Epistemology the Epistemological Gap Is Term Paper

We are, in essence, simply made up of a lot of different people through time and history. The people today are an evolved version of everyone that came before and this pattern will continue. This has to do with Spirit. He says, "Spirit is indeed never at rest but always engaged in moving forward" (p 5). On that same note, in Peirce's "Fixation of Beliefs," he talks about the struggle between beliefs and doubts (inquiry) and how the purpose is to know if one is dealing with a doubt or a belief. This can be likened to Hegel's theories in that inquiry is all about evolving. One cannot evolve -- society cannot evolve -- if there is not this struggle to find the truth or beliefs.

Where Peirce strays from Hegelian thought and thus widens the epistemological gap is that he says that there are

Real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them; those Reals affect our senses according to regular laws, and, through our sensations are as different as are our relations to the objects, yet, by taking advantage of the laws of perception, we can ascertain by reasoning how things really and truly are; and any man, if he have sufficient experience and he reason enough about it, will be led to the one True conclusion (p 75).

For Hegel, there is nothing that outside of our thoughts about them. Peirce does say thought that in taking advantage of perception we can see the truth about things and Hegel would agree that perception does lead us to truth.In short, while there seems to be a gap between how the two philosophers view the real and unreal, truths and beliefs, there are associations that can be drawn between the two that shows their thinking was not completely different….....