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Transcendental Arguments in Scientific Reasoning

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Abstract

Although there is increasing interest in philosophy of science in transcendental reasoning, there is hardly any discussion about transcendental arguments. Since this might be related to the dominant understanding of transcendental arguments as a tool to defeat epistemological skepticism, and since the power of transcendental arguments to achieve this goal has convincingly been disputed by Barry Stroud, this contribution proposes, first, a new definition of the transcendental argument which allows its presentation in a simple modus ponens and, second, a pragmatist re-interpretation of this argument form that leaves it to the scientific community to debate, criticize, refine, or reaffirm its core claim: a premise which claims that the truth of a certain assumption is a necessary condition for something that is generally accepted. The proposed “logico-pragmatist interpretation” highlights the role of transcendental arguments as a methodological step to move science forward, just as abduction and inference to the best explanation do.

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Notes

  1. More on abduction in Sect. 5. “Hypostatic abstraction” is the process of creating new scientific entities by transforming predicates into nouns (“multitude is the hypostatic abstraction derived from a predicate of a collection,” CP 5.534); “theorematic deduction” is an inference that becomes possible through “the introduction of auxiliary individuals into the argument” (Hintikka 1983 <1980>, p. 113); “theoric transformation” is the process of solving a problem by means of a shift of perspective (Hoffmann 2005, 2011); and “diagrammatic reasoning” is a multi-step process of constructing external representations of our reasoning, experimenting with them, and observing the results so that “relations between the parts of the diagram other than those which were used in its construction” can be detected (Peirce NEM III 749).

  2. Stern (2015). See also Bell (1999) with more references along these lines.

  3. See already Cassam (1987, p. 355); Stern (1999, p. 48, 2015), and Bell (1999, pp. 203–204). Vahid (2011) characterizes transcendental arguments as “extended modus ponens inferences” (p. 396).

  4. For a comprehensive and critical discussion of similar arguments by Roy Bhaskar and Nancy Cartwright see Clarke (2010).

  5. All quotes are from Kant (Prol.), §29, §1, and p.7, but material is taken also from §§19, 27, and 28.

  6. (C1) is the transcendental claim of the argument. It is justified here by a disjunctive syllogism which is based on the premise (P2) that there are only three possibilities. Since the first two have been rejected by Hume, only the third one—Kant’s transcendental assumption (C1)—can be true. For a visualization of the structure of the entire transcendental argument by means of an argument map, see Hoffmann (2018).

  7. (C1) is the second premise—the transcendental claim—of the transcendental argument. Since it is justified by another argument it is marked here as a conclusion.

  8. See Sacks (1999) for a similar argument. This problem, of course, is equivalent to the well-known problem of coherence theories of truth.

  9. Friedman (2001, p. 71). See also his reaction to critics in Friedman (2012).

  10. Einstein (1955 <1919>, p. 54). The last words have been changed based on the fact that the German version reads “daß ein Perpetuum mobile unmöglich ist” (Einstein 1986 <1919>, p. 128).

  11. http://home.cern/topics/higgs-boson/origins-brout-englert-higgs-mechanism (accessed Jan 13, 2018).

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  1. School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology, 685 Cherry Street, N.W., DM Smith Building, Atlanta, GA, 30332-0345, USA

    Michael H. G. Hoffmann

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Hoffmann, M.H.G. Transcendental Arguments in Scientific Reasoning. Erkenn 84, 1387–1407 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-0013-9

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