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Kant offers a threefold analysis of "metaphysics" as:

(1) a discipline;

(2) a set of assertions; and

(3) a "human propensity."

For logical positivism, a statement is "metaphysical" if it purports to make a statement of fact but fails to do so, thereby also failing to have a meaning, because no observations count as evidences for or against it. Accordingly, a metaphysical statement is a pseudoinformative statement that is really meaningless.

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For Walsh, metaphysicians historically have wanted to say both that their propositions possess a peculiar certainty and that they are significant as a purely analytic proposition is not. So metaphysical propositions pretend to the status-in Kantian terminology-of synthetic a priori truths. The principle of causality, for example, is not a very wide empirical truth mysteriously known in some nonempirical way, but rather the expression of a rule of procedure that serves to tell us, not what properties things have, but how to interpret them. But, then, Walsh reasons, there's a possibility of decoupling Kant's principles of the understanding from their exclusive cOllll.ection connection with our sense knowledge of the world underlying science and thinking of them as also providing prescriptive principles for interpreting the rest of human experience. Thus metaphysics comes to be viewed as a set of principles of the understanding that, when applied, yield a unitary account of things, and the metaphysician as "a man with a vision of the scheme of things entire;' who then proceeds to develop his vision into a theory. The metaphysician, accordingly, is someone concerned to advocate, articulate, and apply a set of basic interpretative principles, "categorical principles;' that promise to make sense of all empirical data. 

That this view of metaphysics may well blunt "Hume's fork" to the extent of declining to accept his simplistic two-part analysiS analysis of meaningful propositions seems clear enough. But I take it to be equally clear that it is completely shattered on the rocks of truth and argumentation. What good does it do to hold that one metaphysics may be more "illuminating," or "enlightening," than another if the judgment as to what is illuminating is itself a purely "persona!," as distinct from, in any way, a "public" judgment? Unless I'm mistaken, Walsh's view of metaphysics saves it only by destroying it-or, if you will, only by completely changing the subject.

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