ABSTRACT
A transcendental argument rests on the recognition that the conditions for reliable knowledge must lie in the way in which the subject actively constitutes that object. Thus, as has already been suggested by Horkheimer's account of critical theory, the subject and object are not treated as fundamentally separate. Crucially for Kant, human beings can have knowledge only of the way in which the world appears to them as human beings. In Peirce's pragmatism, Habermas seeks to find a transcendental epistemology that avoids the pitfalls of a first philosophy, which is to say a transcendentalism that makes no substantial presuppositions as to what should count as knowledge. Labour makes possible that acquisition, and the consequent synthesis of the subject's experience of the world in terms of specific, contingently acquired, concepts. Dilthey's hermeneutics rests upon the distinction he draws between the methodologies of the natural and cultural sciences, and the consequent epistemological superiority of the latter.
