Vaihinger philosophy of as if pdf

Jun 20, Elena Holmgren rated it it was amazing Shelves: Sign in to use this feature. Outlines of the History of Greek Philosophy. Mithu Storoni rated it it was amazing Oct 05, Chris Bradley rated it liked it Dec 16, Oc particular, he used examples from the physical sciences, such as protonselectronsand electromagnetic waves.

Philosophy of the Unconscious. Paul Siakaluk rated it liked it Mar 11, Vaihinger provides here, I think, the clearest exposition of the thread that runs fr. Whether you are a scientist or a theologian philosphy will view your certitudes with a changed perspective. The basic idea is that human thought is a by-product of evolution, a mechanism for coping with the struggle to survive. Explore the Home Gift Guide. Science Logic and Mathematics. Kant, whose school Vaihinger belonged to, is given particular attention.

Ultimately, all postulates that ground and direct the process of knowledge-acquisition spring from organismic values, from our striving to humanize the world and bring it into a humanly graspable and relatable form. Epistemology, the philosophical study of the nature, origin, and limits of human knowledge. Along the way this means to an end became an end in itself, an philoslphy faculty, now separated from its primary function of finding food, shelter, sex etc.

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Joe rated it really liked it Jul 12, He also notes that the theory implies that claims about the utility of holding doctrines and even the theory itself are no more than useful fictions. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. I think the view of human life that emerges here, from this closer look at all our illusions about knowledge, is deeply poignant and transformative, if you let it ss in.

Product details Hardcover Publisher: Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account. William Pole — — Routledge. According to this criticism, Kant overlooked the possibility that space and time might be both subjective forms of intuition and objective properties of things in themselves the classic statement of this criticism is [Trendelenburg ].

Vaihinger, by contrast, does not hesitate to admit that the above objections are genuine problems for Kant. In the case of the Deduction, Vaihinger even claims to have been able to trace precisely each portion of the text to a particular series of notes from the decade between the Dissertation and the KrV From — Kant is a dogmatic rationalist after the Leibnizian-Wolffian model. Then, under the influence of Locke and Hume, he endorses empiricism from — With the publication of Dreams of a Spirit Seer , he begins to adopt the standpoint of the critical philosophy, but by the time of the Inaugural Dissertation , the influence of Leibniz particularly of the Nouveaux Essais reasserts itself.

This reversion to dogmatism lasts until when he becomes a skeptic, again under the influence of Hume. Finally, he arrives at the mature critical standpoint with the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason in —92, — In the Prolegomena , Kant argues thus:.

These objects are surely not representations of things as they are in themselves, and as the pure understanding would cognize them , rather, they are sensory intuitions, i. Roughly, Vaihinger reconstructs the argument as follows: 1 Some differences in the spatial properties of objects cannot be known through the pure understanding; 2 All differences between things in themselves can be known through the pure understanding; C Space is not a thing in itself.

However, the thesis that the Deduction, regardless of its precise method of composition, at least contains multiple inconsistent lines of argument, rather than a single unified argument, has found able defenders since Vaihinger see e. For a recent challenge to this revised patchwork reading see Allison It will therefore be worth briefly examining before turning to the main argument of the PAO. In the Dialectic, Kant claims that certain concepts e.

Practical reason, however, may provide justification for the belief in say the existence of God, even if not of a sort sufficient to yield knowledge of him. Vaihinger disputes this reading. Instead, he interprets the Ideas as self-conscious fictions, which are nevertheless licensed by their theoretical and practical utility.

Both the distinction between fictions and hypotheses, and the idea of treating reality as if certain concepts appropriately applied to it are major themes that find extensive development in the PAO.

Adickes accuses Vaihinger of ignoring countless passages that flatly contradict his fictionalist reading, and of misleadingly paraphrasing or eliding passages he does cite. In one way, at least, this criticism is unfair. Adickes nevertheless makes a compelling case that even those passages on which Vaihinger does rely do not speak decisively in favor of his interpretation.

Most contemporary Kant scholars follow Adickes in rejecting the fictionalist interpretation of the Ideas, though it continues to find some supporters see e.

Rauscher Confusion here may be forestalled by attending to something Vaihinger himself says about the aim of the work:. There were two possible ways of working out the Neo-Kantianism of F. PAO xxii. Vaihinger will use this idea to motivate his own fictionalism, and to provide a radical reinterpretation of Kantianism. These various influences are drawn together in the introductory chapters of PAO. Like bodily organs, the psyche is designed or rather, selected to perform a particular role within the total economy of the organism.

Though broadly in the spirit of Schopenhauer and Darwin, this instrumentalist conception of the mind is, as Ceynowa has argued , 35— , also more specifically indebted to the nineteenth century psychologist Adolf Horwicz.

For the bare purposes of carrying out those actions necessary for survival, Vaihinger is claiming, the intellect would not have to be a reliable guide to the way the world really is. On the contrary, fictions may have an indispensable role to play here. What are we to make of this sort of argument? One might suggest that the fact that our cognitive apparatus is a product of natural selection supports, rather than undermines, the idea that it is a reliable guide to the way the world is.

Vaihinger would likely respond that this only shows that we have to get the right things about the world right. It does not mean that our total image of the world is, or even could be, a copy of reality, accurate in all its details. After all, the theorizing in fundamental physics is a rather different matter than determining how to find a meal, and even if such theories turn out to be useful down the line, it seems that life would and does manage just fine without them.

For example, the repeated co-occurrence of sensations of a branching shape and sensations of green leads the psyche to postulate a relation of substantial inherence between a thing or substance the tree and its attribute green PAO — However, he argues in a manner evocative of Berkeley, the notion of a substance is incoherent since it implies the existence of a bare substrate with no properties whatsoever PAO — The fiction is nevertheless justified, he suggests, because it facilitates the recognition of regularities in the occurrences of our sensations, and the communication of these regularities to others PAO Given that our most immediate relation to the world is thus mediated by the categories which also include the relations of part-whole, cause-effect, inter alia , it is natural to suppose that these fictions will resurface in our more sophisticated theories, e.

Vaihinger is not suggesting that genuine knowledge that serves no particular practical aim is impossible; but he is suggesting that our total theoretic image of the world is ultimately limited by those fictions that have been preserved as most adaptive for our basic practical aims PAO Ceynowa Others have disputed this connection Bouriau In other words, semi-fictions are statements or propositions that happen not to correspond to the world; genuine fictions are those that claim something impossible about the world.

See the article on Models in Science. Vaihinger does not clearly distinguish these. A standard example is the model of the planetary system given in classical mechanics:. In physics we find such a fiction in the fact that masses of undeniable extension, e. Such a neglect of elements is especially resorted to where a very small factor is assumed to be zero. PAO The idea is familiar. If what we are interested in is determining the trajectory and velocity of the planets around the Sun, then it is useful to ignore or iron-out a wide variety of features of the system, e.

The solar system behaves nearly just as it would if the planets were mass points, etc. This suggests a counterfactual understanding of fictions: by reasoning from assumptions that are false—sometimes radically false—at the actual world, we may still arrive at conclusions that are true, or quite nearly true, at the actual world. If those results are arrived at more efficiently by entertaining the fiction, then the fiction is justified.

Since everything follows from a contradiction, any counterfactual whose antecedent is a real fiction will be trivially true, and this is to say they cannot possibly do the work Vaihinger envisions Appiah , 11; Cohen , One way to respond, here, is to note that the logic with which Vaihinger operates is still essentially the version of Aristotelian logic found in Kant and throughout much of the nineteenth century.

Such pre-twentieth-century logics often implicitly reject the principle ex contradictione quodlibet. See, e. Relatedly, but from a more contemporary perspective, one might read Vaihinger as anticipating some recent views on counterpossible reasoning Pollard Consider the following counterfactual conditionals:. Intuitively, 1 and 3 are true while 2 and 4 are false. Moreover, someone who rejects intuitionism might well wish to argue against intuitionism by relying on something like 3 , even though what the antecedent states is, by her lights, impossible.

These facts have led some to suppose that 1 and 3 are not merely true, but non-trivially true for more on these sorts of arguments, see the entry for Impossible Worlds. Here, then, is a case in which a proof no one would wish to call trivial allegedly proceeds from a contradictory assumption. Anthony Appiah rejects this kind of interpretation, on the grounds that such counterpossibles are unintelligible , 11—17; cf.

Wilholt , In particular, the point is that we may find it useful to regard certain phenomena in one way for some purposes, but in another, incompatible way for other purposes. Even when it turns out to be useful to combine incompatible models for understanding one and the same phenomenon or range of phenomena , Appiah suggests, Vaihinger need not be committed to a paraconsistent logic.