An overlooked, and strikingly modern take on the structure and limitations of logic, F.C.S. Schiller takes on some of the most powerful, but heretofore largely unexamined, assumptions and shortcomings that undergird much of western epistemology. Of primary concern to Schiller is the belief that knowledge can ever exist free from context in an abstracted and ideal form. Once any "fact" as been abstracted from the situation of its formation, it potentially is altered and loses its meaning. Since anything cannot be known except by its relationships its context is not only meaningful, it means everything. Thus, it is less 'things' that we are to be concerned with (if we want 'to know') and more processes that make up reality.Once understandings of reality must be tied to processes and contexts it is a small jump to re-imagine how we think about the world around us. For example, the premises that we often operate on, rather than being 'self-evident' become a crucial setting that will color how we view an entity or idea. Once we are guided in any direction, certain beings and ways of knowing are prized over others, potentially leading to our overlooking certain aspects. No matter how much we claim to be observing 'facts' we can never know for certain that we have considered all the important aspects. This means that all knowledge must be a tentative guess at the nature of reality, never to be fully confirmed, only to be denied. Because there cannot be absolute knowledge, how we understand reality is based upon how we translate the world into representations of it. Along the path of translations many conflating factors come into play (contextualization) and we must be careful when we assert what we know. There must always be a question as to whether or not a translation has been successful.
Thus, absolute truth is only truth abstracted from all context, and thus it is useless. Yet it is exactly this context-free truth that Logic claims to reveal. Rather, any knowledge is valid in regards only to its usefulness, or, in regards to its relationship to the rest of reality. While this work has been largely overlooked, it anticipates much of the work of Whitehead and later movements in philosophy. A strikingly modern account, Schiller's work seems almost prescient of later movements concerning epistemology.
