Abstract
For a long time it looked as though contemporary philosophers of science had succeeded in reducing the theory of knowledge to methodology and in this way were able completely to liberate it from metaphysical elements. If this impression were correct, then we should regard this as a late victory of logical positivism, as the elimination of metaphysics from a central area of philosophical thought.1 This self-conception is clearly expressed in the thesis, not rarely put forth by representatives of the contemporary philosophy of science, that it is philosophically neutral. However, it is rather the case that now and then metaphysics re-enters through the backdoor when it is thrown out the frontdoor. In fact, it can then sometimes re-enter unnoticed because attention is only focused in one direction.
Translated from the German by Dr. John Krois (Ed.)
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Notes
See the book by Herbert Keuth, Realität und Wahrheit: Zur Kritik des kritischen Rationalismus (Tübingen, 1978) and my review essay, ‘Realität und Wahrheit: Zu Herbert Keuths Kritik am kritischen Rationalismus’, Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 33 (1979), 567ff.
See ‘Analytica Posteriora’, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, edited by Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), pp. 111ff. Cf. esp. Kurt von Fritz, ‘Die APXAI in der griechischen Mathematik’, Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 1 (1955), 21.
von Fritz, op. cit., emphasis added.
One thinks here of Edmund Husserl and Hugo Dingier, but also of Rudolf Carnap in the early phase of logical positivism. Cf. Gerard Radnitzky, ‘Über empfehlenswerte und verwerfliche Spielarten der Skepsis’, Ratio 7 (1965), passim, esp. pp. 128f.
See Karl Popper, Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie (Tübingen, 1979);
William Warren Bartley III, The Retreat to Commitment (New York, 1962);
Hans Albert, Traktat über kritische Vernunft (4th ed., Tübingen, 1980), pp. 11ff. The situation described there as a trilemma has been known of since Aristotle’s time;see ‘Analytica Posteriora’, 72b 5–73a 20. Cf. von Fritz, op. cit., p. 95. See also Otfried Hóffe’s introduction to the German edition of this work: Aristoteles, Die Lehre vom Beweis oder zweite Analytik, edited by Otfried Hoffe (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1976), pp. XXVIf. Hoffe wants primarily to show a fourth way in Aristotle, the recourse to principles attainable through induction, but he then admits that it involves unattainable, immediate, and error-free cognition. So we can in no way regard this as a fourth way, and most certainly not as a way out of the trilemma. As far as the problem of the interaction of sources of knowledge is concerned, it is definitely not neglected in critical rationalism. Rather, only the classical solution is rejected.
See Hans Werner Arndt, Methodo seiendfica pertractatum: Mos geometricus und Kalkülbergriff in der philosophischen Theoriebildung des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts (Berlin and New York, 1971), p. 7.
On this see Arndt, op. cit., pp. 7ff and passim.
See Arndt, op. cit. p. 11.
On Pappus see Arndt, op. cit., pp. 22ff, p. 53,
and passim. Cf. Irme Lakatos, “The method of analysis-synthesis” in his volume Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2: Mathematics, Science and Epistemology, edited by John Worrall and Gregory Currie (Cambridge, 1978), pp. 73ff and passim.
On Zabarella see Arndt, op. cit., pp. 25ff.
Lakatos speaks therefore of a Pappusian circle; see Lakatos op. cit., p. 7.
Lakatos believes that a pure intellectualism and a pure empiricism occur relatively seldom and he constructs the “Cartesian circle” so that the problems of both versions of classical rationalism.occur in it. See Lakatos, op. cit., p. 77.
This is especially clear in Leibniz. On this see Arndt, op. cit., pp. 99ff, 102, and 110ff.
Remarkably, Leibniz related it nonetheless to synthesis, which in earlier discussions only involved a derivation from previously established principles, rather than to analysis. See Arndt, op. cit., p. 123. We today would more likely want to conceive it in terms of the first, analytic, resolutive, or inductive phase, while the second, synthetic, compositive, or deductive phase gets along with a logic that is constructed to draw the consequences from given cognitions, i.e. to explicate their content.
On this see Lakatos, op. cit., pp. 101ff.
See Wolfgang Röd, Dialektische Philosophie der Neuzeit, Vol. 1 (München; 1974), pp. 19ff as well as his book Geschichte der Philosophie, Vol. 7: Die Philosophie der Neuzeit I. Von Francis Bacon bis Spinoza (München, 1978), pp. 58ff and 63 with reference to Descartes.
See Röd, Dialektische Philosophie der Neuzeit, Vol. 1, op. cit., pp. 19ff.
On this see Karl Popper, Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie, (Tübingen, 1979), p. 59 and passim; cf. p. 57 where he draws attention to the fact that Kant’s transcendental method is analogous to the empirical method of science.
On Kant’s problem see also Karl Popper, The Nature of Philosophical Problems and their Roots in Science’, in Conjectures and Refutations (London, 1963), pp. 94f.
On the distinction between “logical a priori” and “valid a priori” see Popper, ‘Science: Conjectures and Refutations’, Conjectures and Refutations, op. cit., pp. 47f.
See Immanual Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1965), p. 31.
On this see Röd, Dialektische Philosophie, der Neuzeit Vol. 1, op. cit., p. 31 where the questionable nature of this interpretation is discussed. Cf. also the section ‘Transzendentaler Ansatz und kritischer Realismus’ in my book, Traktat über rationale Praxis (Tübingen, 1978), pp. 13ff.
See Bertrand Russell, Philosophie. Die Entwicklung meines Denkens (München, 1973), pp. 76ff.
See on this Alan Musgrave, ‘Einstein’s Influence on Philosophy’, An open lecture delivered at the University of Otago on June 20, 1979, unpublished.
See Karl Popper, Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie, op. cit., which was written at the beginning of the 1930s, but has now been published.
On this see my essay “Kritizismus und Naturalismus” from 1971 in my volume of essays, Konstruktion und Kritik (2nd ed., Hamburg, 1975), pp. 17ff as well as my book Traktat über rationale Praxis, op. cit., pp. 13ff. In addition, see my essay ‘Die Wissenschaft und die Suche nach Wahrheit’ in Gerard Radnitzky and Gunnar Andersson, eds., Fortschritt und Rationalität in der Wissenschaft (Tübingen, 1980).
See Röd, Dialektische Philosophie der Neuzeit, Vol. 1, op. cit., p. 31.
See Ibid.Röd, Dialektische Philosophie der Neuzeit, Vol. 1, (München; 1974), pp. 32f. This harmonizes to that extent with the reinterpretation of Kant’s conception proposed by me. Cf. my essay, ‘Kritizismus und Naturalismus’ and the abovementioned section of my book Traktat über rationale Praxis.
On this see Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, op. cit., pp. 672 and 676.
See my works mentioned above in Note 27.
See Röd, Dialektische Philosophie der Neuzeit, Vol. 1, op. cit. pp. 43ff.
Röd criticizes the dependence on this ideal. See Ibid.Röd, Dialektische Philosophie der Neuzeit, Vol. 1, (München; 1974), p. 46.
On this see Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London, 1959), Ch. 2, pp. 49ff.
See my Traktat über rationale Praxis, Ch. 2, pp. 33ff.
In his above-mentioned book, Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie, in which the methodological character of the theory of knowledge itself is emphasized, Popper points out that in metaphysics, to the extent that it can seem acceptable, a hypostazation of methodological considerations can be found. See p. 386. At that time Popper still gave great importance to making a sharp distinction between metaphysics and the theory of knowledge. In the meantime, however, he developed his views of this matter further so that this thesis has now been overcome in his later work. The conception of methodology as a technological derívate of metaphysics seems to me to be more in line with the other views he upholds today than the mentioned thesis.
See my book Traktat über rationale Praxis, op. cit., pp. 45ff.
See my essay, ‘Geschichte und Gesetz, Zur Kritik des methodologischen Historismus’, in Sozialphilosophie als Aufklärung, Festschrift für Ernst Topitsch, edited by Kurt Salamun (Tübingen, 1979).
See Imre Lakatos, Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery, edited by John Worrall and Elie Zahar (Cambridge: 1976), pp. 143f, note 2. Lakatos indicates that Popper was not interested in the meta-question of the character of this discipline. But this can hardly be maintained today since his book mentioned above, Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie, shows the very opposite. Of course, he will not continue to maintain the answer he gave at that time to this question, after that he has dropped the sharp distinction between metaphysics and the theory of know- ledge. On the other hand, Lakatos regarded the epistemological background of methodology with considerable mistrust, and his answer is also unsatisfactory. If heuristics does not belong either to the sphere of logic or to that of psychology, as Lakatos rightly determines, then the “technological” solution put forth here in the framework of critical rationalism seems to me to be the most acceptable solution.
See the concluding sentence of Lakatos’s essay, ‘The method of analysis-synthesis’, in Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2, op. cit., p. 103
A good example from the sphere of the history of ideas of this seems to me to be Albert Schweitzer, Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung (6th ed., Tübingen, 1951).
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Albert, H. (1984). Transcendental Realism and Rational Heuristics: Critical Rationalism and the Problem of Method. In: Andersson, G. (eds) Rationality in Science and Politics. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 79. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-6254-5_3
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