it does, and what is it that it does do? From the rhetorician's point of view, how does speaking metaphorically rather than straightforwardly advance the aims of rhetoric? Why avail yourself of metaphor in the first place?"

On other fronts, Moran is intrigued by the contrasting modes of explanation used in various fields of knowledge. The natural sciences, for instance, have predictive laws. History does not. What's more, no one expects the field to develop them.

"And yet," he adds, "we do understand major historical events in one way or another. I'm interested in how explanation and understanding in what are sometimes called the 'human sciences' differ from those things in the natural sciences -- and so, in how understanding people is different from understanding the behavior of physical objects, even though in one sense people are physical."

But most of all over the past 12 years or so, Moran has returned again and again to questions of inner and outer knowledge in human relationships, the larger context for his contemplations on the mysteries of trust. To hear his deeply puzzled intonation of one basic riddle -- "How is it that you know your own thoughts without observing or listening -- without doing any of the things you would need to do to learn someone else's thoughts?" -- is to sense why such questions continually fire his thinking.

For now, Moran is working on a book that will "pull together the various strands of the story about first-person relations and their difference from relations with other people." The book will wind up examining "the messier areas of moral psychology about trust, disbelief, self-deception, and the various ways in which attempting to adopt a kind of third-person relation to oneself goes wrong -- and why and in what ways it goes wrong."

If Moran seems to gravitate toward philosophical spaces where things fall apart, he readily concedes the pull. "These problems are equal parts philosophical problems in the scholarly sense and life problems too," he says. "They wouldn't be interesting to me if they didn't have that character. Clarity and rigor on either side helps out the other, I think. Understanding philosophically how, for example, self-deception is possible for human beings is part and parcel, I take it, of understanding how we as human beings engage in it and how life brings someone to such a pass that they engage in something that we want to call 'self-deception.' "

Moran believes that philosophy, "almost regardless of its particular content," can help improve and maintain the health of society and individuals alike in this age of sound bites, hasty analysis, and media shouting matches masquerading as "debate."

"I think it's extremely important for as many people as possible to see that there is a wide range of important discourse that is not a matter of expertise but is nonetheless something you can learn about in a systematic way," he says. "People have a responsibility to make their minds up about many of these concerns -- for the moral aspects, certainly -- and it is a sign of a person's seriousness about themselves or about life that they take somesuch questions seriously and attempt to come to terms with them.

"The one good thing that philosophy can do, especially for people growing up today, is to expose them to real discussion. They may never have experienced an actual discussion between two or more people who were seriously trying to arrive at the truth about some matter. When philosophy gives people a taste of that, they will want more of it. And they will be properly appalled at the level of discourse on the part of the people who have so much control over society.

"If we philosophers can show people how to get to reasoned common ground about various abstruse issues in metaphysics, then there ought to be all the more hope for securing common ground about issues that are much more tangible."