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We now turn to some examples of the quest for simple and immediate ideas, judgements, or what have you, that would be secure in themselves while providing enough to support a system of knowledge. It is necessary to remember that such a paradigm will work only if some strict conditions are satisfied: (a) The basic item as conceived must be totally independent. Should the awareness of its actuality presuppose knowledge of some other actuality it could not produce the base of the possibility of knowledge since it would require support itself. (b) The idea in question must be epistemically simple, but something e.g. ontologically simple may well fail this test. (c) The idea must be immediately graspable, that is it must be possible for it to be grasped in the absence of anything else. In principle the idea should be capable of being the only idea in existence. I am talking here of the epistemic paradigm, while what we might call the linguistic paradigm might be less demanding, it cannot replace the epistemic one.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-3542-1_1

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