15.15. From Kantian Epistemology to DGB 'Dialectical Rational-Empiricism' (via Vaihinger)

Man is intelligently designed -- just like every other animal that walks on, swims on, and/or flies over top of, the face of the earth. Even plants are intelligently designed.

Now, whether you want to say that 'God' intelligently designed us, or 'Nature' intelligently designed us, or some other species from a different planet intelligently designed us, or none of the above -- that is up to you. I will say I am an 'agnostic' here -- I don't know. However, it might be argued -- and it has been argued (Vaihinger, the philosophy of 'as if', 1911) -- that sometimes man can utilize 'functional fictions' or 'fictional constructs' (my words, not his) in ways that 'work for him' and/or otherwise 'brighten up his day' even though they may not be 'totally epistemologically accurate', but in effect, do him no harm, relative to their amount of epistemological error. Indeed, if you want to push this point furhter, it could be easily argued that every human construct or concept contains a certain elsement of error or 'fictional component'.

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Hans Vaihinger
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In Philosophie des Als Ob (As If), he (Vaihinger) argued that human beings can never really know the underlying reality of the world, and that as a result we construct systems of thought and then assume that these match reality: we behave "as if" the world matches our models. In particular, he used examples from the physical sciences, such as protons, electrons, and electromagnetic waves. None of these phenomena have been observed directly, but science pretends that they exist, and uses observations made on these assumptions to create new and better constructs.

This philosophy, though, is wider than just science. One can never be sure that the world will still exist tomorrow, but we usually assume that it does. Alfred Adler, the founder of Individual Psychology, was profoundly influenced by Vaihinger's theory of fictions, incorporating the idea of psychological fictions into his personality construct of a fictional final goal.

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I find it most interesting that Vaihinger was a Kantian scholar. Indeed, I like Vaiinger's interpretation and/or modification of Kant's epistemology better than anything else I have come across. It fits fairly closely with my General Semantic (Korzybski, Hayakawa...) background.

It could be argued -- and I will hang onto this argument for the time being -- that 'God' is one of these types of 'fictional or mythological constructs' that can be useful and important to man -- as long as he is not using the name 'God' to terrorize or poision his own life, and/or the life of others.

I will use a 'pantheistic' construct (see my blogsite on religion, spirituality, and pantheism...) here -- specifically 'God/Nature' or 'God-Nature' -- to function in my writing and my philosophy as 'The Creator' behind man's -- and lifes's 'intelligent design'.

Let's go back to Kant and Vaihinger. I don't mind using Kant's concept/construct of 'noumenal world' as long as it is used in a similar fashion to Vaihinger's philosophy of 'As If'. In other words, Kant's construct of 'noumenal world' becomes an idealistic, metaphysical epistemological concept that is more closely aligned to Vaihinger's Philosophy of 'As If' than anything that Plato wrote on 'Ideal Forms'.

This is an important distinction. In other words, according to DGB's (that's me) rendition of Kant, we live in two worlds: 1. our subjective, phenomenal world of 'as if'; and 2. our objective, noumenal world that we will never know perfectly but we can still get to know better and better through a better and better use of our sensory perceptions and our subjective, phenomenal world of 'as if' that is based on partly 'factual' and partly 'fictional' -- constructs. Sometimes, it doesn't matter how 'fictional' our constructs are; at other times it may be a life and death matter.

Based on this DGB rendition of Kantian epistemology, we have something to workd with -- epistemologically speaking -- and do not have to panic and commit 'epistemological suicide'.

Let us leave it here for now.

dgb, Dec. 30th, 2007.