Abstract
Philosophy, as the search for truth, is a matter of thinking, reasoning and arguing correctly; and so the interest in truth implies trying to avoid fallacies. Intuition cannot be a source of knowledge allowing us to attain truth in philosophy; in fact, the results of intuition-led philosophy contradict both the facts of experience and each other. Current fashionable forms of pseudo-philosophy are averse to reasoning, for they either despair of ever attaining truth or else trust in intuition as their guide. Nonetheless, a certain “feeling for truth”, which is not the same as intuition, is crucial for philosophical thinking and argumentation.
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Notes
- 1.
The original title was ‘Typical Fallacies in Philosophy’. It was changed in this translation to highlight the fact that Nelson was actually trying to develop a theory of philosophical fallacies. He himself makes this intention explicit in his next lecture, and he confirms it at the end of the last one.
- 2.
The concept of interest (Interesse) is of great importance in Nelson’s philosophy (as well as in the work of many other German-speaking philosophers, e.g. Habermas). Interests have an objective as well as a subjective side to them. Objectively, whoever has a stake in something has eo ipso an interest in it. Subjectively, there is an affective as well as a volitive element in interest, no matter whether the interest is theoretical (cognitive) or practical (active). Among human theoretical interests, what Nelson will in Chapter “Lecture XIII” call ‘logical’ interests occupy a special place in these lectures, e.g. the interest in uncovering fallacies, the interest in truth, the interest in definitions, the interest in proof and provability, the interest in rigour, the interest in consistency, and so forth. Whenever the word Interesse can be literally translated without sinning too much against English usage, I retain it. In any case it is good to remember that the word ‘interest’ as a philosophical term was quite common in all languages of eighteenth-century Europe, although it kept a terminologically central place only within German philosophy.
- 3.
Nelson follows Kant’s practice of distinguishing two fundamental kinds of cognitive activity— thought (Denken) and intuition (Anschauung). When human beings manage to combine thought with intuition, they are able to achieve knowledge (Erkenntnis), yet thought by itself, without any intuition, only creates pseudo-knowledge; or as Goya, a contemporary of Kant, put it, ‘when reason dreams, it produces monsters’. In Kantian philosophy thought embraces both the three fields of pure traditional logic (concepts or terms, judgments or propositions, reasoning or inference) and the fields of traditional ‘applied’ logic or ‘methodology’ (the study of fallacies, heuristics and research methods, the construction of theoretical systems). Most of the time German denken (the verb as well as the noun) must be translated by ‘reasoning’ or even ‘argumentation’; yet in a few passages ‘conceiving’ is a more appropriate translation. Denkfehler, literally ‘error in thinking’ is best translated by ‘fallacy’ as used in modern argumentation theory, i.e. as a label for errors beyond obvious violations of formal rules of logical inference. We avoid the usual terms ‘deduction’ and ‘deduce’ for ordinary logical inference (excluding induction, abduction, and analogy) because in the Kantian tradition the word Deduktion was reserved for a special kind of transcendental argument which, in the post-Kantian tradition initiated by Fries to which Nelson belongs, goes beyond formal logic as usually conceived.
- 4.
See for instance Weininger (1904). I remind the reader that Wittgenstein was an admirer of this celebrated thinker of fin-de-siècle Vienna. A similar intuitive philosopher of Nelson’s times was Oswald Spengler. Nelson discusses him below in this lecture and again in Chapter “Lecture XXII”. It may be useful to compare a passage from an earlier book: ‘This feeling is a dark awareness of what is true. It is therefore misleading to call it an act of intuition, as is often done. People speak of the ‘intuitive apprehension’ of something that is true yet only mean a dark awareness which in itself lacks all intuitive clarity… Feeling is no intuition but an act of reflection, even though it is different from the grasping of concepts or the drawing of inferences. Thus we have occasionally the feeling that an argumentation we have listened to or read is fallacious and yet cannot quite say what the fallacy is. We are confident that we shall find it, though, once we can think about it in leisure.’ See Nelson (1917, 304). For the correct understanding of the first three lectures as well as the last two ones it is very important that the reader keeps in mind that the term ‘intuition’ for Kant, Fries and Nelson always refers to our sensory capacities; this includes the ‘formal’ intuitions that underlie mathematical knowledge but excludes all intellectual intuition. It is only that last capacity which is criticised both here and elsewhere.
- 5.
This paper by Kant was published in 1796 and can now be read in English translation in Allison and Heath (2002, 431–445).
- 6.
My translation pairs science and scholarship in order to render the German word Wissenschaft, which covers both endeavours.
- 7.
- 8.
See Hegel (1821), Preface.
References
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Nelson, L. (2016). Lecture I. In: A Theory of Philosophical Fallacies. Argumentation Library, vol 26. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20783-4_2
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