S CHLICK’S C RITICISM OF I MMANENCE P HILOSOPHIES A ND R EICHENBACH’S C ONCEPTION OF THE O BJECT OF K NOWLEDGE

2. S CHLICK’S C RITICISM OF I MMANENCE P HILOSOPHIES A ND R EICHENBACH’S C ONCEPTION OF THE O BJECT OF K NOWLEDGE

To illustrate my point, I will first focus on the criticism Schlick made in the first edition of Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre (1918) against immanence philosophies, in particular Schuppe’s immanentism, on the basis of his conception of knowl- edge intended as coordination.

In criticizing Schuppe’s immanentism, Schlick says that it is “quite clear that thought, in the sense relevant to knowledge, signifies nothing but the designation of objects. But that an object is not produced by our giving it a designation –

indeed, it is independent of it and can exist without our correlating some sign or representation with it – is all contained in the very concept of designation. The

above fallacy would never have been committed if the two meanings of the word ‘thought’ had been kept apart by assigning different terms to them” 3 . In other words, Schlick considers his conception of ‘knowledge’ to be anti- thetic to Schuppe’s, because it encompasses the idea that the sense of ‘to think’ inherent to knowledge means only “to designate objects” and that it has nothing

to do with any kind of dependence of the objects on the thought designating them. As we know, in the Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre these objects are charac-

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terized as transcendent objects and even called by the Kantian expression “Dinge an sich” (things-in-themselves).

In Reichenbach’s conception, which differs from Schlick’s, the equation of the process of ‘knowing’ to a process of unique coordination could be used to explain why the object of knowledge, constituting some sort of non-metaphysical

‘transcendence’, remains nevertheless ‘immanent’ with respect to the presuppo- sitions of the cognitive process. In his 1920 essay Relativitätstheorie und Er- kenntnis Apriori, Reichenbach used the characterization of knowledge elaborated by Schlick partly to reject and partly to accept Kant’s conception of the a priori.

Here the coordinative conventions mentioned by Schlick are treated as “con- stitutive principles”. They are introduced and characterized in contrast to par- ticular laws by calling into question their constitutive value with respect to the objects of knowledge: in “contrast to particular laws” (or “axioms of connection”

[Verknüpfungsaxiome]), these constitutive principles (or “coordinating princi- ples”, “axioms of coordination” [Zuordnungsaxiome]), “do not say what is known in the individual case, but how knowledge is obtained; they define the knowable, [...] they show the order rules according to which knowledge is obtained and indicate the conditions the logical satisfaction of which leads to knowledge.”

For Reichenbach, in the process of knowing, one of the two sides of knowl- edge – ‘the real’ – “is defined by coordination with the equations”. The object of knowledge thus constitutes itself in a way which is immanent with respect to the coordination principles. Its transcendence is due to the fact (devoid of any meta- physical connotations) that it is susceptible to a potentially unlimited number of

empirical determinations 4 .

In Schlick’s conception of knowledge, the elements of one of the ends of the cognitive connection (concepts and judgments) are coordinated with the ele- ments of the other end (objects and facts) by means of the introduction of suit- able connections of a definitional and conventional nature. It is by means of these kinds of connections (usual, concrete, implicit and coordinative conven- tions) that we make the association between the apparatus of symbols and the entities (objects and facts) that concepts and judgements have to designate.

What remains valid in Reichenbach is Schlick’s idea of knowledge as coor- dination or designation, and truth as unique coordination or designation. The elements of the two ends of the coordination, though, are not conceived as pre- existing to the coordination itself: coordination connections have a function in the constitution of the objects of knowledge.

Evidently, even though they both consider as valid the coordinative or des- ignative conception of knowledge, these two ways of looking at the cognitive process are profoundly different. This difference affects and is made evident by Schlick’s and Reichenbach’s attitudes towards Kant’s theory of synthetic a priori judgements.

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