Direct Knowledge is More or Less The Only Knowledge We Have

The Peirce quotes below require no emendation and I have nothing to add. Possibly, I might argue the contention in the headline above.

I don’t know if you have ever been accused of telling a lie when you most certainly were telling the truth, sharing knowledge based on your own experience. I have been accused on two occasions I can recall. In neither case was my faith shaken. I did not tell myself I had not experienced what I knew I had.

But I learned, at least to my satisfaction, that I have a good deal of certainty about what has taken place. At least in these specific instances.

I am also aware that my direct knowledge of huge swatches of the past, which includes memories I might once have possessed, is woefully inadequate. I cannot remember masses of things.

And I cannot be alone. There is perhaps nothing as selective as memory. Can you remember what you were doing three days ago at three in the afternoon?

Is direct knowledge dependent on memory? It must be, if it relates to what cannot be proved apart from a particular event.

In my two examples above, I could no doubt produce witnesses to one incident but not the other. The other was a movie I saw as a callow ten year old. I know the film. But I cannot prove that I was at the showing.

The witnessed incident is recounted in one of my Panflick books, which are, pertinently, fictional memoirs.

What Peirce seems at some pains to do is make life intelligible to ordinary people. I count myself among them. I have no skill at science or math and I am daily struck by the sense that I know nothing.

But what I do know is the result of direct remembered experience.

Some is habitual in the sense that I remember turning my computer on.

Some is explicit and incidental, as in going out with my sweetheart on a regular basis or greeting the man at the cafe who customarily gives me soup at the close of the day. (I assume it would otherwise be tossed. But it is a wonderful custom.)

Yes, we know what we know because we were there. And we recall.

Or we saw or heard or read this or that.

Reality is all.

But our knowledge of it is limited in ways that stagger us by the degree we are ignorant.

Peirce wants to enlarge our awareness. He helps us translate the signs we see into considerations and expressions and actions.

He wants us to become better thinkers and doers.

Peirce was something of a scamp . I have been there too. If we are lucky we transcend our less seemly traits. Peirce certainly does, nowhere more than in his writings where he is generous and humane to a T.

Needless to say, if I must defend my Peirce interest to an expert, I will respond that I have direct knowledge.

Peirce: CP 2.140 Cross-Ref:††

§4. DIRECT KNOWLEDGE

140. You further opine that there is such a thing as knowledge. Your thinking there is any use in logic betrays that opinion. For you, the non-ego is not an unknowable thing in itself. Since the above argument for reality is that it is experienced, the same argument compels you to admit that there is knowledge; so that that branch of this second question needs no further attention. But it will be well to notice roughly in what sense this argument compels you to admit the existence of knowledge.

Peirce: CP 2.141 Cross-Ref:††

141. The knowledge which you are compelled to admit is that knowledge which is directly forced upon you, and which there is no criticizing, because it is directly forced upon you. For example, here I sit at my table with my inkstand and paper before me, my pen in my hand, my lamp at my side. It may be that all this is a dream. But if so, that such dream there is, is knowledge. But hold: what I have written down is only an imperfect description of the percept that is forced upon me. I have endeavored to state it in words. In this there has been an endeavor, purpose — something not forced upon me but rather the product of reflection. I was not forced to this reflection. I could not hope to describe what I see, feel, and hear, just as I see, feel, and hear it. Not only could I not set it down on paper, but I could have no kind of thought adequate to it or any way like it.†P1