For one thing, because Kant didn’t show that metaphysics exceeds the limits of reason to everyone’s satisfaction.
In particular, he didn’t persuade Saul Kripke. In 1972 Kripke published work that would eventually appear as Naming and Necessity (1980), and called the Kantian view into question in a way that was impossible for anyone to ignore. It was probably the biggest philosophical event in the last half of the twentieth century. Philosophy was one way before Kripke and another way after him.
In the Kantian view, the world is a “manifold” of sensations that we put into an intelligible order by applying concepts and names to it. A concept is a set of properties in virtue of which something counts as a certain kind of object, and a name is a label that stands for a uniquely identifying description of some particular thing. (This is the way Frege and Russell understood it.) Take the name “Abraham Lincoln.” It stands for “the sixteenth president of the United States” – that’s what the name “Abraham Lincoln” means. And that meaning determines its referent, as there is only one thing in the world to which that description applies.
In this way of looking at things it seems that the world we know is the world as we make it intelligible to ourselves, and the closest we can get to a fundamental understanding of reality consists of knowledge of the workings of our structures of intelligibility. What reality is like “in itself,” the traditional domain of metaphysics, is beyond our grasp.
An implication of this view is that there are no objects with necessary properties. What’s necessary or essential to something’s being the way it is is determined by how we choose to describe it, not some natural feature of the thing as it is in itself, independently of our interest in it. If you choose to describe Lincoln as “the sixteenth president of the United States,” an essential feature of Lincoln is that he was an American citizen and an inessential or “accidental” feature is that he was the husband of Mary Todd Lincoln. But if you re-describe him as “the father of Tad Lincoln,” he’s essentially the husband of Mary and only accidentally the sixteenth president of the United States.
All this, to repeat, depends on the claim that meaning determines reference, and this is what Kripke denied in Naming and Necessity. We don’t refer to objects by organizing them into groups of properties, he argued, we simply designate them, such that a name names the same thing in all possible worlds including those in which the referent of the name lacks the properties we attribute to it. There’s no undifferentiated “manifold” that we can shape as we please within the scope of our cognitive faculties. There’s some real thing “out there” that we encounter, name, and talk about.
(To get a quick sense of the weaknesses in the Frege-Russell theory that motivate Kripke’s argument, consider an imaginary but possible case. Schneider was the author of the incompleteness theorem, but he died before he told anyone other than Gödel, who then published it as his own work. Does that mean that when you were referring to Gödel as the author of the incompleteness theorem, you were really referring to Schneider? Not at all. You were referring to Gödel, but had some false beliefs about him.)
The larger implication of Kripke’s work is that we are not separated from reality by our representations of it. That means that the picture of philosophy that derives from Kant – that we study and clarify concepts, meanings, and representations, all things that we have “made,” but not the world as it is in itself – is an unnecessarily restrictive way of understanding the discipline. When we encounter a bit of reality and call it, for example, gold, gold is what we’re talking about regardless of the various beliefs about it we may entertain. The medieval alchemist who thought of gold as compounded of mercury and sulfur, and the modern chemist who thinks of it as an element with the atomic number 79, are both talking about the same thing. Both are directly in touch with the same real world.
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