Abstract
Some famous authors in the philosophy of physics (e.g. Dingler) have also incurred in the concept-swapping fallacy, witness his attempt to prove the law of causality (a synthetic judgment) by means of definitions. But it is in the so-called ‘theory of knowledge’ or ‘epistemology’ that we can see the fallacy at work from the very start. Although ‘epistemologists’ claim to be Kant’s successors, their very field of inquiry is incompatible with the critique of reason, and in fact is an egregious case of trying to derive synthetic judgments from mere concepts. The problem they set out to solve, viz the validity of our principles, requires an utterly different kind of inquiry, the one Kant called ‘deduction’.
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Notes
- 1.
See Dingler (1911, Chap. II, §5, p. 51, Definitions 6 and 7). Nelson’s quotation (probably from memory) is not quite faithful to the original. Given that his argument is not affected by it, the text has been corrected and variables have been introduced to clarify the definition.
- 2.
See Dingler (1911, 52).
- 3.
See Dingler (1911, 53, 54).
- 4.
For a historical study of how the Kantian ‘theory of knowledge’ developed, see Nelson (1912).
- 5.
See Nelson (1908; Meinong is examined and found wanting in Chap. IV, §§21–24).
- 6.
I introduce here a slight amendment in the German text, which has two sentences that opaquely anticipate the reasoning that follows. Nelson comes back to this argument in his last lecture. The argument was discussed in depth by Popper (1979).
- 7.
I keep the word ‘demonstration’ against English usage because it is introduced as Kant’s expression. A word like ‘ostension’ would perhaps be more appropriate and better understood. The Kantian distinction is similar, albeit not identical, to Russell’s distinction between ‘knowledge by acquaintance’ and ‘knowledge by description’ (see Russell 1911).
References
Dingler, Hugo. 1911. Die Grundlagen der angewandten Geometrie: eine Untersuchung über den Zusammenhang zwischen Theorie und Erfahrung in den exakten Wissenschaften [Foundations of applied geometry: An inquiry into the connection between theory and experience in exact science]. Leipzig: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft.
Nelson, Leonard. 1908. Über das sogenannte Erkenntnisproblem [On the so-called problem of knowledge]. Abhandlungen der Fries’schen Schule (N.F.) 2(4): 413–818 [Reprinted in Nelson (1971–1977), vol. II, pp. 59–393].
Nelson, Leonard. 1912. Untersuchung über die Entwicklungsgeschichte der Kantischen Erkenntnistheorie [Historical enquiry into the development of the Kantian theory of knowledge]. Abhandlungen der Fries’schen Schule (N.F.) 3(1): 33–96 [Reprinted in Nelson (1971–1977), vol. II, pp. 405–457].
Nelson, Leonard. 1971–1977. Gesammelte Schriften, 9 vols. eds. Paul Bernays, Willy Eichler, Arnold Gysin, Gustav Heckmann, Grete Henry-Hermann, Fritz von Hippel, Stephan Körner, Werner Kroebel, and Gerhard Weisser. Hamburg: Felix Meiner.
Popper, Karl. 1979. Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie. Tübingen: Mohr [English Translation: The two fundamental problems of the theory of knowledge, London, Routledge, 2008. The original German text was written by Popper in the late 1920s or early 1930s].
Russell, Bertrand. 1911. Knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (N.S.) 11: 108–128.
von Meinong, Alexius. 1906. Über die Erfahrungsgrundlagen unseres Wissens [On the empirical foundations of our knowledge]. Abhandlungen zur Didaktik und Philosophie der Naturwissenschaften 1(6): 1–113.
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Nelson, L. (2016). Lecture XVIII. In: A Theory of Philosophical Fallacies. Argumentation Library, vol 26. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20783-4_19
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