14 MEANING
the acceptance of Euclidean geometry in physics may lead to the occurrence of strange forces, “universal forces,” which distort all bodies to the same extent, and may lead to even greater inconveniences concerning the continuous character of causality.[1] The discovery of interconnections of this kind is an important task of epistemology, the relations between different decisions being frequently hidden by the complexity of the subject; it is only by adding the group of entailed decisions that a proposal respecting a new decision becomes complete.
The discovery of entailed decisions belongs to the critical task of epistemology, the relation between decisions being of the kind called a logical fact. We may therefore reduce the advisory task of epistemology to its critical task by using the following systematic procedure: we renounce making a proposal but instead construe a list of all possible decisions, each one accompanied by its entailed decisions. So we leave the choice to our reader after showing him all factual connections to which he is bound. It is a kind of logical signpost which we erect; for each path we give its direction together with all connected directions and leave the decision as to his route to the wanderer in the forest of knowledge. And perhaps the panderer will be more thankful for such a signpost than he would be for suggestive advice directing him into a certain path. Within the frame of the modern philosophy of science there is a movement bearing the name of conventionalism; it tries to show that most of the epistemological questions contain no questions of truth-character but are to be settled by arbitrary decisions. This tendency, and above all, in its founder Poincare, had historical merits, as it led philosophy to stress the volitional elements of the system of knowledge
- ↑ Cf. the author’s Philosophie der Raum-Zeit-Lehre (Berlin: De Gray ter, 1928), § 12.
