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Renegade Instances
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2022
Extract
Attention has been drawn, particularly since Kant, to propositions which can not have negative instances. They used to be called a priori, axioms, first principles. Today, they are usually called postulates—C. I. Lewis uses both the old and new terminology—because there is a growing recognition of the fact that at least some of them are not “necessary” in the traditional sense. Kant placed a limitation on the apriorism of the continental rationalists. Current epistemologists and logicians have outstripped Kant in the direction signalled by him. Both he and they, however, concur in the opinion that apriori propositions are subject to negation of a sort. The Kantian dinge-an-sich, though they can not contradict these propositions by being negative instances of them, do nevertheless stand to them in the relation of insubordination, thereby exerting on them a “negative action” of a sort. And, according to current views, there are instances which, though they fall outside the range of significance of a proposition or system and hence can not contradict it, do nevertheless tend to bring about a revision of it by a negative action of some sort. The purpose of this brief essay is to coin a convenient name for such instances and to describe certain properties of their peculiar negative action.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1936
References
1 More precisely, the feathered quadruped does not disturb the proposition, “If anything is feathered and biped and white and graceful, etc., it is feathered and biped,” but it shakes, rather, the variable (see below) “Swans are birds,” with this analytic interpretation. As we shall see, it exposes the word-variables “swan” and “bird” to redefinition, the new resultant being either another analytic proposition or a synthetic one. This qualification should be kept in mind as we proceed.
2 See first foot-note.
3 The reader who is versed in the history of science may replace our fictitious renegade instance (the feathered quadruped) by actual historical renegades—instances which rendered “useless” or “inconvenient,” by renegation, the basic assumptions or “first principles” of scientific theories.