Kant Against Kant III

From Appendix B of The Refutation of Kant

In Kant’s application, the pattern is: a concept (each of the four concepts of reflection) operates in two domains (pure understanding and sensible intuition), has different conditions of application in each, and is applied across domains without the transcendental reflection that would have revealed the difference. The inference from one domain to the other is performed rather than argued for. The result is a metaphysical system built on a confusion its author did not see.

In this book’s application, the pattern is: a concept (“the thing-in-itself”) operates with two readings (Reading A: some features of reality are inaccessible because cognition has structure; Reading B: no features of reality-as-it-actually-is are accessible to human cognition at all), and the slide from Reading A to Reading B is performed rather than justified. The result is an epistemological restriction built on a confusion its author did not see.

The structural identity is exact. In both cases, the error is not a failure of logic within either reading but an unargued inference between readings. In both cases, the restricted claim is what the philosopher can demonstrate and the unrestricted claim is what the philosopher asserts and subsequently utilizes. Leibniz could demonstrate that conceptually indiscernible objects are identical in pure understanding but he could not demonstrate that the principle extends to objects of experience. Kant could demonstrate that cognition has structure and that this structure means some features of reality are inaccessible to a given cognitive apparatus but he could not demonstrate that the structure actually blocks all access to reality as it genuinely is.

In both cases, the slide from the restricted claim to the unrestricted claim generates the philosopher’s central doctrines. In both cases, the slide is performed by treating the key term as univocal when it quite clearly has two distinguishable readings with different meanings.

The amphiboly diagnostic used in this book was not derived from Kant’s Amphiboly chapter. It was developed independently, as part of the Veriphysics philosophical framework and was applied across six domains before the obvious parallel with Kant’s chapter was even noticed. This convergence is significant because it was not engineered. Two diagnostics, developed from two different philosophical traditions separated by nearly three centuries, identify the same structural pattern: a key term operating in two distinguishable senses, with an unargued inference between them. That the 21st Century philosophical diagnostic developed from Aristotelian roots catches an error in the philosopher who developed the same diagnostic from his own separate framework is not irony. It is confirmation that the pattern is real, the problem is not uncommon, and the method for identifying amphibolous errors is robust.

The six amphibolies identified in Appendix A are downstream consequences of the master amphiboly, and the diagnostic that identifies each of them converges with the diagnostic Kant built independently for a different target.

The six papers that identified these amphibolies individually are:

• “Solving the Agrippan Trilemma: Triveritas and the Third Horn” (epistemology)

• “Solving the Scientific Demarcation Problem: Structurally Warranted Termination as the Foundation of Scientific Knowledge” (philosophy of science)

• “The Hard Problem of Consciousness: Triveritas and the Third Impossibility” (philosophy of mind)

• “Dissolving the Is-Ought Gap: Triveritas and the Normative Force of Truth” (ethics)

• “The Freedom of the Caused: Triveritas and the Resolution of the Free Will Problem” (metaphysics)

• “The Incompleteness of Incompleteness: Godel, Wigner, and the Triveritas” (foundations of mathematics)

Each paper applies the same diagnostic to a different key term. Each identifies an amphiboly of two definitions for the same concept. The method converges with Kant’s. The results are the elimination of six impossibilities that the post-Kantian tradition treated as permanent features of the intellectual landscape.

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VERIPHYSICS: The Refutation of Kant: The Fault in the Foundation and the Key to the Closed Door by Vox Day is now available for Amazon Kindle, KU, and audiobook.