Hans Vaihinger (1852–1933)

The Philosophy of As If is Vaihinger's major work and probably has primarily historical importance, as part of the 19th century rejection of rationalism and as a precursor to logical positivism later in the 20th century.

Vaihinger, like other positivists, takes his metaphysical cue from empiricist theories of knowledge, claiming that our access to reality is limited to "sensations", and then claims that everything beyond that, including scientific theories, ethical claims, and religion is show more built upon frameworks provided by "fictions". These fictions include both what are fairly explicit fictions, like the social contract, but also, maybe most interestingly, all general concepts, including fundamental concepts like space, time, and causality, ethical concepts like good and evil, and the very language of everyday life -- the general terms for everyday objects, like table, chair, bird, mammal, . . .

Unlike nominalists, Vaihinger, coming in the wake of Darwin and other evolutionary thinking, focuses equally on the usefulness of these fictions, as much as on their fictional status. Although he uses such terms as "error" and "mistake" in describing our reliance on such concepts, he distinguishes those errors as the attempts to describe reality via the concepts rather than use them to successfully cope, manipulate, and predict. Fictions are, for him, valuable or less valuable in so far as they provide this ability to cope with the world around us. Their value is proven over time, as they aid or fail to aid us in our interactions with the world and each other, much as biological traits prove more or less adaptive.

Like other German philosophers of the 19th century (this book was originally written thirty years before its first publication in 1911), Vaihinger takes pains both to tie his thought to and distinguish it from Kant. Like Kant, he adopts a "critical" position (he calls his theory "critical positivism"), denying knowledge of a reality of "things-in-themselves", and supposing our knowledge of what we call objective reality to be built upon a framework provided by ourselves. Unlike Kant, though, he claims no a priori status for that fundamental framework, rejecting Kant's rationalism. The justification for those concepts, and the basis for their change over time, lies in their pragmatic value (although he criticizes the pragmatists themselves for taking pragmatic criteria to provide criteria for "truth").

I think what Vaihinger is attempting really is to displace a conception of mind as primarily a knower to mind as a biological function -- whereas even for Kant, knowledge is an activity whose end is purely its own, knowledge for Vaihinger is in service to the requirements of a biological organism, analogous to digestion. He says:

"Just as the physical organism that breaks up the matter which it receives, mixes it with its own juices and so thus makes it suitable for assimilation, so the psyche envelopes the thing perceived with categories which it has developed out of itself." (p. 2)

There is something intriguing and even right in this way of naturalizing human thought, placing it in the context of the activity of a biological organism rather than a creature with privileged access to an independent reality. That conception is lacking, I think, in the later development of positivism, particularly logical positivism, which, while deflating the scope of metaphysics and philosophy in general, puts little or nothing in its place other than empirical science -- religion and ethics become strictly "meaningless" rather than, as for Vaihinger, the human strivings for means of coping with what life presents us.

All in all, I can't say that this is one of the must-read books in the history of philosophy. Its value is mainly as an interesting episode in the rejection of rationalism and the development of pragmatism and positivism. show less