Clarification/Follow-up by Jon1667 on 04/16/03 1:56 pm:
Knowledge, Peirce believes, is a community affair. It is true that a single individual may happen on a truth, but that would not be knowledge unless it was justified, and justification is not an individual matter.

Clarification/Follow-up by Jon1667 on 04/16/03 5:09 pm:
Just how do you reason about metaphysics or anything else without language? Whistle?

Clarification/Follow-up by Dark_Crow on 04/16/03 5:49 pm:
It seems you are right when you say whistle; we “learn” to associate sounds and symbols with abstract ideas in the mind, and then to communicate these abstract ideas with other minds using sounds and symbols; we also have the ability to create new words, languages, concepts, and innovations. These two distinct combinations create human imagination, the undisputed power behind all human endeavors. It created the mind of mankind. It made the amazing human adventure possible. The mystical, the mystery of life, the imagination.

Clarification/Follow-up by Jon1667 on 04/16/03 8:02 pm:
Babthrower:
I sympathize with what you say. Descartes writes that he actually believes what he writes he doubts. It is better, I think, to understand Descartes as saying that it is _possible_ to doubt that, for instance, there are material objects, or that there is a God. In fact, in the latter part of the "Meditations" he tries to show that it merely appears possible to doubt these things, but, in fact, it isn't.
That is why Descartes describes his doubt as "metaphysical" or "philosphical" or "hyperbolic" doubt, which is compatible with believing what you (metaphysically) doubt.

Pierce, like Pragmatists after him, is a behaviorist about mental states. He thinks that the "cash value" (William James' term) of believing lies in how the (alleged) doubter behaves. A person who lays a book on a table cannot be doubting that either the book or the table exist.