Print

Lotze, Rudolph Hermann (1817–81)

DOI
10.4324/9780415249126-DC049-1
Versions
DOI: 10.4324/9780415249126-DC049-1
Version: v1,  Published online: 1998
Retrieved March 28, 2024, from https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/biographical/lotze-rudolph-hermann-1817-81/v-1

3. Epistemology

Among Lotze’s best-known contributions to the theory of knowledge, found in the third book of his Logic (1874), is his reinterpretation of Platonism: the construal of metaphysical objectivity as epistemic validity. Lotze argued that Plato had been fundamentally misunderstood. In specifying that the Ideas were non-spatial, Plato had intended to imply that they were not ‘things’ at all. (Here ‘Idea’ invokes thought-content, not an act of ideation.) These contents are to be understood as having an existence completely different from the type of existence associated with objects or things. While physical objects can possess ‘being’ in the strict sense and events merely ‘occur’, such contents have ‘validity’. This implies a kind of epistemological realism: there are thoughts (or propositions) which are true or false and which are true or false independently of and antecedent to our judgment of them.

Such epistemic realism is sharply distinguished from any metaphysical variety. The latter view holds that these thought-contents must exist (or subsist) in some particular place. It may entail a false hypostatization that seems to follow from the correct emphasis we give to the independence of our thoughts from us. To assert the ‘objective significance’ of thought-contents is, hence, not to ascribe to them any sort of ‘real’ existence. Our apprehension of a thought seems to presuppose its existence in a preordained ‘place’; yet this can be nothing other than its setting within the inferential relations which hold between different thoughts and their meaningful components. As such, it is part of ‘a whole’: what Lotze calls the world of the ‘thinkable’. It is thus that the apprehension of a thought-content, as part of a larger system, may appear to be analogous to the perception of a physical object.

This picture affects the approach to epistemic justification that emerges in Lotze’s views on the validity of the Euclidean axioms. Even if our spatial perception depended upon some cognitive capacity such as ‘intuition’, Lotze argued, this fact alone could not account for our taking these axioms and their derivable theorems to constitute justified belief. Lotze tried to detach the concept of the a priori (as justificatory) from that of the innate (as genesis or source). Any sense in which one might speak of the innateness of Euclidean geometry only indicates causal or psychological origin and is irrelevant to the question of justification. Instead, Lotze characterized a priori truths as those rooted in ‘truths of universal validity, and thus prior to the particular instances in the sense of being rules by which they are determined’ ([1874] 1887 2: 131). Yet this exhibition of truth must not be confused with the panlogicist attempt to discover truth by means of an a priori deduction. Rather, it is ‘reduction’ (or the regressive method) which makes possible the apprehension of the ultimate presuppositions of thought.

Print
Citing this article:
Sullivan, David. Epistemology. Lotze, Rudolph Hermann (1817–81), 1998, doi:10.4324/9780415249126-DC049-1. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Taylor and Francis, https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/biographical/lotze-rudolph-hermann-1817-81/v-1/sections/epistemology-65430.
Copyright © 1998-2024 Routledge.