I have to
conclude that its dialectic has not invalidated
in the least degree the usual conjunctions by
which the world, as experienced, hangs so variously
together. In particular it leaves an empirical
theory of knowledge(2) intact, and lets
us continue to believe with common sense that
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one object _may_ be known, if we have any
ground for thinking that it _is_ known, to many
knowers.
In [the next essay] I shall return to this last
supposition, which seems to me to offer other
difficulties much harder for a philosophy of
pure experience to deal with than any of
absolutism's dialectic objections.
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IV
HOW TWO MINDS CAN KNOW
ONE THING(1)
IN [the essay] entitled 'Does Consciousness
Exist?' I have tried to show that when we call
an experience 'conscious,' that does not mean
that it is suffused throughout with a peculiar
modality of being ('psychic' being) as stained
glass may be suffused with light, but rather
that it stands in certain determinate relations
to other portions of experience extraneous to
itself. These form one peculiar 'context' for
it; while, taken in another context of experiences,
we class it as a fact in the physical
world.
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