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The Feeling of Knowing
Steven Connor’s 2019 book ‘The Madness of Knowledge’
Steven Connor’s The Madness of Knowledge: On Wisdom, Ignorance and Fantasies of Knowing (2019) proposes a new word for the feeling of knowing. Here are some insights from the introduction to the book.
A relatively recent word: ‘Epistemology’
Though the question of knowledge itself goes back at least to ancient Greek philosophy, the word to describe that intellectual concern is a relatively recent arrival to English. Ralph Cudworth’s treatise (written c. 1688, published 1731) suggested the related word “epistemonical, meaning something like ‘capable of being known’.” In Connor’s interpretation, a word like “epistemonical” begins to gesture toward our fantasy that something’s existence depends on our ability to know it “and not vice versa.” There doesn’t appear ever to have been a noun form, “epistemony,” for “the condition of knowability.”
“Epistemology” was coined in 1847 in the English Review as a translation of Fichte’s “Wissenschaftslehre.” That is used for theories of knowledge.
A new word: ‘Epistemopathy’
But what about “the feeling we have of knowing” and of “learning, thinking, arguing, doubting, wondering and forgetting”? What are these…
