Title: The Methodological Structure of Kant’s Metaphysics of Science
Abstract: For many of us nurtured in idealist ways inclining us to unwavering acceptance of Kantian principles, 1951 was a bad year. We read in Reichenbach's The Rise of Scientific Philosophy of the "disintegration of the synthetic a priori".1 Kant had taught us that there are very general principles—each one connected to a primal category of thought—that are necessary in the formation of mathematics and physics and are expressible in nonanalytic propositions. However, since Kant's death in 1804 both mathematics and physics have developed revolutionary traits: noneuclidian geometries, new developments in symbolic logic, relativity physics, and finally, quantum mechanics, sealed the negative fate of Kant's high principles. Henceforth we must accept that there are no nonempty claims about reality that can be counted as necessary or indispensable to mathematics and science. Kant's attempt to offer a new epistemological guarantee of the three-dimensionality of space, and of the Newtonian character of physical motions, thus failed in the deepest sense: As a philosophy of science it turned out to be an anthropomorphic curiosity. Kant's epistemic formalism might well apply to macroscopic objects undergoing macroscopic movements and observed within the apparent three-dimensional limits of our human visual space. It fails to apply in any other domains. Kant's objects of possible experience are objects too limited for purposes of recent mathematics and physics.
Publication Year: 1986
Publication Date: 1986-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 44
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