Volume 12, Number 8 · April 24, 1969
A Note on Vico's Concept of Knowledge
By Isaiah Berlin
Vico's fundamental distinction, as everyone with the least acquaintance with his writings knows, is between verum and certum. Verum is a priori truth and is attained in for example, mathematical reasoning, where every step is rigorously demonstrated. Such a priori knowledge can extend only to what the knower himself has created. It is true of mathematical knowledge precisely because men themselves have made mathematics. It is not, as Descartes supposed, discovery of an objective structure—in fact the eternal and most general characteristics of the real world, but rather invention: invention of a symbolic system which men can logically guarantee only because men have made it themselves, irrefutable only because it is a figment of man's own creative intellect. 'Geometria demonstramus quia facimus. Si physica demonstrare possemus, faceremus.'[1] 'The rule and criterion of Truth is to have made it,' Vico said a year later, in 1710.[2] Faceremus: but this is not possible: men cannot make the physical world. 'Physica a caussis probare non possumus, quia elementa rerum naturalium extra nos sint.'[3]
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