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From: sarge@thirdi.UUCP (Sarge Gerbode)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Philosophy and psychology
Message-ID: <117@thirdi.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 25-Aug-87 15:23:47 EDT
Article-I.D.: thirdi.117
Posted: Tue Aug 25 15:23:47 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 27-Aug-87 06:03:57 EDT
Reply-To: sarge@thirdi.UUCP (Sarge Gerbode)
Organization: Institute for Research in Metapsychology
Lines: 28
Keywords: philosophy psychology Kant
Summary: Are they really so separate?

[Warning -- the following is deliberately provocative.]

With Kantian catagories and similar things, we see a blurring of the
distinctions between psychology and philosophy.  If something is
psychologically impossible to any human, will any human philsoopher ever be
able to regard it as true?

Maybe the philosophical quest for non-empirical truth is simply a study of
universal psychology -- the psychology of the ways in which people are
inescapably constrained to construct their thoughts and understand their worlds.

Perhaps we discover these limits by attempting to escape from them and finding
we cannot.  The truths of philosophy, then, would be those limits that are
genuinely inescapable, while other limits of thought might be overcomable.  It
would surely be useful to know which of our limits we can overcome and which we
can't -- what we can think and what we can't think.

We can also make a virtue of necessity and decide that *our* limits are built
into some kind of universal universe (e.g., that the world is constrained to
human logic).  But that would be going beyond the evidence, wouldn't it?
-- 
"Absolute knowledge means never having to change your mind."

Sarge Gerbode
Institute for Research in Metapsychology
950 Guinda St.
Palo Alto, CA 94301
UUCP:  pyramid!thirdi!sarge