The Idealistic Argument

Posted on October 13, 2008
Filed Under Peirce | Leave a Comment

Sorry for being so busy I’ve not written much. I’m working on a post on Blake’s book right now. Sorry for the delay there. In the mean time I came upon this great quote from Peirce. It gets at, I think, what is of concern in the so-called Continental tradition. (At least up through the 80′s) But does so in a much more pragmatic vein.

The idealistic argument turns upon the assumption that certain things are absolutely “present,” namely what we have in mind at the moment, and that nothing else can be immediately, that is, otherwise than inferentially known. When this is once granted, the idealist has no difficulty in showing that that external existence which we cannot know immediately we cannot know, at all. Some of the arguments used for this purpose are of little value, because they only go to show that our knowledge of an external world is fallible; now there is a world of difference between fallible knowledge and no knowledge. However, I think it would have to be admitted as a matter of logic that if we have no immediate perception of a non-ego, we can have no reason to admit the supposition of an existence so contrary to all experience as that would in that case be. (CP 1.37 (c. 1890: from MS fragment entitled “Notes on the Question of the Existence of an External World”)

Of course this will sound very Derridean but rather than go down the odd trails of a rhetorical demonstration of reading and fallibilism Peirce makes the more Davidsonian move.

Related posts:

  1. More Against Correlationism
  2. Reverse Knowledge Argument
  3. Ontological Argument
  4. God, Dasein and Omniscience
  5. Siris on Kant
  6. The Problem of Extra-Semiotic Entities

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