Dear Ulysses, lists - The quote you give is a paraphrase of Husserl's Prolegomena. But it refers to a huge issue only partially dealt with in NP. Peirce was no believer in sense data but he did think there are degrees of (im)mediacy of knowledge. I do not go deeply into his perception theory in this book (a bit in ch. 4) but his idea was that all new stuff in thought appears through abduction of which perception forms an extreme variant. All thought is in signs, but some signs are more immediate than others - among them perceptual judgments which form the way perception appears to us. To P, perception is not particular, but always-already invovles general elements which is why he does not face the issue of how to get from particular sense data to perceptions. Peirce being a continuist, I do not think he would like absolute, distinct classes of immediate knowledge vs. mediate knowledge - but rather a continuum from less to more mediate knowledge.
Best F Den 10/09/2014 kl. 08.21 skrev U Pascal <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> : If nobody minds, I would like spend some time on this passage in chapter two: "regarding empiricism: the belief in nothing but singular empirical propositions bars it from even defending its own principles because it rejects the important possibility of reaching mediate knowledge from immediate knowledge. It thus confuses the origin of knowledge with its legitimation..." (Friederik 2014: 19). My sense is that there are two important distinctions here. 1) Mediate knowledge vs. Immediate knowledge and 2) the distinction between the origin of knowledge and its legitimation. I believe the second distinction has huge implication, especially in how we are usually taught epistemology in analytic philosophy classes -- my hunch is there is often some ambiguity concept of 'justified belief' that smuggles in many issues arise that when this distinction is ignored -- but before we get ahead of ourselves I would like to roll back the tape a bit and ask for some clarification on the first distinction. What are our references for 'mediate' and 'immediate' knowledge? and do these categories have analogues in Peircean terminology? How is distinction (1) related to distinction (2)/what is our account for how mediate knowledge is reached from immediate knowledge? best, Ulysses
----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to [email protected] . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to [email protected] with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
