  The most obvious aim of the PAO is to establish the centrality of fictions to our cognitive life. But there is also a broader, and in some ways more ambitious, aim to the book—to provide the kind of “corrected Kantianism” Lange had tried to establish in the History of Materialism. As we saw above, Vaihinger views Kant’s system as riddled with inconsistencies, which arise from the alleged fact that Kant retains certain elements of his pre-critical dogmatism even after adopting the critical standpoint.  The As-If philosophy can be seen as an attempt to retain what Vaihinger takes to be Kant’s core philosophical insights, while removing the inconsistencies that beset the surrounding system in which those insights were originally couched. 