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the fact that knowledge could not begin unless the basic presuppositions
of intelligibility itself were a priori characteristic
of rationality.
Even the professing empiricists somehow beat themselves out
the back door on just such problems as this one. Thus C. I.
Lewis---whose attempt to refute the synthetic a priori are almost
notoriously well known---raises a whole host of questions
which cannot be solved without repudiating the empirical
viewpoint:
Is it requisite to knowledge that the warrant of it be
complete and sufficient to justify what is believed?
In part, our empirical cognitions are bases upon sense
data, at least in typical cases. But that these by themselves
do not constitute justification of the belief is
suggested by the fact of illusion. Typically there
must be some reliance upon other and like empirical
beliefs, taken as antecedently assured. Must this kind
of ground of our belief also lie within our apprehension
if the belief is to be justified as knowledge? And
must this ground itself be likewise grounded? And
must this ground of the ground be warranted, and the
warrant of it lie within our apprehension---and so on;
unless or until we come to something in such regress,
which is given and self-warranting and is sufficient
for all which it must support? And if so, can any empirical
cognition possible to us stand up under this
requirement? 5
Lewis, I think, never succeeds in answering these problems,
although he spends hundreds of pages in the attempt. But this
5 C. I. Lewis, An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, p. 28.