ONT Re: Just In Time Logic
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JITL. Note 11
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| Chapter 4. Of Reality
|
| Investigation supposes a true and a false,
| truth and falsity being independent of all
| opinion upon the matter. The name 'real'
| is applied to that which is independent
| of how you or I or any number of minds
| think it to be.
|
| It is a truism to say that the character of what I think
| depends entirely on what I think it to be. The real is
| not, therefore, 'per se' an immediate object of thought,
| even though my thought may happen to coincide with it.
| Yet the real must influence thought or I could not by
| following any rules of reasoning arrive at any truth.
|
| Investigation consists necessarily of two parts, one by which a
| belief is generated from other beliefs, which is called 'reasoning';
| and another by which new elements of belief are brought into the mind,
| which is called 'observation'. Thus, the conclusions depend entirely
| upon the observations. But while the ultimate conclusion is one and
| the same in the minds of all who push investigation far enough, the
| observations on which it hangs are for every man private and peculiar.
| The observations which I made yesterday are not the same that I make today;
| nor are simultaneous observations from different situations or with other
| different circumstances the same. Two men cannot therefore make the same
| observation. We may go further and say that no two observations are in
| themselves in any degree alike. The judgment that they are alike is not
| contained in either observation (since they do not relate to one another)
| but is a belief generated by the two beliefs in which the two observations
| immediately result, so that it is an inference of reasoning, as that has just
| been defined. Thus our reasonings begin with the most various premisses, which
| have not in themselves anything in common, but which so determine our beliefs as
| to lead us at last to one destined conclusion.
|
| Here is the whole statement of facts from which we must infer whatever we can know
| of the mode of being of the real. But there is no additional fact which we can
| infer from these facts. For these embrace everything which takes place in
| thought, and as to anything out of thought we can know nothing.
|
| C.S. Peirce, CE 3, pp. 60-61.
|
| Charles Sanders Peirce, "Chapter 4. Of Reality", MS 205, Fall 1872, pp. 60-61 in:
|'Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Volume 3, 1872-1878',
| Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1986.
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