Metaphysical Realism and Logical Empiricism: Two Forms of the Regressive Exploitation of the Sciences by Idealism

Abstract

A first observation: the philosophical position according to which thought and language derive first from experience and second from deduction is not restricted to the spontaneous effects it has in the practice of the linguist: it exists in an autonomous philosophical form with its own ‘solution to the problem’ of the relationship between ‘theory of knowledge’ and ‘rhetoric’. Hence the spon­taneous continuism of linguistics in epistemological matters is based on a philosophical continuism running from the ‘given’ to the ‘deduced’, with the proviso that one can apprehend the given correctly or incorrectly and that one can deduce correctly or incorrectly, which provides a means by which to distinguish between what is science and what is not, and to decide, by internal criteria, whether or not a discourse is scientific. In order to understand the effects of this spontaneous philosophy¹ (and as we shall see later, in order to attempt to protect oneself from it), it remains therefore to examine how its categories operate in relationship to the two spaces which I have hitherto called ‘theory of knowledge’ and ‘rhetoric’.