The Philosophy of 'as If ' by Hans Vaihinger
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Scaffolding Around Reality

Although it is anchored in 19th century issues and language (especially archaic psychological language), The Philosophy of As If is still worthwhile as both an historical document and an important contribution to the philosophy of inquiry. Vaihinger’s central thesis is simple but profoundly so, namely that “… the object of the world of ideas as a whole is not the portrayal of reality — this would be an utterly impossible task — but rather to provide us with an instrument for finding our way about more easily in this world.” That is, what we call knowledge is not a description of Reality but is merely the scaffolding we erect around Reality in order to survive in it.

Although the book was first published in 1911, its content was formulated in the 1870’s. This is contemporaneous with the work of C.S Peirce in the United States on essentially the same subject matter. And although Vaihinger is keen to distinguish his views from what he knew of American Pragmatists (probably only James and Dewey), I think he would have recognised the congruence of his own thoughts with those of Peirce had he been aware of them. In particular, both men accepted Kant’s analysis that the thing-in-itself, or what we casually call Reality, is undiscoverable even through rigorous scientific inquiry. The statement “Fictions are never verifiable, for they are hypotheses which are known to be false, but which are employed because of their utility,” could have been made by either man (it is in fact Vaihinger).

The intellectual connection between Vaihinger and Peirce is demonstrated in many ways but most acutely in their views on the constitution of the ideal as a presumption of scientific inquiry, and in the importance of creative imagination in scientific development. For both, the concept of the ideal was neither a hypothesis nor an existent. Rather it was a logically necessary condition of inquiry, “a practical fiction,” analogous to the concept of God as the ‘guarantor’ of medieval theology. The ideal, unlike the guarantor however, is determined by the purpose of the inquiry itself and is therefore neither stable nor a matter of any sort of philosophical or religious dogma. Perhaps their similar religious educations account for the similarity of their conclusions (Peirce’s mother was a Protestant mystic; Vaihinger’s father was a pastor).

Both Peirce and Vaihinger put a good deal of stress on the creative imagination in inquiry. In fact both insist that there is a reputable logic that is neither deductive nor inductive. Peirce called this the logic of ‘abduction’ which resembles that of Kantian transcendental deduction. Vaihinger sees this same logic as a “synthesis of induction and deduction,” the result of which he calls “artifices.” As with Peirce these artifices (Peirce calls them hypotheses but this is only a matter of conflicting vocabulary) originate in a manner that can’t be accounted for by either inductive or deductive rules alone. They are imagined in some distinctive way. For Vaihinger they are “Stimulated by the outer world, [but] the mind discovers the store of contrivances that lie hidden within itself.”

Despite these similarities, however, I think Vaihinger is both broader and deeper than Peirce. In the first place Vaihinger’s philosophy is not just about scientific inquiry but of inquiry in general from mathematics to law and even to literature. In this he anticipates Wittgenstein in all but the terminology he uses. Unlike Peirce, Vaihinger was never a student of language. He nevertheless made an important point about language (using the term ‘discursive thinking’) that Peirce never made explicitly, namely that it has no reliable relation to reality. This is the whole basis for his fundamental thesis. Language can tell us nothing about Reality despite its usefulness which is

“… exactly what Kant so laboriously demonstrated in his theory of cognition, namely that it is utterly impossible to attain knowledge of the world, not because our thought is too narrowly circumscribed — this is a dogmatic and erroneous interpretation — but because knowledge is always in the form of categories and these, in the last analysis, are only analogical apperceptions.”

And Vaihinger takes this a step further. Not only is language unreliably connected with Reality, it is inevitably contradictory to Reality. That is to say, whatever terms we might use to describe those things that are not words will be wrong. No fictions, even scientific ones, accurately ‘cut the world at its joints.’ As he says, “Rigidly applied, such fictions lead to contradictions with reality.” But it is this very characteristic that is essential for the progress of science. It is when the inherent contradictions become clear - instantaneous force at a distance in Newtonian physics, or the violation of Einsteinian relativity by quantum entanglement for example - that science recognises the need for new research. Peirce had a similar view but applied it only to statistical error in empirical findings.

Vaihinger is also more than an intellectual bridge between Kant and 20th century philosophy, or between German Idealism and American Pragmatism. He is also an example of the significance of medieval philosophy in modern thought. For example, despite the approximately one million words Thomas Aquinas spent on his Theo-philosophy, he was well aware that absolutely nothing he said about God could be known without what he called revelation, and that even then this knowledge was distorted by the means necessary to convey it - human language.

Since the Enlightenment we have faced exactly the same situation with what we term Reality. Except that we now recognise that divine revelation is merely another fiction claiming a privilege it doesn’t warrant, and that there is no evidence that Reality is interested in revealing itself anyway. The Thomistic tradition of ‘negative theology’ - whatever we think God is, he is not that - is as relevant now as it was in the 13th century and might assist more than a few scientists to get over themselves as the new priests providing access to the Absolute.

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