Eternal Possibilities: A Neutral Ground for Meaning and Existence

Introduction

Introduction KANT supposed that metaphysics should restrict itself to the conditions which must obtain for the experience of any object whatever. One condition he emphasized is that concepts of the understanding have application to sensuous intuition only. Kant would identify the world with "objects" which result when phenomena are organized and unified in ways prescribed by these concepts. His objects are to be the focus for knowledge, while the world itself is relegated to a limbo where it abides unknown. 1 This is the cul-de-sac to which Kant brings us, and the outcome to which my book is a response. Kant's restriction upon the concepts of understanding would not be detrimental to a phenomenology of experience, but it must discredit a theory of knowledge. For it is the world, and not experience that is the object of knowledge, experience being that activity whereby information about the world is transmitted to us. Kant deflects attention from the world to experience as he identifies the "transcendental " though still psychological conditions for the having of sensory experience. That is an achievement, but not the only one to be prized if philosophy is to provide a comprehensive theory of knowledge. It is not an achievement to which we should forever defer surrendering the right to speculate about the character of the world known, and about that relation to mind in which it comes to be the object of knowledge. There is one liberating step we can take: we must free the understanding from that constraint to which Kant bends it. He supposed that metaphysics is speculative and irresponsible when it pretends that concepts might have application beyond the 3 IThat follows if concepts apply only to phenomena, Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reasoll, translated by N. Kemp Smith, (New York: St. Martin's, 1929), B.xv. I I, p. 22, if the space and time in which phenomena are presented are forms of intuition only, B.xxvi, p. 27, and if the world is noumenal because, first, every property thal might have been ascribed to it is ascribable aniy to the objects synthesized in experience, B.xx, p. 24, and if because, second, causality applies only within experience, and not to the relation of the world and the ego as it makes and has experience , B.xxvii, p. 28. Eternal Possibilities forms of intuition, space and time. We need to tell how our concepts may have a reference that carries into the world itself. For we betray our opportunities if we demur when asked to tell what the world is in-itself and how we may know it. The hypothesis which I shall defend here clarifies certain of the world's features, while it provides that the world is, in respect to these features, representable in language. I suggest that properties exist in the first instance as eternal possibilities for definiteness and difference . I argue that these possibilities are instantiable as states of affairs, and representable in words and sentences . This solution restates Plato's view that logos is present in thought and the world; but it derives for its modal interpretation of Plato's Forms as possibilities from Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Two of Wittgenstein's assumptions are pertinent here: 1) the character and existence of the world are independent of the fact that we may talk about it; 2) the world is not a thing-in-itself existing apart from thought and unavailable to it; we do succeed in using language to represent states of affairs occurring in the world. Wittgenstein sets out to tell what language and the world must be in order that we may use one to represent the other. He proposes that a sentence can represent a state of affairs if each displays a form that is common to them, or more exactly, if the elements of one are configured in the same way as the elements of the other. But more, he believes that this alleged isomorphism is necessary but not yet sufficient for knowledge. For we know the world only if we grasp its character; we fall short of that if we merely exhibit, as a token expression of it, sentences having a form that is like that of states of affairs. Wittgenstein must establish a further point if he is to provide for knowledge. He must argue that the isomorphism of sentence and state of affairs is not the external, extrinsic, relation of likeness that is characteristic of left and right hands, and...