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Wiki MarkupUnless I'm mistaken, Hartshorne's statement that "inferring this \ [_sc_. universally common element\] is merely \ [_sic\!_\] the extreme or limiting case of the attentuation attenuation of commitment ordinarily involved in drawing conclusions" (_AD_: 43) is, in point of fact, a disguised comparison. And, unfortunately, it results in obscuring what is distinctive about transcendental deduction.

Deducing conclusions transcendentally is not merely "the extreme or limiting case" of doing what we do in otherwise reaching conclusions deductively, even if there is, as Hartshorne points out, a certain important similarity. In nontranscendental deductions, we do indeed discard part of the distinctive meaning of our premises. But what we discard is really what is more nondistinctive in their meaning. In transcendental deductions, on the other hand, what we discard is – exactly is—exactly as Hartshorne says – our says—our premises' more distinctive meaning, so as to focus attention on its nondistinctive kernel. So, while the two procedures are, in an important way, alike, they are also significantly different; and this is what Hartshorne's way of talking about them obscures.

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