Re: C.S. Peirce • Objective Logic

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Note 3

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Objective Logic (cont.)

But whatever be the kind and degree of our logical assurance that there is any real world,
external or internal, that same kind and degree of assurance we certainly have that there
not only may be a living symbol, realizing the full idea of a symbol, but even that there
actually is one.

I examine the question from this point of view.  It certainly seems as if the mere
hypothesis of such a thing as a symbol sufficed to demonstrate such a life-history.
Still, a fallacy is to be suspected.  How can a mere hypothesis prove so much as this
seems to prove, if it proves anything?  I call in the data of experience, not exactly
the every-minute experience which has hitherto been enough, but the experience of most
men, together with the history of thought.  The conclusion seems the same.  Yet still,
the evidence is unsatisfactory.  The truth is that the hypothesis involves the idea of
a different mode of being from that of existential fact.  This mode of being seems to
claim immediate recognition as evident in the mere idea of it.  One asks whether there
is not a fallacy in using the ordinary processes of logic either to support it or to
refute it.

— Charles S. Peirce, “Minute Logic” (1902), CP 2.114–115

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