Introduction
Peirce's study of Kant, and later of Hegel, and Dewey's retention of much of Hegel's social philosophy are recognised idealist sources of pragmatism.Footnote 1 Here I shall argue that the transition from idealism to pragmatic realism was already achieved by Hegel. Hegel's Science of Logic is an exercise in ‘transcendental logic’, the study of the legitimate cognitive roles and use of our basic conceptual categories and principles. Kant's transcendental method centrally requires identifying sufficient grounds to justify a priori certain synthetic propositions (KdrV A216-8/B263-5). Central to Hegel's transformation of Kant's Critical philosophy are two key points. First, Hegel recognised that sufficient necessary conditions for the legitimate use of our a priori categories must include the legitimate use of empirical conceptions of spatio-temporal phenomena. Second, Hegel also recognised that determining the legitimate use of fundamental conceptions and principles (whether a priori or empirical) requires critical assessment of their content in order to determine whether, in what regards or to what extent they ‘can be true’ (WdL, GW 12:27.17-20, 28, 8-18), a task initiated in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit (Westphal Reference Westphal2009c). Accordingly, Hegel's Science of Logic is concerned, not only to articulate, explicate, order, integrate and inter-define our basic categories — whether traditional or new, whether metaphysical, natural-scientific, anthropological or teleological — but also to specify their scope of legitimate possible cognitive use within their proper domains and within specific kinds of cognitive claims, even though the Science of Logic prescinds from specific cognitive claims (WdL, GW 12:20) to focus upon the content, scope and proper domains of our categories and cognitive principles. For example, Hegel contends not only that ‘becoming’ is distinct from and yet integrates ‘being’ and ‘nothing’, he contends that a truthful quantitative infinity (das wahrhafte Unendliche) is found in infinitesimal analysis, in which a constant quantitative relation holds between vanishing quantities which tend towards zero — quantities which themselves are not and cannot be numbers (WdL, GW 21:254-5). To have real sense, infinitesimal calculus, too, requires corresponding concrete objects (WdL, GW 21:271, 282, 296, 299, cf. 300). Hegel's critical assessment of Cauchy's landmark ‘first reform’ of mathematical analysis (Wolff Reference Wolff1986) is central, not incidental, to his Science of Logic, which is Hegel's successor to Kant's ‘Systematic Presentation of all Synthetic Principles of Pure Understanding’ (KdrV A158/B187). That is Kant's title for Book 2 of his ‘Transcendental Analytic’; Kant expressly claims completeness: all synthetic principles.
Hegel tells us that his ‘Objective Logic’ corresponds in part to Kant's ‘Transcendental Logic’, which includes both the Transcendental Analytic and the Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason (WdL, GW 21:47.1-3). Although Hegel devotes some detailed critical remarks to various aspects of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, their significance requires further explication, to identify enthymemes undergirding both those remarks and Hegel's broader indications about relations between his Science of Logic and Kant's Critical philosophy. The ascription of enthymemes requires care, especially when the issues are complex and far-reaching and the texts intricate. My proposals will disregard various scholarly commonplaces (cf. Stewart 1996); I guide my analysis by Hegel's method of thorough, strictly internal critique, a method as challenging as it is rewarding, and far more specific and informative than one might expect.Footnote 2 Whatever exegetical questions my approach may raise but not yet answer are compensated by its philosophical rewards. Our primary concern is with relations between idealism and pragmatism, not only with what may be believed, said or written about their relations, even by their protagonists. Hegel's reanalysis of Kant's Critical philosophy is the first and still one of the most sophisticated and adequate pragmatic — specifically pragmatic realist — accounts of the a priori.
By his own methodological lights, Hegel owes us a detailed, thorough, sound and strictly internal critique of Kant's Critical philosophy. This Hegel did not publish, though I am convinced that Hegel had conducted such a critical assessment of Kant's Critical philosophy, and that if we delve into Kant's philosophy rigorously, we can confidently and accurately identify many sound points of Hegel's implicit, strictly internal critique of Kant's Critical philosophy. Hence my present aims are hermeneutical: To better identify what is philosophically at stake in Hegel's critical reassessment of Kant's Critical philosophy, and how Hegel's reassessment may contribute to or indeed constitute a sound pragmatism. Only with such guides in place can we undertake the exegetical and critical questions of whether, how or how well Hegel may have formulated or justified his views, or whether they contribute to the philosophical transformation I claim to identify in Hegel's core texts, and to advocate. To those who protest my departure from the received wisdom about Hegel's Science of Logic I reply that too few of Hegel's commentators have critically assessed their own natural ideas about knowledge and its objects in the ways undertaken in Hegel's 1807 Phenomenology, and too few have taken seriously Hegel's profound epistemological, conceptual and semantic achievements in that work, which retained its status as the proper introduction to Hegel's philosophical system, although it did not retain its status as Part One within that system (Fulda 1975). (I return to this point below, §4.6).
I begin with these suggestive correspondences between Hegel's Logic and Kant's first Critique: Hegel's ‘Doctrine of Being’ (Book 1) is his counterpart to Kant's ‘mathematical principles’, namely to Kant's ‘Axioms of Intuition’ and ‘Anticipations of Perception’; Hegel's ‘Doctrine of Essence’ (Book 2) is his counterpart to Kant's ‘Analogies of Experience’; Hegel's ‘Doctrine of the Concept’ (Book 3) — together with its preceding two Books — is his counterpart to Kant's ‘Postulates of Empirical Thought as Such’ and to Kant's ‘Amphiboly of Concepts of Reflection’, and also in part to Kant's ‘Transcendental Dialectic’. Hegel expressly faults Kant for relegating concepts of reflection to an Appendix to his Transcendental Logic (WdL, GW 12:19.34-38). Hegel's faulting Kant in this regard is closely linked — textually and analytically — to his faulting Kant for treating reason as ‘only dialectical’ and as ‘merely regulative’ (WdL, GW 12:23.12, .16-17). In §2 I present three important yet often neglected features of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason which, I contend, are key enthymemes undergirding Hegel's critical reconstruction of Kant's Critical philosophy. Next (§3) I summarise some perhaps unfamiliar features of the philosophical context within which Hegel begins to re-assess and reconstruct Kant's Transcendental Logic, and review (§4) several key steps in this direction Hegel undertook in the 1807 Phenomenology.Footnote 3
I Three Unjustly Neglected Features of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason
§2.1 Kant's Semantics of Singular Cognitive Reference.
Kant is famous for declaring in the Critique of Pure Reason that thoughts without (sensory) intuitions are empty, whilst intuitions without concepts are blind (KdrV A51/B75). This popular slogan is significant in two regards: one methodological, the other epistemological. The methodological point Kant took over from Tetens (Reference Tetens1777) is a specific sense of ‘realisieren' in connection with concepts, according to which to ‘realise' a concept is to show that objects corresponding to it can be given, that is, located and identified by us. Central to Kant's aim to demonstrate the objective validity of our a priori Categories — in contrast to Ideas of Reason — is to show that objects or events which instantiate the Categories can be identified within our experience (Westphal 2004: 133). This methodological use of the term ‘realise' is often reflected in Hegel's use of the same term (e.g., WdL, GW 12:101.1-10Footnote 4).
The second, epistemological point is simple to state, yet profoundly wide-ranging, although Kant left it to his readers to find it in the joint implications of two widely separated parts of the Critique of Pure Reason, the ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’ and the ‘Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection’.Footnote 5 Taken together, Kant's analyses in these chapters demonstrate that for any synthetic proposition to be so much as a candidate cognitive judgment or claim requires that the cognisant subject in question, the renowned S, must refer his or her claim, judgment or statement to some particular(s) S/he has localised within space and time.Footnote 6 To know any one spatio-temporal particular requires both correctly ascribing characteristics to it and locating it within space and time. These are mutually interdependent (proto-)cognitive achievements. Integrating them both is required for predication, not as a grammatical or judgmental form, but as a cognitive act: whether for knowledge of, or for error about, that individual. Only through singular sensory presentation and competent use of conceptions of ‘time’, ‘times’ (periods of time), ‘space’, ‘spaces’ (spatial regions), ‘individual’, and ‘individuation’ can we locate any particular object or event — together with (at least some of) its aspects, parts or characteristics — within space and time. Only through ostensive designation can we ascribe the predicates used in our (perhaps implicit) description or our judgmental classification(s) to any one, putatively known particular. Therefore, predication is required for singular, specifically cognitive reference to any sensed, spatio-temporal particular. Only through this kind of predication as a cognitive achievement can anyone specify (even approximately) the relevant spatio-temporal region (putatively) containing the particular one purports to designate ostensively — by specifying its occupant, the (putatively) known particular. Only in this way can one notice, specify or delimit which spatio-temporal region to designate, in order to grasp this (intended, ostended, presented) particular, and to ascribe to it any manifest characteristics, all of which is required to make any candidate cognitive judgment or claim (whether presumptive or accurate) about that particular.
Determinate, significant cognitive judgments or claims are thus possible for us only through conjoint spatio-temporal delimitation of, and predicative ascription of characteristics to, any particular(s). Recognising any particular object or event requires conceptually identifying both the region it occupies and at least some of its manifest characteristics. How precisely we may identify either the features of any particular or its region is a further issue; approximations suffice, provided they are sufficiently accurate to discriminate between particulars and amongst their locations and durations. Whilst not denigrating the importance of descriptions within philosophy of language (or mutatis mutandis within philosophy of mind), analyses of the meanings of our terms, or of the contents of our conceptions or descriptive phrases do not, because they cannot, suffice for epistemology. Only by analysing the cognitive dimensions of predication can we understand how the terms or conceptions we use in our judgments, claims, statements or assertions can have specifically cognitive significance, in addition to their linguistic meaning or conceptual content (intension). This Thesis is neutral about whether an epistemology is formulated in terms of concepts, statements, beliefs or judgments; it is also neutral about the analysis of conceptual content or linguistic meaning. To summarise this point I state the following
Thesis of Singular Cognitive Reference: Terms or phrases have meaning, and conceptions have classificatory content (intension), as predicates of possible judgments, although in non-formal, substantive domains no such statement has specifically cognitive significance unless and until it is incorporated into a candidate cognitive judgment which is referred to some actual particular(s) localised (at least putatively) by the presumptive judge (a cognisant subject, S) within space and time. Cognitive significance, so defined, is required for cognitive status (even as merely putative knowledge) in any non-formal, substantive domain.
This point about cognitive reference is necessary, though not sufficient, for knowledge, in part because it says nothing about justification. More importantly, this point about cognitive reference is necessary for either truth or falsehood, or for approximation or accuracy. Successful cognitive reference, as specified here, is necessary also to evaluate the truth, falsehood, or accuracy of a judgment, statement or claim, and it is necessary to assess its justification or justificatory status. ‘Cognitive reference’, so understood, is necessary for any substantive claim, judgment or statement to have cognitive status, as a putative truth (in contrast to an arbitrary utterance, sentence or descriptive phrase).
It may be helpful to note that Kant's Thesis of Singular Cognitive Reference accords with, though is more specific than, Frege's (Reference Frege1892a, Reference Frege1892b) tripartite distinction between concepts, particulars and ‘modes of presentation of something designated’ (»Arten des Gegebenseins eines Bezeichneten«), where Arten des Gegebenseins eines Bezeichneten are not restricted to conceptual content or linguistic intension, but may (as especially Evans Reference Evans1975 emphasised) be sensory or perceptual. ‘Modes of presentation’, on Frege's view, are ways in which particulars are individuated and presented to us. In mathematics uniqueness, existence or non-existence proofs may suffice as Arten des Gegebenseins; in the empirical domain they do not. Frege's classic example of modes of presentation, ‘The Morning Star’ and ‘The Evening Star’, indicate not only objects — or rather: an object, Venus — but also circumstances in which they (or rather: it) may be perceived by us from Earth. (Why in empirical knowledge Arten des Gegebenseins eines Bezeichneten are required, and neither ‘knowledge by description’ nor ‘knowledge by acquaintance’ suffice — nor are humanly possible — is indicated below, §4.1.)
§2.2 The Completeness of Kant's Transcendental Doctrine of the Power of Judgment.
As mentioned (§1), Kant makes some very strong claims on behalf of his transcendental doctrine of the power of judgment (transscendentale Doctrin der Urtheilskraft), including the following:
Distinctive of transcendental philosophy is this: that besides the rule (or rather, the universal condition for rules) which is given by the pure concept of the understanding, it can at once also indicate the instance to which it is to be applied. The reason for its advantage in this regard over all other substantive sciences (excepting mathematics) lies in this: that it concerns concepts which are to connect to their objects a priori, so that their objective validity cannot be demonstrated a posteriori, for that would leave their dignity entirely untouched; instead transcendental philosophy must at once indicate, in general though sufficient [sic] marks, the conditions under which objects corresponding to those concepts can be given, without which they would lack content, and thus would be mere logical forms and not pure concepts of the understanding.
This transcendental doctrine of the power of judgment contains two main chapters: the first treats of the sensible conditions under which alone pure concepts of the understanding can be used, i.e., the schematism of the pure understanding; the second however treats of the synthetic judgments which issue from pure concepts of the understanding under those conditions a priori and which underlie a priori all other cognitions, i.e., the principles of the pure understanding. (KdrV A135-6/B174-5; tr. krw)
Kant's chapter on the Schematism of the categories only considers temporal conditions; he noted in his marginalia that the Schematism also requires spatial conditions.Footnote 7 This suggests that Kant's ‘transcendental doctrine of the power of judgment’ in the Critique of Pure Reason is neither so complete nor so systematic as Kant claims it is and must be (KdrV A158/B187).
§2.3 The Integrity of Kant's Principles of Causal Judgment.
Paul Guyer demonstrated that Kant's three Analogies form a tightly integrated set of mutually supporting principles governing causal judgment.Footnote 8 Guyer's incisive finding has been widely neglected;Footnote 9 fortunately, it may be summarised briefly: Each causal principle defended in Kant's Analogies governs one kind of causal change: The persistence of substance through changes of its states, the causal change of states of any one substance, and the causal interchange between any two substances whereby they effect changes of state in each other. To judge that an observed event exhibits any one of these specific kinds of causal change requires distinguishing that change and its kind from the other two (causally possible) kinds. Causal judgments are fundamentally discriminatory. In brief, the empirical criterion of succession is lack of reversibility of the type of sequence of appearances produced by one or more objects; the empirical criterion of co-existence is the reversibility of the type of sequence of appearances produced by one or more objects. Determining that either co-existence or succession occurs requires determining that the other does not in the present case; both determinations require that we identify objects which persist through both the real and the apparent changes involved in the observed sequence of appearances. We cannot directly perceive time or space, and the mere order in which we happen to apprehend appearances does not of itself specify any objective order of objects or events. Consequently, the only condition under which we can determine which states of affairs precede — and which are concurrent with — which others is if there are enduring, perceptible particulars which causally interact, thereby producing changes of state in one another. Enduring perceptible, causally interacting particulars are necessary for us to identify specify spatial locations, to identify changes of place and to identify non-spatial changes objects undergo. To determine whether a change of appearances is a function of one object, previously in view, moving out of view when displaced by another, or instead is a function of one object rotating to reveal a different aspect (side or face), or instead is a function of one spatially stable object undergoing a non-spatial change of state, requires that we are able to, and do, identify places, changes of state and objects which change place or state, and that we are able to distinguish these different kinds of scenario in the actual case. To make any one such identification or distinction requires conjoint use of all three principles of causal judgment defined and defended in Kant's Analogies. None of the principles of causal judgment defended in the Analogies stands alone; they all stand together, or not at all.
Beck (Reference Beck1978: 149 n4) noted that Kant's model of causality in the Second Analogy is Leibnizian, but no one before Guyer realised the reason for this: Kant's Second Analogy only concerns causal sequences of changing states of any one individual substance. Only in the Third Analogy does Kant consider — and argue for — causal interaction between any two (or more) substances (Westphal 2004: §§36-38). Against Hume's merely correlational account of causal relations, Kant does defend — and justify — a transeunt account of causality, according to which a causally active power extends beyond some one physical substance to effect a change of state in another. Kant's ‘answer to Hume’ is not where commentators have insisted upon finding it! It is not in the Second Analogy, but in the conjoint implications of all three Analogies.Footnote 10 Furthermore, Kant is correct that Newton's Mechanics is not merely kinematical, but instead requires and empirically justifies a causal dynamics of transeunt gravitational forces.Footnote 11
II Live Issues from Hegel's Early Studies
§3.1 Physics and Proof A Priori.
It is often noted to Peirce's credit and as central to his pragmatism, that he was not only a philosopher but also a trained and practising scientist (e.g., Kuhn Reference Kuhn1996). Too little noticed (even by his devotés) is that Hegel, too, was well-versed and competent in mathematics and in exact sciences, unanimously elected in 1804 as Assayer to the Jena Mineralogical Society.Footnote 12 At his Gymnasium Hegel excelled in mathematics, and so commanded the background to understand and appreciate his instruction in physics in Tübingen by C. F. von Pfleiderer.Footnote 13 Pfleiderer criticised various attempts to prove physical laws by a priori or purely mathematical means. For example, he (1804: 120-47) showed that collision and rebound cannot be understood purely a priori on the basis of impenetrability and the law of inertia (as, e.g., Descartes purported); elasticity, angle of impact, shape and centre of gravity must all be taken into account. Likewise in hydrostatics he (1804: 211-3) criticised Newton's attempted a priori proof that all parts of a homogenous unmoved fluid exert equal pressure (Principia Bk. 2, Prop. 29). In connection with the inverse square law of gravitational attraction, Pfleiderer (Reference Pfleiderer1804: 334-6) again argued that this law cannot be understood or derived a priori by analogy with light by assuming gravitational rays. Pfleiderer's (1804: 160) criticisms of such purported a priori proofs reflects his clear awareness of the difference between mathematical relations and the determination of their instantiation in nature by any physical system, e.g., regarding uniform acceleration in free fall (Galileo). The need to determine carefully whether any mathematical function is, or which mathematical functions are, exhibited by natural phenomena also shows in Pfleiderer's (1804, e.g., 241-2) clear awareness of idealisations in laws and experimental conditions, a recurrent theme in his lectures. Pfleiderer (Reference Pfleiderer1804: 29, 114, 118, 184f., 432-41) often highlighted how the same kind of mathematical function is exhibited in apparently diverse phenomena, e.g., in levers, pendula, hydrostatics, hydrodynamics, collisions and the composition of forces. These mathematical analogies may be physically significant; so demonstrating requires carefully determining the boundary conditions and physical factors involved in these different physical phenomena. Pfleiderer devoted ample attention to Principia, Bk. II, the modern source book for applied mathematics in terrestrial physics (cf. Smith Reference Smith2002).
It is quite possible that Hegel learned to be suspicious of a priori proofs of laws of nature from Pfleiderer. At the least, Pfleiderer repeatedly and clearly reinforced the lesson that it is for empirical inquiry to determine which if any mathematical function is instantiated by a natural phenomenon, and why it is. Hegel would thus have been suspicious from the start of Kant's (unsuccessful) attempt to provide a priori foundations for the mathematical quantification of natural phenomena, and in particular, for Newton's laws of motion, in his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (‘MAdN’; Westphal Reference Westphal1998b).
§3.2 Transcendental Proof without Transcendental Idealism.
By 1802 Hegel realised that Kant had proven by transcendental analysis that we could not be self-conscious if we were not aware of a spatio-temporal world which presents us sufficient, humanly identifiable regularity and variety amongst appearances both to stimulate and to facilitate our comprehending objects and events under general conceptions in cognitive judgments. Hegel also realised that Transcendental Idealism cannot account for this condition's satisfaction (its being fulfilled by our actual world). Indeed, this sound analysis undermines Kant's main direct arguments for Transcendental Idealism. These insights enabled Hegel to defend the thesis of Kant's Refutation of Idealism, that ‘inner experience in general is only possible through outer experience in general’ (KdrV B278-9), to turn this thesis against Kant's Transcendental Idealism, and to defend this thesis on a (broadly, non-reductively) naturalistic basis (Westphal Reference Westphal1996).
§3.3 Conceptual Dichotomies or Continua?
Consequently, Hegel recognised that Kant's distinction in kind between the a priori and the a posteriori had to be rescinded, along with Kant's very strong modal claims about ‘apodeictic necessity’, and Hegel recognised that causal forces must be accepted as a fundamental feature of natural spatio-temporal objects and events (Westphal Reference Westphal1998b). Accordingly, by 1802 Hegel replaced the dichotomous distinctions in kind between the a priori and the a posteriori, and likewise between the analytic and the synthetic, with continua ranging between the a priori and the a posteriori, on the one hand, and between the analytic and the synthetic, on the other. This shift marks a major step towards a pragmatic account of the a priori, and indicates a central theme in Hegel's critical reassessment of Kant's Critical philosophy. These findings also provide Hegel's first (documentable) clues about how to disentangle Kant's transcendental method of analysis and proof from Kant's Transcendental Idealism. Prising them apart is a central achievement of Hegel's 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit.Footnote 14
III Five Central Points from the 1807 Phenomenology
In the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel argues for several substantive views which have direct methodological and substantive implications for his Science of Logic and philosophical Encyclopaedia, and for Hegel's pragmatic realist transformation of Kant's Transcendental Logic. Five are important here.
§4.1 Hegel's Defence of Kant's Cognitive Semantics.
Russell (1911) famously claimed we can have empirical knowledge either by aconceptual acquaintance with, or alternatively by description of, particulars. Less often noted is that the terms ‘knowledge’ and ‘know’ in Russell's famous article have no justified or tenable sense, because Russell's accounts presuppose rather than analyse our empirical knowledge of particulars, indeed, for reasons already established by Kant's Thesis of Singular Cognitive Reference. Hegel recognised that Kant's semantics of singular cognitive reference is independent of Kant's Transcendental Idealism. In ‘Sense Certainty’ (PhdG, ch. I) he justifies this semantics of cognitive reference through strictly internal critique of aconceptual knowledge by acquaintance and in the closing paragraphs also of purported knowledge merely by description (Westphal Reference Westphal2010a). Hegel argues that, in principle, however extensive or detailed, specificity of description (or analogously, specificity of conceptual content; intension) is insufficient in principle to secure unique reference: Whether a description is empty, determinate or ambiguous because it describes (and in that way purportedly refers to) no, to only one or to several particular objects or events is determined, not by that description alone, but also by what in the world exists or occurs. Hence in principle there can be no empirical knowledge simply by description (Westphal Reference Westphal2002-03). Within any non-formal, substantive domain, to make any specifically cognitive claim (whether true or false, vague or precise, justified or not) requires not only stating that claim, but also localising within space and time the particular(s) to which one's claim pertains, either directly or indirectly (as evidence, or via instruments). So doing is required for predication, not as a mere grammatical form, but as a cognitive achievement, which is required for making a claim to know something, and for assessing both the truth or accuracy and the justification of that claim.
Conversely, purported aconceptual knowledge by acquaintance can only be knowledge of some (physical or empirical) particular if one identifies that particular by locating it within one's surroundings and discriminating it from its surroundings, both spatio-temporally by identifying (at least approximately) the region it occupies and by identifying (at least approximately) some of its manifest characteristics. These two kinds of identification through discrimination or differentiation are mutually interdependent: We can identify the boundaries of the region a particular occupies only by identifying some of its manifest characteristics as filling the region delimited by that boundary, and we can identifying manifest characteristics as manifest characteristics of any one particular by discriminating (at least approximately) the spatio-temporal region that particular occupies (Westphal 2000a, 2002-03).
Accordingly, not only are causal judgments discriminatory, as Kant argued: The judgments by which we identify particulars — and identify them as objects of our putative cognitive claims or judgments — are discriminatory. Hegel's justification of the Thesis of Singular Cognitive Reference is altogether independent of issues in ontology about idealism or realism or sense data. This is a major virtue of Hegel's method of determinate negation via strictly internal critique of opposed views. Hegel shows in advance that the term ‘knowledge’ has no sound analysis, and no justified use, in Russell's (1911) famous article (Westphal Reference Westphal2010a). Furthermore, Hegel is correct that Kant's concepts of reflection, treated in the Amphiboly (KdrV A260-89/B316-46), are constitutively significant for transcendental reasons, insofar as effective, appropriate and justifiable use of the concepts of ‘identity’, ‘difference’, ‘compatibility’, ‘incompatibility’, ‘inner’, ‘outer’, ‘form’ and ‘matter’ (‘whole’ and ‘part’ should also be included), are required to identify and to differentiate (discriminate, individuate) any particular(s) about which we make even putative cognitive judgments (WdL, GW 12:19.34-38).Footnote 15 Very briefly, this is also why Frege was right to distinguish not only concepts and objects, but also Sinne as modes of presentation (above, §2.1).
§4.2 Contra Infallibilism, pro Concepts a priori.
The Thesis of Singular Cognitive Reference has the important methodological and epistemological implication that, within substantive (non-formal) domains, statements of mere logical possibilities have no cognitive status, and so cannot undermine the justification of cognitive claims which are otherwise well supported by relevant evidence. This provides strong, cogent justification for fallibilism about rational justification in all substantive domains (Westphal Reference Westphal2014). This is a central tenet of pragmatism.
The Thesis of Singular Cognitive Reference also entails that the conceptions of ‘unity’, ‘plurality’, ‘object’, ‘differentiation’, ‘time’, ‘times’, ‘space’, ‘spaces’ and ‘I’ are a priori, insofar as their possession and competent use is required to localise any spatio-temporal particulars so as to be able to learn or to define any empirical conception. Hegel argues for the a priori status of these and other related conceptions by strictly internal critique and reductio of the concept-empiricist account of them. Though the classical American Pragmatists eschewed the a priori, C. I. Lewis (Reference Lewis1929), who understood his Kant much better than they, recognised that and argued for the thesis that our conceptual classifications are in important regards always a priori, insofar as they include not only the concepts just indicated, but also specific descriptive content (intension) which can never be exhaustively specified or justified by empiricist means (see Westphal Reference Westphal2010b).
§4.3 Binding Problems.
The discriminatory character of perceptual judgments by which we identify, individuate and locate particulars in our surroundings is underscored in Hegel's brilliant internal critique of Hume's analysis ‘Of scepticism with regard to the senses’ (Treatise 1.4.2) in ‘Perception’ (PhdG, ch. II; Westphal Reference Westphal1998a). Locke (Essay 1.4.18) claimed we obtain the concept ‘substance’ by an ‘inadvertency’, when we mistake a group of frequently co-occurring sensed qualities for some one thing. Hume realised that concept empiricists must explain how we can construct the concept ‘body’ (or: physical particular), since it is — by the standards of concept empiricism — an utter fiction: How is Locke's ‘inadvertency’ even psychologically possible, on empiricist principles? Examining this phenomenon led Hume to confront what is now called the Binding Problem. This problem arises at two levels. First:
Within our total current, continuing sensory field, how are we able to select and group together any plurality of sensations as sensations of any one physical particular amongst those several surrounding us?
This question arises both synchronically and diachronically; it also arises within each sensory modality and across our sensory modalities. The second level is intellectual:
How are we able to recognise various sensed qualities or features as being those of any one physical particular (whether object, event or process), distinct from any others in our surroundings?
Kant addressed these questions with his doctrines of perceptual and judgmental synthesis. Hegel exploited Hume's exacting analysis to demonstrate four important results:
1. The conception ‘physical particular’ is a priori (as Hume himself all but states).
2. The relation ‘thing/property’ is neither reducible to, nor replaceable by, the relations ‘one/many’, ‘set/member’, ‘part/whole’ nor ‘product/ingredient’.
3. The conception ‘physical object’ integrates the opposed quantitative sub-concepts ‘unity’ and ‘plurality’ or ‘number’.
4. Competent use of the conception ‘physical object’ requires competent use of the conception ‘cause’, indeed, as a central factor in solving the binding problems.
All of these results Hegel justified without appeal to Transcendental Idealism, nor to any comparable view (Westphal Reference Westphal1998a, Reference Westphal2009b). The third result directly anticipates a finding Hegel explicates in the Science of Logic (GW 11:258-90, cf. Wolff Reference Wolff2009b), that the opposed conceptions of reflection ‘unity’ and ‘diversity’ must and can only be used conjointly in identifying any concrete object, event, structure or phenomenon, so that the dialectical relation between these quantitative conceptions does and must have positive constitutive significance.Footnote 16 Hegel's results also accord with Lewis's (1929) approach to the a priori status and use of our concepts and classifications (see Westphal Reference Westphal2015b).
§4.4 Causal Realism.
In ‘Force and Understanding’ (PhdG, ch. III), Hegel uses the Thesis of Singular Cognitive Reference (inter alia) to rebut empiricist scepticism about causal powers, to undergird Newton's Rule 4 of Experimental Philosophy and to defend Newton's causal realism about gravitational force (Westphal Reference Westphal2014a, Reference Westphal2015b).Footnote 17 In ‘Self-Consciousness’ (PhdG, ch. IV), Hegel uses his semantics of singular cognitive reference to argue that global perceptual scepticism (whether Pyrrhonian, Cartesian, Empiricist or contemporary) is based upon mere logical possibilities, none of which has any cognitive standing within the non-formal, substantive domain of empirical knowledge because none can be referred to any localised particulars. In principle global perceptual ‘sceptical hypotheses’ are cognitively idle transcendent speculations, coupled with self-alienation from one's own share in human cognition (Westphal 2011). The fact that, as a matter of deductive logic alone, all of our perceptual beliefs could have just the contents they do and yet all be false (e.g., Stroud 1994: 241-2, 245), is no ground for scepticism, but rather for distinguishing between strictly formal domains and the substantive domain of empirical knowledge, within which cognitive justification requires more than deductive logic and a host of claims merely about ‘appearances’ — iff ‘appearances’ are presumed to be distinct from the objects, events and people surrounding us, as global perceptual sceptical hypotheses require. Global sceptical hypotheses cannot be ‘realised’, in Kant's and Teten's sense of the term. (This insight also underlies O. K. Bouwsma's (Reference Bouwsma1949) brilliant critical exposé of Cartesian scepticism.)
In ‘Force and Understanding’ Hegel criticises a representative range of such presumptive global distinctions between mere appearances to us and reality, showing that these distinctions are epistemologists’ own creations, all of which are cognitively vacuous because they fail to satisfy the requirements of the semantics of singular cognitive reference. Positively, Hegel argues that philosophical theory of knowledge must take the special sciences into very close consideration (Westphal Reference Westphal2015b). He argues for this claim en detail in ‘Observing Reason’ (PhdG, chapter VA), by arguing (inter alia) that the empirical findings of the special sciences are very much intellectual and methodological achievements which belie both empiricism and rationalism — and both historia and scientia — and which exhibit and substantiate human reason's power to know nature, in part by identifying genuine natural kinds, species and laws of nature (Ferrini Reference Ferrini2007, Reference Ferrini2009b). All of these findings are highlighted in Hegel's concluding chapter, ‘Absolute Knowing’, not least because they are central to the substance and to the method of Hegel's Science of Logic (de Laurentiis Reference de Laurentiis2009, Collins Reference Collins2012).
§4.5 Pragmatic Mastery.
In the first part of ‘Self-Consciousness’, ‘Self-Sufficiency and Self-Insufficiency of Self-Consciousness’, Hegel defends (in effect) the conclusion of Kant's Refutation of Idealism, that we human beings can only be self-conscious by distinguishing ourselves from our physical surroundings, by strictly internal critique of the thesis that each or any individual constitutes the world of which s/he is aware (Westphal Reference Westphal2009d, 2011). In these several regards Hegel continues, extends and deepens Kant's profound anti-Cartesian revolt (Westphal Reference Westphal2007), in part by justifying these results without appeal to Transcendental Idealism, nor to any similar view (Westphal Reference Westphal2009a, Reference Westphal2009b, Reference Westphal2011a). Instead, Hegel argues by reductio that one can be solely self-conscious in being conscious of an object only in the case of beholding one's own artefacts, though producing artefacts requires figuring out how to cope with and transform independent natural materials. This is an important first lesson in how theoretical reason is rooted in practical reason, and how practical reason is rooted in our bodily interactions with our natural (and social) surroundings (Westphal Reference Westphal2009d, Reference Westphal2011a). This fundamental theme Hegel shares with Classical Pragmatists; indeed, the designation comes from pragma — practices — and their primacy in understanding human thought, knowledge, language and their roots in purposive action, which is rooted in our physiological and psychological human nature, and in the natural environs we inhabit.
§4.6 Objective Thought and Worldly Structure.
These specifics about the Phenomenology are crucial to understanding the character, aims and method of Hegel's Science of Logic. Throughout his career, and not withstanding its various other introductions, Hegel stressed that the 1807 Phenomenology is the sole ‘deduction’, ‘justification’ and ‘proof’ of the starting point of the Science of Logic, centrally because it alone justifies our cognitive competence within philosophy.Footnote 18 In particular, the 1807 Phenomenology alone justifies Hegel's initial premiss that the Science of Logic can and does examine ‘objective determinations of thought’ (objektive Denkbestimmungen), which are fundamental structures of things — their constitutive species, characteristics and differentia — which we comprehend through genuine conceptions. Accordingly, the subject matter of the Science of Logic is not individual things (Dinge), but rather the fundamental concept or the constitutive structure of kinds of things, which Hegel designates as their ‘Sache’.Footnote 19
That we are cognitively competent to comprehend and analyse Sachen (in this sense) is the central premiss of Hegel's Science of Logic which is justified by the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit. This premiss is justified by the Phenomenology in large measure by re-analysing the scope and character of knowledge within the special sciences. Hegel's concern with the scope and character of knowledge within the special sciences is prominent throughout the Science of Logic as well. In particular, central to the revisions of the second edition of the ‘Doctrine of Being’ (Book 1) are extensive analyses of infinitesimal calculus (Wolff Reference Wolff1986Footnote 20) and of the intricate relations between quantity and quality (Ferrini Reference Ferrini1988, Ferrini Reference Ferrini1991-92). These issues are central to the proper use — and to the proper understanding and assessment of the proper use — of quantification in the special sciences. Hegel treats them in the Science of Logic under the heading ‘measure’, extensively revised in the second edition (Ferrini Reference Ferrini1988, Reference Ferrini1991-92), plainly in anticipation of the more thorough and concrete re-analysis of their use in the Philosophy of Nature, in connection with rational physics, i.e., the conceptual foundations of physical science (Westphal 2008), e.g., the centre of gravity of a system of bodies (‘Absolute Mechanism’, WdL, GW 12:143.1-15), or ‘chemism' (WdL, GW 12:148-152; Burbidge Reference Burbidge1996).
V Pragmatic Realism & Natural Science
Today's neopragmatists hold ontology captive to their preferred meta-language, and — like rather too many others — accordingly tend to reduce ‘scientific theories’ to thumb-nail sketches of their main principles. The inevitable result of these ‘moves’ is to make it difficult — especially in the wake of Kuhn and Rorty — to distinguish scientific theories from story telling. To the contrary,
... in the choice of these man-made formulas [viz., quantitative laws of nature] we can not be capricious with impunity any more than we can be capricious on the commonsense practical level. We must find a theory that will work; and that means something extremely difficult; for our theory must mediate between all previous truths and certain new experiences. It must derange common sense and previous belief as little as possible, and it must lead to some sensible terminus or other that can be verified exactly. To ‘work’ means both these things; and the squeeze is so tight that there is little loose play for any hypothesis. Our theories are wedged and controlled as nothing else is.
This is very tough-minded talk from that reputedly tender-hearted philosopher, William James (Reference James1975: 104); it should be taken seriously, especially so by anti- and irrealists about the objects of empirical knowledge, especially in the sciences. The difficulty in devising a theory that ‘works’, as James put it, lies in devising a quantitative theory of natural regularities, a theory that ‘can be verified exactly’ and that is more than simply a device for calculating observations. The mathematical formulae must describe not only possible, but plausible natural means or mechanisms which produce the observed phenomena. The use of mathematics to discover and to describe natural regularities was and is central to modern science, and mathematical analysis was and is used (with methodological and more general rational or ‘metaphysical’ considerations playing a supporting role) to determine the very terms or factors into which to analyse some complex natural phenomenon. The use and centrality of mathematics in modern science was misunderstood by empiricists and rationalists alike, as well as by Kant, and too often is still misunderstood. In discussing the relevance of the almost purely mathematical framework Newton develops in Principia Books I and II to his ‘system of the world’ (Book III), De Gandt (Reference De Gandt1995: 267) observes: ‘The solidity of the inductive fabric is due to its mathematical framework, which makes it possible to establish an extremely tight network in which observation and theory advance on and regulate each other’. Borrowing terminology from logical empiricism, this may suggest that Newton's mathematics forms the ‘correspondence rules’ between his theoretical and observational language. That is too glib. Newton's mathematical framework is constitutive for his theoretical postulates and, as De Gandt explains, for the mutual regulation of theory and observation. This mutual regulation defies the fundamentally deductivist model of rationality common to empiricism, rationalism, logical positivism and falsificationism. This mutual regulation is fundamentally pragmatic — in the broadly naturalistic, realistic sense of ‘pragmatism’ found in classical American philosophy.Footnote 21
Interim Conclusions
By disentangling Kant's decisive Thesis of Singular Cognitive Reference from Kant's Transcendental Idealism, by using that thesis to justify fallibilism within all non-formal domains, including empirical inquiry as well as philosophy, by arguing that human thought is fundamentally rooted in human action and that both are rooted in our concretely practical living in the world with one another, and by arguing in detail that epistemology must take actual empirical inquiries into very close philosophical consideration Hegel already — indeed, by 1807 in the Phenomenology of Spirit — pioneered pragmatic realism. However, by disentangling Kant's transcendental methods of analysis and proof from Kant's Transcendental Idealism, Hegel recast these powerful methods for pragmatic realism, including powerful transcendental arguments for externalism about mental content, linguistic meaning and cognitive justification. Amongst the pragmatists, such considerations were developed only by C. I. Lewis (Reference Lewis1929) and F. L. Will (Reference Will1997: 1-18).Footnote 22
Notes
Please note that Hegel's Gesammelte Werke is cited as ‘GW’ by volume:page.line numbers. Individual works are indicated by their German initials. The forthcoming The Phenomenology of Spirit translated by T. Pinkard is cited by consecutive paragraph numbers (¶) correctly provided by the translator. Kant's Gesammelte Schriften is cited as ‘GS’ by volume:page numbers. Individual works are cited by their German initials. The Collected Papers of Charles Saunders Peirce is designated ‘CP’, cited by volume:¶. Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition is designated ‘Writings’.
