KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF; FACTS AND PROPOSITIONS
Abstract
KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF; FACTS AND PROPOSITIONS Joseph MARGOLIS - Temple University "The world", Wittgenstein says, "is all that is the case. The world is the totality of facts, not ofthings".1 Rad Wittgenstein chosen things (events, processes, physical objects ... ) rather than facts to constitute the world, he could not have maintained his picture theory of languagc: there could then have been no structure that the facts constituting the world and our logical pictures of the world might share. Surprisingly, the issue bears on the distinction between knowledge and belief. "The immediate object of knowledge", Zeno Vendlcr holds, "is not a 'knowledge', a ('true') picture ofreality, but reality itself" - where, by reality, Vendler means, facts. 2 "A statement or belief is true", he says, "if it agrees with what is the case, if it fits the facts" (p. 83). Vendler's use of the Wittgensteinian idiom is caught up ingeniously in the thesis that "the same grammatical construction, the familiar noun-c1ause, is commonly used either to express a proposition or to denote a fact" (p. 89). That is, propositions or propositions believed count as (intended) pictures of facts; and the facts, wh ich are said to provide "the