Page:Schlick - Gesammelte Aufsätze (1926 - 1936), 1938.djvu/222

 them out there remain what in Kant's terminology would be called synthetic judgments, and there can be no doubt that all of these do convey some kind of knowledge.

When I listen to a proposition which is not tautological I am actually told something which will be new to me (unless I happened to know it before), and the proposition will save my finding it out myself. (We assume the proposition to be true ; if it is false it will express not knowledge, but error.) The simple sentence "the ring is lying on the book" certainly communicates some kind of knowledge just as well as the scientific proposition "the neutral helium atom contains two free electrons".

Yet obviously there is an essential difference between these last two cases. The first one is a statement of one single fact which does not simplify our picture of the world, the second one has the character of an explanation. For some particular purpose it may be of the utmost importance to know that the ring was lying on the book, and certainly it is knowledge, for it presupposes at least three acts of recognition: 1) of one object as a ring; 2) of another object as a book; and 3) of the spatial relation between the two as the first object being on top of the second one. Yet we feel that this knowledge remains, as it were, on the lowest possible level, whereas the statement about the helium atom belongs to a very high region of thinking.

The second statement is of a very much higher order of "interest" than the first one. You will think immediately that this is due to the different levels of generality: the proposition about the ring deals with one small insignificant fact, that about the helium is applicable to all the countless helium atoms in the world. There is some truth in this, but it is not the whole story. In the first place, it is possible for single never reoccuring facts to have a high degree of importance — when this is the case they are called "historical facts". But in the case of history of mankind it will be seen that the interest is not scientific, but human (it appeals to feeling rather than intellect). In the second place, knowledge of a single object or event may sometimes be counted as a great advance of science, as the discovery of a star or the explanation of a volcanic eruption in geology. So the difference in generality (generalness?) is not sufficient to account for the distinction between knowledge as knowledge of a fact, and knowledge as explana-