| Since the ancient Greek times, what philosophers most concern is a method of thinking. From Plato's time to the 19th century, the axiomatic method was considered as the scientific method to think about the world and to understand it. If there are no axioms, it's hard to imagine how science exists. So the method of thinking, including understanding, should be logic and methodical. However, it is "the hermeneutic circle" which shatters such optimistic estimate of the axiomatic method. The hermeneutic circle reveals the circularity lurked in the human understanding by describing the circular relations between "the whole" and "the individual parts". As a result, it seems impossible to find a methodical beginning of thinking. Meanwhile, the Logicists find such circularity in the scientific language, which makes the foundation of the scientific language as a problem. Hermeneutic and Logicism coincide just at this point. Most of scientific philosophers renounce the attempt to reconstruct the thinking methodically, and only a few of them still try to fulfill this reconstruction, one of them is "Erlangen Constructivism". "Erlangen Constructivism" was found in the 1960s by Paul Lorenzen, who was an important mathematician physicist and logician, and Wilhelm Kamlah, who was a famous musician and historian, and their students. As the other constructivists, the Erlangen constructivists, who have inherited the critical spirit of Kants', believe that what is given-for example, language- in praxis should be constructed and such construction should be step by step, without gaps, and without circles. It is the particularity of Erlangen Constructivism that it plans to construct the scientific language methodically on the basis of ordinary language by means of the modern logical analysis and then promises to solve the problems of Beginning and Grounding. Although it was criticized by other philosophers, for example, the critical rationalism, which put the Miinchenhaus-Trilemma forward as the argument for renouncing to give grounds for science, and the critical theory, very few philosophers, could successfully present a comprehensive critique of Erlangen Constructivism. What this essay wants to do is to make a feasible and comprehensive critique of Erlangen Constructivsm, which does not deny its constructive method but make it clear and generalized. For this purpose, the essay will be arranged in this way:It is the first step towards making a general description of the methods, field of application and technical details of Erlangen Constructivism. It is the second step towards examining, to what extent the concepts which are presented actually, are consistent with its promise. It is the final step towards systemizing the method of Erlangen Constructivism as an idea of a kind of semantics in order to make this method orderly and clear.The main dissertation consists of three chapters, in addition to the introduction and the Epilogue.Chapter 2 is the reconstruction of the essential part of the Erlangen philosophizing. On the contrary to most sciences nowadays, which have already abandoned efforts to find the grounds for themselves because of the Munchenhausen-Trilemma, the Erlangen Constructivists claim to trace the sciences again to a justified ground. They have attached great importance to the postulates of being free from circularity and developing step by step, which make them particularly interested in "the reliable beginning of all reasonable speech".Thereupon, to avoid this aporia, i.e. it is "always already" spoken and thus the beginning of language is uncatchable, the Erlangen Constructivists plan to construct the beginning of language "a primis fundamentis"(from the beginning) methodically. In these circumstances, it should be in an "isohyptical"(proceeding on the same level of language) way to establish the beginning of language and make further developments, or else people will refer to all kinds of ordinary languages, and as a result they will violate the postulate of being free from circularity.In order to guarantee the commonness of meaning isohyptically, the Erlangen Constructivists have suggested to train the participant, who feigns being speechless for the moment, to use the proper terms of the ideal language (orthosprache) in the correct way, which corresponds to the learning process of a first language explained by the Behaviorists. For some not very obvious reasons, the Erlangen School marked some of the learning contents preferable; however, it can't become a good justification for such markedness by making a forced isohyptical impartation of them.Spoken in details, the first step is to presuppose that we can not further give reasons for the ability to differentiate, and that its derivatives-the ability to behavior and the ability to predicate-are the basis. In reference to the learnability and the teachability of the schemata of the speech acts and the non-speech acts it is possible to practise how to perform the elementary acts of predication, wherein the meanings of those predicators are first defined exemplarily by the production of the set of examples and the set of counter-examples. By the rules of predicators, the connection between those exemplarily defined predicators specifies the predicators as terms, and the acts of abstraction regarding synonymity make talking about the concepts possible. Thereafter, by means of the schemata of the acts of pointing, the targets are isolated for the acts of predication, and then are represented by the nominators in the language.Finally, the elementary propositions are constructed by using the nominators, predicators and the illocutionary acts of attributing and denying.After the construction of the linguistic elements it will begin to establish the illocutionary acts of assertion and thus create the prerequisites for teaching the constructivist logic. It is possible to construct the logical constants by connecting elementary propositions and complex propositions in some way, and the rules of dialogical arguments about the truth value of the assertions determine the usage of these constants.Following the introduction of modal logic, constructive arithmetic and constructive analysis, the next step is to guarantee the "empirical" components of science, especially the possibilities of measurement. Geometry marks the usage and productive conventions of the first measuring instrument (Alphagerat), which are identified as the first operationalisations methodically, as non-empirical theories, where according to the constructivist principles Geometry can also develop from the "bottom", that is to say, from the praxis of the Lebenswelt. It's time to think of those theoretical postulations regarding the structural features of geometrical bodies, i.e. the principles of homogeneity, when people want to guarantee that the first basic geometrical bodies that are produced can behave constantly. But the Erlangen Constructivists haven't clarified how to deduce these principles "from the bottom"Finally, Erlangen Constructivism focuses on those propositions which are implicitly based on "the last resort", i.e. the teacher's unfalsifiable instructions, of grounding. The constructivist ethics, which is reconstructed in the above-mentioned way, takes the following basic idea as a starting point, that the suggestions for norms are based on the desire to make the aimed circumstances happen. As a result, such reasonable suggestion has to consider these two questions:why is a suggested aim worth pursuing? To what extent can a suggested norm be a means of achieving that aim? If there is a conflict between the aims, then the consultation has to be made according to the rational principle and the moral principle, where the first superprinciple should regulate the formal conditions of the argumentation, and the second one should rule on how to solve the conflicts between the supernorms. In this context Erlangen Constructivism suggests to choose the basic norm as a way out to guarantee the satisfaction of wants. However, due to the opacity of the concept of wants, to deliver on this way out "righteously", Erlangen Constructivism should make its way towards constructivist cultural studies.Chapter 3 probes into whether and to what extent the whole Erlangen program, which promises to solve the problems about Beginning and Grounding, is implemented. In the first place, it is necessary to distill the typical characteristics of the beginning, which is established according to the Erlangen prescription, from the research materials and thus we can examine whether those requirements, which are combined with these characteristics, are justifiable. In the second place, this part analyses how Erlangen Constructivism solves the problem about beginning. What the Erlangen constructivists want to construct is a public language, so the beginning, which they insist to inquiry into, is suitable to establish the commonness of meaning for a language. As a result, only "the constitution of meaning" can characterize this beginning, at which point the Erlangen Problem of beginning is converted into the problem about constructing the meaning of a language. The key point in identifying how to construct the meaning of a language lies in how to distinguish the context, which constructs the meaning of a language, and the context, in which a language is applied. Some contexts can be classified as constituting meaning by simulating a kind of teacher-student-situation, which can avoid using the metalanguage to accomplish such classification in order to satisfy the requirement of being free from circularity. The contexts that constitute the meaning of a language are:the logical rules, which can be enforced but can't be expressed isohyptically; all kinds of operationalisations, which can not be substituted by the isohyptical formulations in principle; and the rules of meaning, which can be formulated isohyptically. In the third place, this part analyses how Erlangen Constructivism solves the problem of grounding. It is important to realize that the Erlanger concept of grounding is used as a technical term in the language involved. If a proper metalanguage exists, then we should read the predicator "is reasonable" as "is reasonable in the ideal language O". Similarly, the predicator "is justified"of a metalanguage can be read as "is justified by the system of norms N". This releases us from doing the specific research into the "deductivity" and "non-deductivity"of the procedure, which the Erlangen constructivists make use of, because at least in principle all of these grounds can be reconstructed as deductive relations; even if the deductivity is queered by appeal to the dialogue-game and the non-speech acts in the practical justification, there is no change in the deductivity of the concept of grounding per se. So the Erlangen concept of grounding is different from the one in the Munchenhausen-Trilemma, let alone the solution of the problem about ground in this Trilemma. However, to sum up, the first problem about grounding for the Erlangen Constructivists is how to ground the truth-decisions of a proposition. In light of the Erlangen prescription, it can be solved by combining the proposition with the beginning of the language involved in a simulated teacher-student-situation, which leads to the second problem of grounding in the sense of Erlangen Constructivism, i.e. how the conventions to which such combination resorts can be justified. According to the Erlangen prescription, still by means of a simulated teacher-student-situation, the teachers, who are able to speak the language involved, distinguish those conventions from the other suggestions, and make them into the beginning. From this, we can say that the term "grounding" in the sense of Erlangen Constructivism can be regarded as such a process, that by means of a rational dialogue those persons involved can reach agreement about some rules, which aim at constructing the scientific languages methodically to guarantee the rationality of science. In this sense, the Erlangen constructivists have indeed solved the problem of grounding, which is not a philosophical problem, but a problem of how to lay the foundations of the scientific language.Chapter 4 discusses what makes such a science, which has already been applied in practice, obligated to correct itself according to this reconstruction, which has been implemented in accordance with the regulations of Erlangen Constructivism. For this purpose, it is necessary to clarify what these regulations are directed toward. Because the postulation, i.e. to construct the science methodically by means of the scientific language, which has a prescriptive intention under the Erlangen programme, is combined with some restrictions when it is realized as a model, which are more "content-related" and thus can not be justified only by the maxims of Methodizitat. In the next step, this part demonstrates that those restrictions can be regarded as evidence to show that the Erlangen Constructivism has introduced a dogmatic foundation, which is not necessarily dogmatic in the end. It also points out the very reason why the Erlangen School fails to construct the universal and feasible theory which can lay the foundations for all kinds of sciences:the confusion between the postulation, i.e. to lay the foundation of scientific languages methodically, in content and the one in form. So the reconstruction of a "rational core" in the Erlangen program, which gets rid of those worthless contents, can give an adequate opinion on the normative requirement, which combined with that "rational core":first, it shows that a part of this requirement can be justified only on the basis of methodological considerations; then, it shows that that part of this requirement can be raised undogmatically, only when the other part of this requirement,which refers to those content-related restrictions, is relativised at the same time, to the effect that it is insignificant compared with those methodological requirements. In order to realize the above-mentioned program, it is necessary to explain why we need to lay the foundation of the basic principles of language:to guarantee that we can achieve this goal, i.e. the commonness of meaning, which decides whether a language makes sense. Because if a language can not guarantee that the laymen, who are interested in it, can speak it after a certain time, it is not only useless in science, but also not a language any longer. As a rule, it is the semantics with reference to these languages that takes charge of this problem of the rule-based constitution of meaning. So, more precisely, the thesis of this chapter is that the reduction of those unnecessarily restrictive requirements in content of the Erlangen program to its "rational core" shows this program as the conception of a certain type of semantics, and those steps of constructing a language which are performed by the Erlanger constructivists constitute a model of this type of semantics. For this purpose, the discussion will proceed in this way:the first step is to assert several facts about secondary semantics (Secondarsemantik) and primary semantics (Primarsemantik) in reference to the professorial dissertation of Peter Hinst. The second step is to show a way to construct a language by means of the primary semantics and explain to what extent the "rational core" of Erlangen Constructivism, which lays the foundation for all kinds of scientific languages, can be interpreted as a model of the construction of language by means of primary semantics.Chapter 5 is the conclusion of this dissertation, which reviews the Erlangen postulation, i.e. to construct scientific languages in a reliable and reasonable way and thus justifies the reconstruction of science by means of primary semantics. In the end, it concentrates on the problem, which separates the Erlangen School and Critical Rationalism regarding the ways in which the philosophy of science develops, i.e. the Munchenhausen-Trilemma, and simulates a dialogue between them to reveal the fundamental disagreements between them about this problem. |
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