On the antinomies and the appendix to the dialectic in Kant's critique and philosophy of science

Abstract

In this article I will try to show: (1) Systematically and historically the chapter on the antinomies and their dissolution constitutes an essential part of Kant's argumen tation for the transcendental or Copemican turn and a necessary complement of the so-called 'Deduction'. (2) From Kant's construction, analysis, and critical dissolution of the antinomies there follows only a negative meia-theoretical con sequence. He recognized this explicitly, but unfortunately, he never theless chose to formulate it usually (though not always) in the wrong way, namely as an object-theoretical one. (3) There is a loose analogy between the misuse of the forms of intuition and the forms of thinking (the categories) on the one side, and the misuse of ideas of reason on the other. But there is a more important difference: the first tries to extend a legitimate object theoretical use illegitimately beyond the limits of possible experience, whereas the second is an oft/eci-theoretical misuse of solely meta theoretical aims, rules and assumptions. (4) Kant's arguments for the necessity of regulative ideas of reason imply a systematically still highly interesting conception of experience and empirical science as complex, mashed feedback systems which due to their structure can progress in a systematic, self-controlled, and self-correcting way. The structure is tentatively reconstructed and exhibited in a directed graph. (5) The ideas mentioned by Kant are not a complete list of all ideas of reason. They are paradigmatic examples of an open class, and they can be arranged into at least three different open subclasses. (6) The functions and role of 'reason' and its ideas in cognition and especially in science are exclusively meta-theoretical. (7) In the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic Kant criticizes the naive absolute objectivism of the classical natural sciences. His positive theory is a kind of objectively relativistic realism or prin cipally relative objectivism.