Essays in Experimental Logic

"ego-centric predicament." The phrase designated something which, whether or no it be real in itsel

it affects alike every view, every theory, every object experienced; it is no respecter of persons, no respecter of doctrines. Since it cannot make any difference to any particular object, to any particular logical assertion, or to any particular theory, it does not support an idealistic as against a realistic theory. Being a universal common den

g a particular chemical reaction; there is no ground for supposing that it affects a reaction in any way that modifies it as a chemical reaction. And if the 'ego-centric' relation were cited when the point at issue is something about one group of facts in distinction from another group, it ou

xternal relation of terms expresses a ubiquitous mark of every genuine proposition or relational complex, and that this ubiquity is a strong presumption in favor of realism. Why so uneven, so partial, in your a

that both realist and idealist, having the same primary assumption, can come back at each other indefinitely. Consequently, I wish to employ the existence of this tu quoque controversy to raise th

realist is quite within the common premise when he points out that every special fact must be admitted for what it is specifically known to be; no idealistic doctrine can turn the edge of the fact that knowledge has evolved historically out of a state in which there was no mind, or of the fact that knowledge is even now dependent on the brain, provided that specific evidence shows these to be facts. The realist, on the other hand, must admit that, after al

fies, each term in relation to the other. But this means that there are not, as respects organism and environment, two terms at all. Eater-of-food and food-being-eaten are two names for one and the same situation. Could there be imagined a greater absurdity

ence that everything is constituted a thing by its relation to eating. Special sciences exist indeed which discuss the nature of various sorts of things in relation to one another, and hence in legitimate abstraction from the fact that they are all foods.

in and out of the relation to eater with no change in their own traits. Moreover, the position of the eaterists is self-contradictory. How can a thing be eaten unless it is, in and of itself, a food? To suppose that a food is constituted b

doing something distinctive, because contrasting with its other functions, in eating then, and then only, is there an issue. In this latter case, the thing which is food may, of course, be proved to be something besides food, because of some different relation to the organism than that of eating. But if both stick consistently to their common premise, we get the following trivial si

ation of the relation to the terms of which it is the relation, is an obvious absurdity; to assert that the relation does not modify the "seller," the "wife," or the "object known," is to discuss the relation of the relation just as much as to assert the opposite. The only reason, I think, why anyone has ever supposed the case of knower-known to differ from any case of an alleged exhaustive and exclusive correlation is that while the knower is