My question is: Vico claims that one can only know things that one creates, because in creating them one learns their components. However, one still does not know the components of the components! Does this mean that one cannot know the completed object or concept either?
I think that it does. Regardless of how small the pieces one uses in constructing an object, they will not be small enough - size goes on nearly into infinity. Furthermore, objects of a certain smallness become impossible for humans to perceive or work with except with the aid of specialised machinery, and as they probably do not know the composition of the machinery either, that introduces a whole new problem - the question of how a thing is constructed as well as the materials it is constructed of.
Constructing a concept poses a slightly different dilemma, as the composition of thoughts is rather more vague than that of material objects. However, I think that any explanation of such composition would likely contain an explanation of the thoughts' origins, which creates perhaps even more of an issue than the composition of objects. Where does a thought originate? It has a basis in past thoughts of a single person, but that person created those past thoughts from other past thoughts, and so on back to thoughts which originate in experiences in the material world. As one presumably does not know the composition of all the material things which influenced the thought, even if one could identify each and every one of those things, the exact composition of a thought appears to be more elusive even than the composition of an object.
Thus, if knowing the components of an object or concept is the only way to know the object or concept, no one can know any objects of concepts at all.
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