Humans can truly know only what they themselves have made.

Evidence

The principle of verum-factum is one of the cornerstones of Vico’s theory of knowledge. It is perhaps best understood not so much in the interpretation that Gramsci attributes here to Croce that knowledge is a form of doing, as in its inverse, that doing is a means of knowing. Contrary to the prevailing Cartesianism, Vico maintained that only the object of human action (“factum”) could be truly known in that there was here an identity of subject and object absent in our dealings with the world of natural science. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2544

Categorization

• DEFINE: Names and unpacks verum-factum, a cornerstone of Vico’s epistemology that Gramsci leans on for the claim that history and society are knowable in a way nature is not.
• XREF: Feeds forward into the historicist epistemology assumed by Orientalism critique: knowledge-claims about human societies are themselves made, not discovered neutrally.