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In article <117@thirdi.UUCP> sarge@thirdi.UUCP (Sarge Gerbode) writes:
>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.

You seem to be hinting at what is usually called "transcendental
philosophy". This has nothing to do with metaphysics, but it is
looking for the bounds of reason, science(s) and experience in
general. Examples are Kant's transcendental ideas of time and space,
or Heidegger's notion of being-in-the-world. Some time ago
there was a short discussion about whether an omnipotent being
could also change our logic. A transcendental critique of this
question should start by circumscribing the boundary conditions
for our logic, and then discover that the question does not
make any sense.

The book of Winograd and Flores "Understanding
language and cognition" can be viewed as a transcendental
critique of cognitive science and artificial intelligence
(whether it is a good one or not, is not my point now).

>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.

Yes, since transcendental philosophy does not deal with empirical
questions, and must be aware of its own critical bounds as
well, it is different from "normal" sciences. A typical
method of transcendental critique is investigating paradoxes,
or trying to create them . These tend to be
very revealing about where the limits are. Examples are the Liar
paradox, Zeno's paradox and the hermeneutical circle.
-
Hans Weigand
Dep. of Math and Computer Science,
Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam