The Philosophy of 'As if'
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The Philosophy of 'As If': A System of the Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind (Die Philosophie des Als Ob) is a 1911 book by the German philosopher Hans Vaihinger, based on his dissertation of 1877. The work for which Vaihinger is best known, it was published in an English translation by C. K. Ogden in 1924.
Vaihinger's philosophy
Vaihinger's philosophy, based on his study of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche, holds that while sensations and feelings are real, the rest of human knowledge consists of "fictions" that can only be justified pragmatically. Even the laws of logic are fictions, albeit ones that have proved their indispensable worth in experience and are thus held to be undeniably true. It is not worth asking whether religious and metaphysical doctrines are true in an objective sense, since this cannot be discovered, but it is worth asking whether it is useful to act 'as if' they were true. Vaihinger concedes that the concepts of fiction and 'as if' vary depending on the type of truth concerned. The theory is open to criticism on the grounds that it involves a covert appeal to a non-pragmatic concept of truth, and that it implies that it is itself no more than a useful fiction.
Influence and reception
The work influenced both Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler. Though it contained the first use of the term "logical positivism", the logical positivists were generally dismissive of the work. Moritz Schlick wrote that Vaihinger's description of his philosophy as a form of "idealist positivism" was one of its many contradictions. The American journalist H.L. Mencken was scathing in his criticism of the book, which he dismissed as an unimportant "foot-note to all existing systems".
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