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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"

(AI: 284), or that "the whole universe consists of elements disclosed in the analysis of the experiences of subjects" (PRe: 166 [252]). As I have previously explained (Notebooks, 21 October 2000), 111y issue is not with these statements as such, but with one of the possible ways in which they're construed-specifically, _with how the term "Inetaphysical character" in the first statement and the term "elements" in the second, are understood.If "metaphysical character" includes "experience" in SOlne intelligible sense of the word, as Whitehead himself presumably thinks, then I can only reject his statement, arguing instead that it includes only the "concreteness" of which "experience" as we experience our own is (adInittedly!) a special case. Or, again, if the "elements" disclosed in the analysis of experience include "experience" in some intelligible sense or other, as Whitehead appears to hold, then I have to reject the statement, arguing, on the contrary, that what is "elemental" in the experiences of subjects is not their experience, but simply their concreteness, their being instances of concrescence, and so on. _Mutajis mutandis,

Of course, "inner nature/' asI can reasonably construe Iny statement above so that I can st)( Inake it. The issue in its case is what is to be understood by "inner nature" and "analogy." Since the only ilUler nature of anything to which we are privy is our own, it's truistic to say that any knowledge we can have of the iruler nature of anything else is by analogy with it. But, again, what is meant by, or included in, "inner nature"? If it's equivalent to "metaphysical character," then the issue is the same as has been clarified under 2 above, and I have to resolve it accordingly. As for "analogy/' I have good reason to allow, as I've argued under 1 above, that even "metaphysical character" is an analogical concept, in that, e.g., such Inetaphysical knowledge as I can have of the universal individual can only be by analogy with such metaphysical knowledge as I can have of myself as a particular individual I would use the tenn, includes but is not exhausted by "metaphysical character." So there Inay well be any number of other merely factual, nOllInetaphysical things that I can know about the inner nature of things other than 111yself by analogy with myself. But in no case can I make or imply a legitimate claim to such knowledge where I cannot give an intelligible sense to the tenns eInployed in the analogy-as I clearly cannot in the case where "experience" is supposedly used analogically with a claim to know the "metaphysical character" of things.

11 December 2006