A detailed book review of The Refutation of Kant, which was never on my original list of priorities for Veriphysics, but came out of my attempt to distinguish it from the most significant previous philosophies, and, of course, Enlightenment philosophy.
“The Refutation of Kant” is an important addition to philosophical study. It has a more immediate and direct impact if the reader refers to the summary in Chapter 10, then begins again. Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” was a serious work of philosophy, aimed to settle the disputes between rationalism and empiricism by transcending both. The subtle flaw at the base, ignored by modern mathematics and physics, but one that stymied or redirected research in other fields, was the amphiboly, the deliberate use of one term for two separate meanings, which damaged this transcendence.
The key term in Kant’s philosophy is the “thing-in-itself.” The thing, an object or occurrence, can be investigated by phenomena means (observe, measure), but the “thing-in-itself” is treated separately. Kant treats it as a single category: the noumenal realm, everything that is not phenomenal, all of it equally and uniformly inaccessible to human cognition. The treatment is uniform. The term is not. It is composed of two different readings, and the switch between the two is the problematic amphiboly. Reading A (the restricted reading): Some features of reality are inaccessible to a given cognitive apparatus because that apparatus imposes structure on experience that cannot be subtracted out by means available to that apparatus. We cannot perceive without perceptual organs. For example, try seeing heat without an infrared camera. The noumenal bounds can be found and reduced by better measurement – it becomes a question of limits. Reading B (the full reading) carries different meaning: No features of “reality-as-it-actually-is” are accessible to human cognition. We are permanently sealed inside the phenomenal envelope, and everything we experience is structured by our own contribution to that experience. You can’t know heat because you can’t, infrared camera notwithstanding. Both readings are used interchangeably, though the meanings and outcomes are vastly different.
Refuting this amphiboly is time-consuming, from the need to understand the text and logic used to construct it. Take the time to step through this, and follow the attributes to Kant’s own words in the original documents, as this refutes the philosopher’s ideas as written, not any expansion or defense of them written later. Some of the mathematical refutations were already in use as the time of the first edition (1781), as in the differential and integral calculi of Newton and Leibnitz. This part was far easier to follow, as I’ve used irrational and imaginary numbers extensively. This electronic review would be impossible without understanding and applying concepts that under Kant’s philosophy would be relegated to the unknowable “thing-of-itself.”
There is much of good use in Kant’s philosophy, but a significant basic premise was refuted. What this means is not discarding a formidable body of work, but re-examining what now opens up: without the amphiboly being used to limit understanding of the “thing-in-itself,” scientists are now freed to use caution and due humility to ask questions and create concepts about things shunted off for 240 years, and investigate with new and different measurement methods to examine phenomena they were essentially told not to look at.
This is the scientific method as best applied: ask a question, hypothesize, and experiment. If the answer is “no,” one question can be set aside, and something different or unusual may be tried instead, to discover more about a thing or a feature of the universe.
On a related note, it only seemed fair to turn things around and permit the major philosophical traditions to analyze the Triveritas and see if it held up from their various perspectives, which I did in this philosophical paper:
The logical, mathematical, and empirical proofs of the Triveritas establish its superiority from within its own framework. This paper tests it from outside. Seventeen major traditions in Western and Eastern epistemology are examined, each asked to evaluate the Triveritas using only its own preferred method. Each tradition confirms the component it is equipped to evaluate. No tradition’s method, honestly applied, refutes any dimension of the Triveritas. No tradition confirms the whole. This paper does not claim to establish the necessity or superiority of the triple conjunction; those results are established by the three internal proofs. It establishes a different and complementary result: systematic compatibility. The Triveritas is compatible with every major epistemological tradition examined across both the Western and Eastern canons, confirmed by each on the dimension each is equipped to assess, and contradicted by none. The inclusion of five Eastern traditions, developed independently of the Greek philosophical heritage, strengthens the result: the compatibility is not an artifact of a shared intellectual lineage.
The paper not only underlines the core strength of the Triveritas, but also illustrates the significance of Veriphysics by demonstrating how it is materially distinct from any of the preceding philosophical traditions. I understand that reading philosophy at this depth is not on the short list for most readers of this blog, but if you want to understand the foundations of the modern concept of truth and why they are not actually capable of supporting what is asserted, The Refutation of Kant is a good place to start.