ABSTRACT
BY now I have surveyed a series of facts which seriously suggest a reappraisal of our capacity to acquire knowledge. This reappraisal demands that we credit ourselves with much wider cognitive powers than an objectivist conception of knowledge would allow, but at the same time it reduces the independence of human judgment far below that claimed traditionally for the free exercise of reason. It is useless to accumulate more evidence unless we can first master what has been given so far. I shall now try, therefore, to give a firmer outline to the conception of personal knowledge. The argument will be focussed for this purpose once more on the narrow range of knowledge, forming the hard core of greatest certainty. Only if we can find simple formulations which define the indeterminacy and existential dependence of such knowledge, can we hope to devise a stable framework within which any kind of knowledge can be justified.
