The first review of THE REFUTATION OF KANT has been posted.
A refutation of Kant has to do one of two things: produce a counterexample the system cannot deal with, or locate the move inside the system that doesn’t actually argue for what it concludes. The second part of Day’s Veriphysics does both, and the interlocking of the two halves is what makes the book hard to answer because every defense of one wing concedes ground on the other.
The argument worth focusing on is the Master Amphiboly, and Vox is right about it. The “Thing-in-itself” runs two readings across a single word: that every cognizer is shaped by its apparatus, and that no feature of reality is in principle accessible to human cognition. The first is trivially true and Kant argues for it. The second is the load-bearing claim of the whole edifice and Kant never argues for it once, and instead moves to it under cover of the first. Once you see the slide, you can’t unsee it. Neptune is the cleanest empirical counterexample, though not the only one: Le Verrier worked an inverse problem through pure formalism and Galle confirmed the prediction within a degree, and the positron case is structurally identical: Dirac’s equation required it before anyone looked. If formal cognition cannot in principle identify features of reality not already given in experience, these events did not happen.
The mathematical half is harder to evade and simpler to state. Construction in Kant’s sense was tied to constructibility, which was already a problem with the irrationals in 1781 and decisively broken by Cantor a century later. The available retreat is to recast synthetic a priori as analytic, which costs the system the work it was built to do. The pincer is real and no version of Kant survives both jaws. One place worth pressing further is that the amphiboly used is portable. The slide from an apparatus-relative epistemic limit to an ontological claim about reality runs through Hume on causation, through Wittgenstein on private language, and through most of the strong-program science studies literature. Naming it generalizes the refutation.
Worth reading. Excellent work by Day
That is an intriguing observation about the potential portability of the Master Amphiboly. I shall have to examine the situation and see just how far the intellectual rot goes.