metonymy4u

In my opinion it was Kant, not Wittgenstein, who solved all the problems of western philosophy. My reasoning goes like this. The pre-eminent problem bedeviling the corpus of western thought since Plato was the question of how knowledge is possible. The issue is the ontological status of epistemological conclusions. For example, if I conclude that two circles are similar in the fact that the ratio of their circumference to their diameter is always the same, I naturally posit a cause of this similarity which is consistent and unchanging, since if I were changing it could not have caused the pattern that I perceived. And even if I suggest that the pattern I’m perceiving is not entirely accurate (that in fact the ratio of C to d for any circle is “cake” and not “pi”), still there is something causing the erroneous pattern that I am seeing and that something must actually exist in order to cause my erroneous perception. So the question becomes for the neo-Platonic thinkers, “how can I know that I know,” or “how can I have justified true belief and also know that it is justified and be justified in believing it?” The question was later re-described by Hume as the “problem of induction” and his answer was, quite simply, “you can’t!”

Of course, Hume’s skepticism sent shivers through the community of rationalist philosophers who wanted to continue their dabbling in natural philosophy and their readings of “the book of nature written in the language of mathematics.” And Kant, taking him very seriously, clearly was not going to let his beloved ship of science founder on the reef of British skepticism. So Kant’s answer was this: we can indeed have synthetic a priori knowledge of the contingent (phenomenal) world, but what this means is just that we can employ the heuristic of induction and universality merely as a utilitarian tool or allegorical interpretation of experiences, and not as a literal representation of “the truth.” The problem, as Kant saw it, was that thinkers since Plato had been far too prone to think about the world analogically. This led them to believe that, for example, if a watch has to have a watch maker, then a universe that is as intricately designed and as lawfully described as a watch must also have a universe maker. In Kant’s world, we can still speak about ideas like “pi” or “God,” but must understand that these are simply useful heuristic models of experiences that, though they point beyond the contingent, cannot ever be directly given in experience. Ontological conclusions about the heuristics of reason (about epistemological principles) can never be proven or disproven. They are “the noumenal” and are forever forbidden to us as phenomenal creatures.

In this way, we begin to see numbers as convenient words that we use to describe experiences. Numbers are simply a way to signal our understanding of certain properties of sets. And the idea of a set is itself nothing more than a product of our brain’s evolutionarily adaptive tendency to remember and classify events. Whether numbers and sets are anything more than that cannot be entertained or verified by a contingent mind. Likewise, God is a convenient word that we use to express the idea that a duty is a principle that does not depend on physical contingencies, and that if such an uncontingent principle is to have real causal power, its existence must be guaranteed by an uncontingent cause or being. But whether God is anything more than that convenient idea is not something that can be experienced. And if it cannot be experienced, it cannot be spoken. By describing the limits of our thought, what Wittgenstein re-described as the limits of speech, Kant thus absolved us of ever having to answer Hume’s provocative skepticism about the problem of induction, which was the problem of knowledge which was the problem of everything, in the west.