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I wrote some years ago, that "such knowledge as we can have of the inner nature of anything else we can have only by way of analogy with whatever we are able to know of our own existence."  During the intervening years, I found good reasons to reject such a statement insofar as it is construed as I almost certainly construed it in making it.  My question, then, is whether this is the only way to construe it, or whether it bears some other construction in which it can and should still be made.  I have two comments.

  1. It seems clear, as I have ponted out elsewhere (e.g. Notebooks, 22 September 2004), that aside from ordinary, dictionary use of "analogy," the term has and must have proper uses even in an austerely transcendental metaphysics.  Tke the term "real," for example.  If abstracts are properly said to be as real as concretes, then, assuming the longical-ontological type difference between abstracts and concretes, it cannot be used univocally.  And so, too, with ther terms "abstracts" and "concretes," both of which, like "real," are applicable across fundamental differences of logicall-ontological type.  In the cases of "abstracts," there are not only the differences between the various types of categorial properties

2. A precedent for defining the alternative construction of my statement is how I have long since defined alternative ways of construing certain parallel statements of Whitehead's and Hartshorne's. I refer to such statements of Whitehead's as that "all final individual actualities have the metaphysical character of occasions of experience"

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