The Philosophy of 'As If'

Hans Vaihinger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000385885
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Economía
• Subtopic: Historia económica

Hans Vaihinger (1852–1933) was an important and fascinating figure in German philosophy in the early twentieth century, founding the well-known journal Kant-Studien. Yet he was overshadowed by the burgeoning movements of phenomenology and analytical philosophy, as well as hostility towards his work because of his defense of Jewish scholars in a Germany controlled by Nazism.

However, it is widely acknowledged today that The Philosophy of 'As If ' is a philosophical masterwork. Vaihinger argues that in the face of an overwhelmingly complex world, we produce a simpler set of ideas, or idealizations, that help us negotiate it. When cast as fictions, such ideas provide an easier and more useful way to think about certain subjects, from mathematics and physics to law and morality, than would the truth in all its complexity. Even in science, he wrote, we must proceed "as if " a material world exists independently of perceiving subjects; in behaviour, we must act "as if " ethical certainty were possible; in religion, we must believe "as if" there were a God. He also explores the role of fictions in the history of philosophy, going back to the ancient Greeks and the work of Leibniz, Adam Smith and Bentham.

The Philosophy of 'As If' was a powerful influence on the emerging philosophical movement of pragmatism and was groundbreaking in its anticipation of the central role that model-building and simulation would come to play in the human sciences.

This Routledge Classics edition includes a new foreword by Michael A. Rosenthal, which provides a fascinating and important background to Vaihinger's life and the legacy of The Philosophy of 'As If'.

Part 1
Basic Principles

General Introductory Remarks on Fictional Constructs

The normal and most natural methods of thought always have as their primary object the formation of those particular apperceptions that are of a final and definitive character; and only such ideational constructs are formed as can be shown to correspond to some kind of reality. It is in fact the essential object of science to develop only such ideas as have an objective correlate and to eliminate all admixture of the subjective.

Such a task is, however, not easily accomplished, for many difficulties are encountered. The ideal, in which the world of ideas consists exclusively of congruous, well-ordered and non-contradictory constructs is only to be attained slowly and with difficulty. The way to this ideal is through methodology.

The first and the natural task of methodology is to suggest in what direction representations possessed of real validity are to be sought.

Our natural tendency is to adjust all our representations, to test them by comparison with reality, and to render them free from contradiction. This is the most natural and obvious method, and it appears to be the only way of advancing a scientific theory of knowledge. This would hold true even if our mental constructs were direct reflections of reality. But the customary modes and results of thought already contain so many subjective and fictional elements that it is not surprising if thought also strikes out along other lines. It must be remembered that the object of the world of ideas as a whole is not the portrayal of reality—this would be an utterly impossible task—but rather to provide us with an instrument for finding our way about more easily in this world. Subjective processes of thought inhere in the entire structure of cosmic phenomena. They represent the highest and ultimate results of organic development, and the world of ideas is the fine flower of the whole cosmic process; but for that very reason it is not a copy of it in the ordinary sense. Logical processes are a part of the cosmic process and have as their more immediate object the preservation and enrichment of the life of organisms; they should serve as instruments for enabling them to attain to a more complete life; they serve as intermediaries between living beings. The world of ideas is an edifice well calculated to fulfil this purpose; but to regard it for that reason as a copy is to indulge in a hasty and unjustifiable comparison. Not even elementary sensations are copies of reality; they are rather mere gauges for measuring the changes in reality.

Before entering on our task it is necessary to make a distinction that will subsequently assume considerable importance. Ideational constructs are in the strict sense of the term real fictions when they are not only in contradiction with reality but self-contradictory in themselves; the concept of the atom, for example, or the “Ding an sich.” To be distinguished from these are constructs which only contradict reality as given, or deviate from it, but are not in themselves self-contradictory (e.g. artificial classes). The latter might be called half-fictions or semi-fictions. These types are not sharply divided from one another but are connected by transitions. Thought begins with slight initial deviations from reality (half-fictions), and, becoming bolder and bolder, ends by operating with constructs that are not only opposed to the facts but are self-contradictory.

A

The Enumeration and Division of Scientific Fictions

Chapter I Artificial Classification

The most widely used of those “provisional methods” which we have called “semi-fictions” is artificial classification. The ultimately valid construct corresponding to it, and eventually to take its place, is the natural system. All cosmic objects present special forms which are theoretically expressed in some classification, and when this specification corresponds with reality in every respect then it is a natural system. The natural system is in itself one of the most complicated problems of philosophy and of natural science, and from it arises the vital question of the nature of species.

A natural system is one in which entities are arranged according to the principles apparently followed by nature in their development. To put it briefly, the natural system of classification must be a copy corresponding to the actual origins and the mutual relationship of all things. This is the goal of science and any direct method must work straight towards it.

It is at this point that all the considerations so far advanced are justified. The material at our disposal puts so many formidable obstacles in the direct path that the logical function strikes out along by-ways. It makes use of an artifice; it creates artificial classes. Now what does this mean? In our psychological terminology it means that it provisionally substitutes for the correct constructs others which do not directly correspond to reality. It then operates with these fictional classes as if they were real ones. We can here only draw attention to the well-known fact that the artificial and fictive classification always selects from a whole group of characters some one that is particularly prominent, and bases its division upon this without paying any attention to the way in which these characters are naturally determined by one another. These provisional classificatory aids not only serve the practical purpose of permitting objects to be arranged and brought under definite rubrics, and provide at the same time a sort of mnemonic device, but they also possess a theoretical value, in so far as they perform a heuristic service by preparing for and facilitating the discovery of a natural system. Artificial systems are generally based on these concepts of species, which themselves only bring a superficial order provisionally into the confused mass of phenomena.

Heuristic methods based upon dichotomy, etc. are but special sub-divisions of this artificial method of grouping. The artificial classifications, however, themselves follow in certain essential respects another theory than the natural one; i.e. the methodological rules which appertain to them and which determine their applicability are clearly of a different nature from those that hold for natural classification. These rules relate particularly to the prevention of the mistakes that necessarily spring from artificial divisions: mistakes which are due not only to the fact that the natural arrangement of phenomena cannot be forced into this artificial edifice and does not coincide with it, but also to the fact that through this artificial system impossible sub-divisions arise which cannot exist in actual reality.

As examples we have among others the Linnæan system and many later classifications of animals, plants and men, all of which have been framed with a more or less conscious feeling of their artificiality. Lamarck, in particular, is to be praised in this respect. In the technical rules given in his Philosophie Zoologique concerning “Artificial devices” [E.T. Part I, Chap. I, p. 19] he discusses this subject in detail. And with him may be mentioned Cuvier, Blumenbach, Kant and a large number of scientists who either applied these artificial classifications themselves or dealt with their theoretical basis.

This artificial classification is almost the only one of the accessories to thought which has had the good fortune to be thoroughly studied by logicians. It was, of course, quite obvious in this case that we were not directly and immediately dealing with reality but with indirect and provisional ideational constructs and modes of thought. The various features characteristic of all fictions are here already clearly manifested: the fact, in particular, that all such fictions in the last analysis lead to contradictions, is worthy of special consideration, and later on we shall emphasize it more specifically.

As long as such fictions are treated as hypotheses without a realization of their nature, they are false hypotheses. They derive real value only if it is realized that they have been deliberately constructed as provisional representations which at some future time are to make room for better and more natural systems.

Chapter II Abstractive (Neglective) Fictions

I Include under this term various methods in which the deviation from reality manifests itself specifically in the neglect of certain elements.

The factor common to all fictions in this class consists in a neglect of important elements of reality. As a rule the reason for the formation of these fictions is to be sought in the highly intricate character of the facts which make theoretical treatment exceedingly difficult owing to their unusual complexity. The logical functions are thus unable to perform their work undisturbed, because it is not possible here to keep the various threads out of which reality is woven, apart from one another.

Since, then, the material is too complicated and confused for thought to be able to break it up into its component elements, and since the causal factors sought are probably of too complicated a nature for them to be determined directly, thought makes use of an artifice by means of which it provisionally and temporarily neglects a number of characters and selects from them the more important phenomena.

A standard example is the well-known assumption of Adam Smith, according to which all human actions are dictated by egoism. We shall try to give an especially typical example of every variety of artifice, and to use it in order to study by the most thorough analysis both the scheme of the construct and the methodology of the artifice employed. As regards artificial classification, by far the most typical historical example is the botanical system of Linnæus; while of abstractive fictions based on the neglect of certain elements the best is Adam Smith’s assumption, which was long regarded as an hypothesis.¹

Neither Adam Smith nor Linnæus regarded himself as dealing with more than a fiction. The proof of the statement that Adam Smith intended his assumption to be merely a provisional fiction was given by Buckle in the introduction to his History of Civilization in England, and this view has been expressly emphasized in Germany by F. A. Lange.

The empirical manifestations of human actions are so excessively complicated that they present almost insuperable obstacles when we try to understand them theoretically and to reduce them to causal factors. For the construction of his system of political economy it was essential for Adam Smith to interpret human activity causally. With unerring instinct he realized that the main cause lay in egoism and he formulated his assumption in such a way that all human actions, and particularly those of a business or politico-economical nature, could be looked upon as if their driving force lay in but one single factor—egoism. Thus all the subsidiary causes and partially conditional factors, such as good-will, habit and so forth, are here neglected. With the aid of this abstract cause Adam Smith then succeeded in bringing the whole of political economy into an ordered system. He presented it as an axiom and deduced from it the relations involved in trade and commerce, which followed with systematic necessity. The assumption of a “harmony” of all individual interests is intimately bound up with this; and it is an assumption which, though of great value as fiction, is positively ruinous as hypothesis or dogma.

But these are only provisional assumptions, which, however rigorously applied, are to be sharply differentiated from hypotheses. They are, or at least should be, accompanied by the consciousness that they do not correspond to reality and that they deliberately substitute a fraction of reality for the complete range of causes and facts.

These artificial methods are applied wherever there are complex situations of this kind, particularly in the treatment of political economy and social and moral relations.

There is one more domain where the application of this method has yielded exceedingly fruitful results, and that is theoretical mechanics.

The phenomena are here so intricate that frequently these abstract causes alone are assumed to be causal factors while others are for the time being neglected. It is precisely in the determination of the mechanical relations of bodies that subsidiary causes are neglected in order to simplify matters, and all mechanical motion, etc. is interpreted, as if it were only dependent upon the abstract factors.

In physics we find such a fiction in the fact that masses of undeniable extension, e.g. the sun and the earth, in connection with the derivation of certain basic concepts of mechanics and the calculation of their reciprocal attraction are reduced to points or concentrated into points (gravitational points) in order, by means of this fiction, to facilitate the presentation of the more composite phenomena. Such a neglect of elements is especially resorted to where a very small factor is assumed to be zero (cf. Bacon in his Nov. Org., II, 146. Particularly remarkable is the passage in Book II, § 36, where he raises the question whether “certain movements of the heavens have been conceived merely with the object of simplifying our calculations”).

There are many other fields of inquiry where this method has been applied with some success. There are, for example, all the ideational constructs deriving from Condillac’s fiction² of a statue, resuscitated for instance by Steinthal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword to the Routledge Classics Edition
• Preface to the English Edition
• Autobiographical
• General Introduction
• Part 1: Basic Principles
• Part 2: Amplified Study of Special Problems
• Part 3: Historical Confirmations
• Index