The significance or vacuity of the statement, “Everything has just doubled in size,” attracted considerable attention last century from scientists and philosophers. Presenting his conventionalism in geometry, Poincaré insisted on the emptiness of a hypothesis that all objects have doubled in size overnight. Such expansion could have meaning, he argued, “only for those who reason as if space were absolute … it would be better to say that space being relative, nothing at all has happened.” The logical empiricists concurred, viewing the universal doubling hypothesis as illustrating the intrinsic metrical amorphousness of continuous manifolds. It is striking, therefore, to find Kant invoking a universal contraction in space and time to support his famous doctrine of transcendental idealism. In one of several completely neglected passages, he writes: “The proof that the things in space and time are mere appearances can also be grounded on the fact that the whole world could be contained in a nutshell and the entirety of elapsed time in a second without the least difference being met with.” Kant's “also” may suggest an idealist argument distinct from any proposed in published works. Here I ask: What is the meaning of Kant's Nutshell Argument for Idealism?

中文翻译：

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康德对唯心主义的简明论证


“所有东西的大小都增加了一倍”这句话的重要性或空洞性，在上个世纪引起了科学家和哲学家的广泛关注。庞加莱在几何学中提出了他的约定主义，他坚持认为所有物体的尺寸在一夜之间都增加了一倍的假设是空洞的。他认为，这种扩张可能有意义，“只有对于那些认为空间是绝对的……最好说空间是相对的，什么也没有发生。”逻辑经验主义者对此表示同意，认为普遍的倍增假说说明了连续流形的内在度量无定形性。因此，令人惊讶的是，康德援引了空间和时间的普遍收缩来支持他著名的先验唯心主义学说。在几篇完全被忽视的段落中，他写道：“空间和时间中的事物仅仅是表象的证据也可以基于这样一个事实，即整个世界可以包含在一个简单的壳中，而整个流逝的时间在一秒钟之内。没有遇到任何差别。”康德的“也”可能暗示了一种与已发表的著作中提出的任何观点不同的唯心主义论点。这里我想问：康德的唯心主义概括论证是什么意思？