ONT Re: Determination
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| Is there any knowledge 'à priori'? All our thought begins with
| experience, the mind furnishes no material for thought whatever.
| This is acknowledged by all the philosophers with whom we need concern
| ourselves at all. The mind only works over the materials furnished by
| sense; no dream is so strange but that all its elementary parts are
| reminiscences of appearance, the collocation of these alone are we
| capable of originating. In one sense, therefore, everything may
| be said to be inferred from experience; everything that we know,
| or think or guess or make up may be said to be inferred by some
| process valid or fallacious from the impressions of sense. But
| though everything in this loose sense is inferred from experience,
| yet everything does not require experience to be as it is in order
| to afford data for the inference. Give me the relations of 'any'
| geometrical intuition you please and you give me the data for proving
| all the propositions of geometry. In other words, everything is not
| determined by experience. And this admits of proof. For suppose
| there may be universal and necessary judgements; as for example
| the moon must be made of green cheese. But there is no element of
| necessity in an impression of sense for necessity implies that things
| would be the same as they are were certain accidental circumstances
| different from what they are. I may here note that it is very common
| to misstate this point, as though the necessity here intended were a
| necessity of thinking. But it is not meant to say that what we feel
| compelled to think we are absolutely compelled to think, as this would
| imply; but that if we think a fact 'must be' we cannot have observed
| that it 'must be'. The principle is thus reduced to an analytical one.
| In the same way universality implies that the event would be the same
| were the things within certain limits different from what they are.
| Hence universal and necessary elements of experience are not determined
| from without. But are they, therefore, determined from within? Are they
| determined at all? Does not this very conception of determination imply
| causality and thus beg the whole question of causality at the very outset?
| Not at all. The determination here meant is not real determination but
| logical determination. A cognition 'à priori' is one which any experience
| contains reason for and therefore which no experience determines but which
| contains elements such as the mind introduces in working up the materials
| of sense, or rather as they are not new materials, they are the working up.
|
| CSP, CE 1, pages 246-247.
|
| Charles Sanders Peirce, "Harvard Lectures 'On the Logic of Science'", (1865),
|'Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Volume 1, 1857-1866',
| Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1982.
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