P & the Pragmatists (Descartes & Vico)

[alice wellintown]

In the work, Vico consciously develops his notion of scienza (science
or knowledge) in opposition to the then dominant philosophy of
Descartes with its emphasis on clear and distinct ideas, the most
simple elements of thought from which all knowledge, the Cartesians
held, could be derived a priori by way of deductive rules. As Vico had
already argued, one consequence and drawback of this
hypothetico-deductive method is that it renders phenomena which cannot
be expressed logically or mathematically as illusions of one sort or
another. This applies not only most obviously to the data of sense and
psychological experience, but also to the non-quantifiable evidence
that makes up the human sciences. Drawing on the verum factum
principle first described in De Antiquissima, Vico argues against
Cartesian philosophy that full knowledge of any thing involves
discovering how it came to be what it is as a product of human action
and the “principal property” of human beings, viz., “of being social”
(“Idea of the Work,” §2, p.3).[7] The reduction of all facts to the
ostensibly paradigmatic form of mathematical knowledge is a form of
“conceit,” Vico maintains, which arises from the fact that “man makes
himself the measure of all things” (Element I, §120, p.60) and that
“whenever men can form no idea of distant and unknown things, they
judge them by what is familiar and at hand” (Element II, §122, p.60).
Recognizing this limitation, Vico argues, is at once to grasp that
phenomena can only be known via their origins, or per caussas (through
causes). For “Doctrines must take their beginning from that of the
matters of which they treat” (Element CVI, §314, p.92), he says, and
it is one “great labor of...Science to recover...[the] grounds of
truth-truth which, with the passage of years and the changes in
language and customs, has come down to us enveloped in falsehood”
(Element XVI, §150, pp.64–5). Unveiling this falsehood leads to
“wisdom,” which is “nothing but the science of making such use of
things as their nature dictates” (Element CXIV, §326, p.94). Given
that verum ipsum factum-“the true is the made,” or something is true
because it is made-scienzia both sets knowledge per caussas as its
task and as the method for attaining it; or, expressed in other terms,
the content of scienza is identical with the development of that
scienza itself.

 The challenge, however, is to develop this science in such a way as
to understand the facts of the human world without either reducing
them to mere contingency or explaining their order by way of
speculative principles of the sort generated by traditional
metaphysics.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/vico/