Minding, Imaging, and Symbolizing

Abstract

If rationalism is driven by the hope that reason can in one way or another get something right, it was bound, sooner or later, to run up against the problem that Kant alludes to when distinguishing between conceptus ratiocinati (‘rightly inferred concepts’) and conceptus ratiocinantes (‘pseudo-rational concepts’).² In his efforts to reform metaphysics once and for all, by mapping a domain of pure reason in accordance with ‘the example set by geometers and physicists,’ he inadvertently shows, however, that reason is unable to determine whether there are any concepts that can be rightly inferred. More recently, Bertrand Russell has reinforced doubts about the wisdom of the Kantian approach while attempting to demonstrate that philosophical reasoning ought to be judged by its logic instead of by its metaphysic. But despite his claim that the formal symbolic language of Principia Mathematica is capable of eliminating vagueness and ambiguity from philosophical discourse, he merely reinforces the view that the problems of philosophy are indeed bound up with the problem of symbolism.³ The irony is that the logicistic approach he advocates leads to a formal kind of mysticism that involves an acritical faith in the powers of science to deliver up precise atomic facts that can be systematically connected by the methods of symbolic logic.