A Case for Transcendental Idealism
I am starting to embrace transcendental idealism, and so I would like to (briefly) explain my interpretation of it and inquire as to any contentions you guys may have of it.
By transcendental idealism, I just mean the original view, plus my interpretation of it, made by Immanuel Kant; which starts with the core idea that we cannot know what is transcendent to us (viz., what may exist completely independently of our representative faculties) but, rather, only what is transcendental (viz., the necessary preconditions for the possibility of experience) and empirical (viz., inferences made from the, a posteriori, content of experience which is only valid for possible experience).
I add, although Kant didnt say this, that we cannot know that we are representing objects (i.e., that we have representative faculties), from empirical evidence (sorry science) because it could be, without any transcendental investigations, totally fabricated content (of whatever origin it may be). Instead, we can know that we have representative faculties because:
1. There is experience, therefore something exists.
2. That something, or a part of it, must be producing experience.
3. The unified parts of that something which are producing it is the I.
4. The I can only produce experience through (data) input (i.e., sensibility).
5. The production of experience via sensibility (and whatever may afterwards interpret such sensibility) entails that ones experience is a representation.
I think Kant just kind of takes for granted that we represent, without really affording us a transcendental elaboration of why that is the case.
From here, it is pretty straightforward Kantianism: we must intuit the spatiotemporal relations of objects (which are sensations, and not the objects-in-themselves), feed that to our faculty of understanding (which includes the faculty of judgment, most categories of the understanding, etc.) (to subsume the diverse sensations into more general conceptions), and then the aftermath of it all is a phenomena (i.e., a representation).
To keep this brief, math, logic, and categories which we use to produce representations are a priori and are not necessarily properties of the things-in-themselves. Whatever the things are in-themselves is entirely impossible to know.
Unlike Kant, I would say that, although there must be something intuited as outside of me in order to determine myself within experience, it is entirely possible that the sensations which are given (for me to intuit) are completely or partially fabricated (by myself or another) and there is no way to know. To me, this doesnt really matter for practical purposes, but is technically true.
For science (and all other empirical studies), transcendental idealism entails that we can only ever claim empirical statements, at best, as valid for possible [perfectin the sense of the best capabilities and not a perfect representation of reality-in-itselfhuman] experience. Thusly, science (and the like) are pragmatic for paradigmatic and not ontological purposes.
What contentions do you have?
By transcendental idealism, I just mean the original view, plus my interpretation of it, made by Immanuel Kant; which starts with the core idea that we cannot know what is transcendent to us (viz., what may exist completely independently of our representative faculties) but, rather, only what is transcendental (viz., the necessary preconditions for the possibility of experience) and empirical (viz., inferences made from the, a posteriori, content of experience which is only valid for possible experience).
I add, although Kant didnt say this, that we cannot know that we are representing objects (i.e., that we have representative faculties), from empirical evidence (sorry science) because it could be, without any transcendental investigations, totally fabricated content (of whatever origin it may be). Instead, we can know that we have representative faculties because:
1. There is experience, therefore something exists.
2. That something, or a part of it, must be producing experience.
3. The unified parts of that something which are producing it is the I.
4. The I can only produce experience through (data) input (i.e., sensibility).
5. The production of experience via sensibility (and whatever may afterwards interpret such sensibility) entails that ones experience is a representation.
I think Kant just kind of takes for granted that we represent, without really affording us a transcendental elaboration of why that is the case.
From here, it is pretty straightforward Kantianism: we must intuit the spatiotemporal relations of objects (which are sensations, and not the objects-in-themselves), feed that to our faculty of understanding (which includes the faculty of judgment, most categories of the understanding, etc.) (to subsume the diverse sensations into more general conceptions), and then the aftermath of it all is a phenomena (i.e., a representation).
To keep this brief, math, logic, and categories which we use to produce representations are a priori and are not necessarily properties of the things-in-themselves. Whatever the things are in-themselves is entirely impossible to know.
Unlike Kant, I would say that, although there must be something intuited as outside of me in order to determine myself within experience, it is entirely possible that the sensations which are given (for me to intuit) are completely or partially fabricated (by myself or another) and there is no way to know. To me, this doesnt really matter for practical purposes, but is technically true.
For science (and all other empirical studies), transcendental idealism entails that we can only ever claim empirical statements, at best, as valid for possible [perfectin the sense of the best capabilities and not a perfect representation of reality-in-itselfhuman] experience. Thusly, science (and the like) are pragmatic for paradigmatic and not ontological purposes.
What contentions do you have?
Comments (455)
I think this contradicts an essential characteristic of transcendental intuition, which is that effect a synthesis of the subjective and the objective. Hence its transcendental character.
In which case, they should be of no concern to us. Not exactly a contention, I know, but an entirely reasonable judgment.
Not exactly entirely? For one thing, we know that they are impossible to know, so we know something about them partially, but not entirely.
Your summary of Transcendental Idealism reminded me of a Quantum pioneer's response to the question whether queer quantum science revealed anything about the Real world. It also sounds like something a modern Buddha might say. Or like the spoon-bending-boy to Neo. :smile:
Quote attributed to Neils Bohr :
When asked ... [about] an underlying quantum world, Bohr would answer, 'There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature.'
I am not following: could you please elaborate? I don't see any proof offered by Kant that actually proves (transcendentally) that my intuitions are not fabricated but, rather, just that they must have intuited objects outside of me in space in order to determine myself within the representations.
Not knowing anything about X does not entail knowledge of anything about X.
Another way to put it, is that I have only negative knowledge of X by negation and never positive knowledge.
:up:
Yeah I could see why, since we share a bit of scientific anti-realism (at least metaphysically).
Good. Keep reading. You may grow out of it.
I guess I also find myself wondering, if accurate. so what? Does it make any difference to how one lives? How is this way of thinking of use?
Quoting Tom Storm
:up:
For you to arrive at the conclusion that you don't know anything about X, you should have known,
1. the fact that you don't know anything about X.
2. the reason why you don't know anything about X.
3. you don't know anything about X now, but you know that there is a possibility that you might be able to know about X, if a, b, c, ...
4. You don't know anything about X now, but you know that there is also a possibility you might have mistaken or misunderstood something about X.
..... etc etc.
You know a lot about X, when you don't know anything about X. Consequently the conclusion you don't know anything about X is false.
Again this is not about semantics or contentless logic, but is highlighted from Kant's Transcendental Logic.
And negative knowledge is also knowledge, no?
Am I right in thinking that your position is that of Indirect Realism, as described by the Wikipedia article Direct and Indirect Realism
Indirect realism is broadly equivalent to the scientific view of perception that subjects do not experience the external world as it really is, but perceive it through the lens of a conceptual framework.
While this is in accord with Kantian T.I., there is nothing implied therein having to do with negative knowledge. Impossible to know, or, knowledge not possible to obtain, with respect to thing-in-themselves, merely highlights human sensory limitation and says nothing whatsoever about the cognitive aspect of the overall human intellectual system. It is absurd to expect a system to make a determination on something that was never given to it.
Quoting Bob Ross
Under the assumption X is some empirical condition, and negative knowledge regarding X is obtained according to judgements such as, I know Xs are not this or that, such judgements are .inane and senseless; that is, they are in reality purposeless and, for this reason, often very ridiculous (A709/B737). You cannot say anything about, nor legitimately claim any kind or degree of knowledge for, that for which nothing is given with which to form a judgement.
So ..upon sufficient reflection, you might find that rather than having negative knowledge of X, there is only positive knowledge of yourself, re: you know there is something you cannot know, from which follows, that forcing the former at the expense of the latter is what the A/B quote is meant to indicate.
Anyway .just sayin. One interpretation of the original view in relation to another. Although, given the high pagination of the quote and your admission of starting to embrace the source, you must be forgiven for not being familiar with the intent of it, and how it tends to correct this one point of your personal interpretation.
Any book suggestions? Or counter arguments to transcendental idealism that you find hold weight?
Hello Tom Storm,
I have read critique of pure reason, prolegomena, and the groundwork for the metaphysics of morals. I working on reading his critique of practical reason and judgment books.
In terms of Kastrup, yes I am moving away from that view.
Moreover, you alluded that you used to have a similar view, but have moved past it: could you please elaborate on what convinced you against the view?
The implications is that we cannot do proper ontology but rather create paradigms of possible human experience.
Hello Pantagruel,
If the sensations are fabricated, then I would never know it; but, yes, they would be unreliable with relation to whatever actual exists in the world-in-itself. It wouldnt change much about practical life though, because, either way, I a condemned to compare experiences and navigate my life with them. So if I were, for example, in a matrix, then it really would not impact my practical life at all. I still have to do what I have to do.
Hello Corvus,
Thats fine by me. I just dont think the colloquial expression I know nothing of X is contradicted here, since it precludes negative knowledge. But I do not have a problem admitting that I have negative knowledge of X when I know nothing about it.
Yes, but not for scientific reasons.
Hello Mww,
This is a really good point I, admittedly, missed. @Corvus I change my mind: I dont have negative knowledge of the things-in-themselves because it could be the case that what I negate of is false (since I know nothing about it). Instead, I know that what I am given is not a thing-in-itself, but the thing-in-itself could turn out to be a mirror (by happenstance) of what I am given (and I would never know it). Thusly, I cannot say "this X is not Y" but rather "I only have knowledge of Y, which is not X".
What non-scientific reasons are there to hold the view of perception that subjects do not experience the external world as it really is, but perceive it through the lens of a conceptual framework.
It is the function of understanding/judgement, to as closely mirror the thing as it is in itself with the thing as it is represented in us. So .not by happenstance, but by logic, Nature herself being the arbiter.
Keep in mind that when Kant posited his ideas, microscopes were a novelty and Dalton had yet to explicate the place of atoms in Chemistry. Much that was hidden was subsequently revealed. We've learned quite a lot about the stuff we couldn't see. This has obliged Kantians to move to treating of phenomena rather than of reality.
So you might reconsider your first argument. Folk have experiences that do not imply that something exists - hallucinations, dreams, illusions and so on. Your conclusion is not justified.
A seed of doubt, maybe.
I dont think Bob Ross meant that the experiences we have are necessarily veridical. Nor does this question have anything to do with our more sophisticated scientific knowledge, compared to Kant. The Enlightenment thinkers were well aware of hallucinations, etc.
Rather, when Bob Ross gives his first two premises:
Quoting Bob Ross
I take him to mean that the something which must exist and be producing experience could just as well be whatever process produces illusions. The point is that, veridical or not, something is going on.
Hello Mww,
I am hesitant to agree here: wouldnt it be more that the understanding/judgment facutly(ies) are preconditioned to try to represent things according to principles, conceptions, and judgments? I dont see how that would entail a close mirroring of the things-in-themselves.
I have a different interpretation of this passage. Kant is talking about the distinction between negative judgments which are such not merely as regards their form but also as regards their content. Negative formal judgment is not a problem; we can make negative any proposition we like. The task is different for a negative judgment of content, however. Such a judgment is meant to be rejecting error (Kants italics). So a negative formal judgment cant do this, since no error is possible [such judgments] are indeed true but empty. . . And now comes the rest of the lines you quoted: that is, they are not suited to their purpose, and just for this reason are often quite absurd (sorry, I have a different translation). But Kant is not talking about negative content judgments here; hes saying that a negative formal judgment that pretends to add to our knowledge is inane, absurd, etc.
The example he gives makes this clear, I think: Alexander could not have conquered any countries without an army. In other words, this is a negative formal judgment that seems to be offering a piece of knowledge, but in fact it merely restates a logical truism (if you stipulate, as Kant probably would have, that an army is necessary for conquering). So it's "true but empty."
Its never easy to grasp Kant, of course, and I welcome your thoughts if I'm off track.
1. There is experience, therefore something exists.
2. That something, or a part of it, must be producing experience.
3. The unified parts of that something which are producing it is the I.
4. The I can only produce experience through (data) input (i.e., sensibility).
5. The production of experience via sensibility (and whatever may afterwards interpret such sensibility) entails that ones experience is a representation.
I'm of no use here, Bob, apologies. There wasn't an argument. It was simply the fact that for practical purposes idealism makes no difference to my day-to-day experience. So it just faded as I got on with life. Additionally, I'm not all that concerned if the nature of reality remains forever elusive to humans. Since we conduct ourselves in a realm which appears to be material (whatever it may be in itself), that's all I need to make effective use of the life I have.
What are the advantages of Kant over Kastrup?
Hello Banno,
By @Ciceronianus own admission, it is not a contention with transcendental idealism; as it is a necessary and perfectly anticipated consequence of it.
:up: . I dont see how this is a contention with transcendental idealism, as having an hallucination is also a representation. All knowledge, other than transcendental extrapolations of the forms of experience, are constrained to the possibility of human experience. Likewise, having more refined tools to perform empirical inquiries does not help resolve the problem that all of it is ultimately contingent on human experience.
Fair enough, my friend!
Oh, not a contention, to be sure - but while Tully might speak for himself, it's plain that talk about a thing about which we can say nothing is at least awkward.
And our perceptions reach much further than they did in Kant's day, in ways he could hardly have imagined. I wonder would he have been so ready to talk about the thing-in-itself as beyond our understanding had he seen how far recent physics has taken us. Which is just to say he was a product of his time.
Finally, if all we are to take from "There is experience, therefore something exists" is the existence of the experience, I don't see that we have made much progress. Certainly we would have no reason to conclude that anything more than the experience exists. But that's not the main problem here; it's rather that you are already making us of language, along with all that entails; so your very line of thinking presupposes far more than it pretends.
:100:
Quoting Bob Ross
Tautology.
(See my reply to #1.)
How do you/we know this is the case?
(See my reply to #3.)
Solipsism.
Could you please elaborate and clarify on this sentence? What do you mean by "mirror"? Where does the "mirror" come from? How do you know the mirror was given to you? By whom?
Quoting Bob Ross
Could you please give some examples with content? Talking with "X" and "Y" in the statement sounds totally empty and makes no sense to me.
Heres the overlooked part of the whole ding an sich dichotomy: the thing of perception, or appearance, is the thing of the thing-in-itself, the only difference being time, or, occassion. Or, using your word, happenstance. Some ol thing is out there, just minding its own damn business, been doing its thing for a million years, suddenly gets itself perceived by a human operating under the auspices of Transcendental Idealism. POOF!!! The thing that used to be all by itself out there suddenly gets itself transformed into a mere representation by a being sufficiently equipped for doing it, and its off to the rodeo.
So, yes, all we have to work with is the representation, but were trying to mirror with it, the thing out there that was formerly just another extant, albeit undetermined, object in a universe full of em.
-
Quoting J
Been paying attention, havent you. For you, a pro; for me a con, in that I took some liberties with the authors intent. Bob advocated negative knowledge, which require judgement, and from the preface to what were talking about here .
. Negative judgementsthose which are so not merely as regards their logical form, but in respect of their contentare not commonly held in especial respect. They are, on the contrary, regarded as jealous enemies of our insatiable desire for knowledge; and it almost requires an apology to induce us to tolerate, much less to prize and to respect them .
.I offered Bob a way out such he wouldnt be exposed to the obligation for apologizing, to himself only of course, for something his reason should have guarded him against, which he actually did, of a sort, by admitting to the point.
I trust you, so here we go:
Regarding the content of a knowledge judgement .knowledge of things-in-themselves is impossible;
Regarding the task of negative judgement: reject false knowledge, re: reject as false that knowledge of things-in-themselves is impossible;
Regarding where yet no error is possible: given from pure speculative reason, it is necessarily the case knowledge of things-in-themselves is impossible, insofar as all knowledge is of mere representation;
Regarding substitution of such negative judgements that are ..
true .. (knowledge of things-in-themselves is not impossible iff negative knowledge of things-in-themselves is possible);
but empty (negative knowledge is nothing more than negation of knowledge itself);
Regarding ..and just for this reason .: knowledge of things-in-themselves already having been shown as necessarily impossible reduces negative knowledge of things-in-themselves to the negation of that which never was;
And we finally arrive at: that which is inane, senseless and quite absurd.
TA!! DAAAAA!!!
(Mic drop, kill the TED lights, Chaplin-esque waddle exit stage right)
It depends whether one is an Indirect or Direct Realist
My belief is in Indirect Realism, whereby our ideas of objects existing in a mind-independent world are interpretations of sensory input derived from a mind-independent world that is real. I also believe that Kant and @Bob Ross can be said to be Indirect Realists.
I am sure that your belief is in Direct Realism, whereby objects in a mind-independent world are perceived immediately or directly rather than inferred on the basis of perceptual evidence
Odd, isn't it, that millions of years ago even before there were folks, lakes and seas existed, even though there was no mind present at that time able to judge whether a large stretch of water was a lake or a sea.
Odd, isn't it, that millions of years ago even before there were folks, that the colour red existed, even though there was no mind present at that time able to judge a similarity in the wavelengths of 620nm to 750nm.
Odd, isn't it, that that millions of years ago even before there were folks, there were rocks that could function as either a table or chair, even though there was no mind present at the time able to judge whether the rock functioned as a table or chair.
As lakes, seas, the colour red, rocks, tables and chairs only exist as concepts in the mind and names in language and don't exist in a mind-independent world, they cannot be perceived immediately or directly in a mind-independent world as required by Direct Realism.
Direct Realism is invalid as one cannot perceive something immediately or directly in a mind-independent world if that something doesn't exist in a mind-independent world.
As an Indirect Realist, I agree.
As both good philosophy and good science are founded on sound logic, your argument aiming at being logical is as much science as it is philosophy.
This is the position of the Indirect Realist. The Direct Realist would say that things-in-themselves are possible to know, as the world we see around us is the real world itself, where things in the world are perceived immediately or directly rather than inferred on the basis of perceptual evidence.
We can talk about things-in-themselves even if we don't know what they are
There are many passages in the Fourth Paralogism of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason where the thing-in-itself is declared to be the cause of appearances.
For example in A199/B244: Now if it is a necessary law of our sensibility, thus a formal condition of all perceptions, that the preceding time necessarily determines the following time (in that I cannot arrive at the following time except by passing through the preceding one), then it is also an indispensable law of the empirical representation of the temporal series that the appearances of the past time determine every existence in the following time, and that these, as occurrences, do not take place except insofar as the former determine their existence in time, i.e., establish it in accordance with a rule. For only in the appearances can we empirically cognize this continuity in the connection of times.
When we perceive the colour red, there is the appearance of the colour red in our sensibilities, which we can reason to have been caused by a particular thing-in-itself. When we perceive the colour green, there is the appearance of the colour green in our sensibilities, which we can reason to have been caused by a different particular thing-in-itself.
It is true that we cannot know the thing-in-itself that has caused our perception of the colour red, but we can reason that it is different to the thing-in-itself that has caused our perception of the colour green.
We may not know what the thing-in-itself that caused our perception of the colour red, but we can reason that it exists, and we can reason that it is a different thing-in-itself to what caused our perception of the colour green. We can name the unknown thing-in-itself that caused our perception of the colour red as R, and and we can name the unknown thing-in-itself that caused our perception of the colour green as G.
The names R and G are not descriptions, as a description of an unknown thing-in-itself would be impossible, but they are, as Wittgenstein says in Philosophical Investigations, replacements for the unknown thing-in-itself. As with the Beetle in the Box, PI 293, this allows us to talk about unknown things-in-themselves.
For the Indirect Realist, thing-in-themselves may be impossible to know, but we can talk about them.
Hello Banno,
Not really. It follows from us having sensibility.
I honestly think, although it is all conjecture, he wouldnt have changed anything if he were alive today. Rather, he would have to address different contentions which are raised nowadays (which he could not have anticipated), such as the common Einsteinien special/general relativity one, but nothing would have changed; as it applies equally today as it did then, and will apply just as equally the forever future. Thats the nice thing about Kant: he stuck to a very oddly specific subject matter which can easily subsume all others underneath it.
This just disqualifies the idea that nothing exists, and nothing produces experience.
Like what? Making use of language does not necessarily entail any sort of linguistic dependencies in a theory; so long it is carefully distinguishes semantics from the underlying content.
Hello 180 Proof,
Agreed, but necessary explication if I am to deduce anything transcendentally without blindly trusting the content of experience.
Because it is either producing fabrications or non-fabrications: in both cases, the representative facutly(ies) must be taking in that data as input, which are just either real or fabricated sensations. Whether there is sensibility with respect to excitations of senses by real objects (rather than fabricated ones), that is impossible to tell transcendentally; but there must be sensations. There could also be sensibility and the excitations are of fabricated objects (for something else could be fabricating them).
If there is sensibility in the sense that real or fabricated objects excite them (as opposed to ourselves fabricating the content of sensibility), then there are things-in-themselves. If not, and (ontological) solipsism were true, then there arent.
Why?
Hello Corvus,
I was just paraphrasing what Mww said (which I linked in the previous response): it could be the case that my sensibility is 100% accurate and everything about the thing-in-itself can be and is gathered by my senses; but I would never know it. My point was that I have no negative knowledge of the things-in-themselves either, for I only have positive knowledge of my own representative faculties.
Hence:
I cannot say this thing-in-itself is not square but rather I only have knowledge of a representation of the thing-in-itself, which is not the thing-in-itself.. So I know the thing-in-itself is not a phenomena, but that does not count as any sort of knowledge of it.
Time, space, logic, math, and the limits of sensibility. So theres not much determinate mirroring of the thing-in-itself from the thing.
Hello RussellA,
Yes, Kant would be an indirect realist.
Not in the contemporary sense of the term: I did not deploy the scientific method to determine this, and I necessarily cannot.
Not really. I mean we have to abstractly remove our a priori means of intuiting and cognizing the said thing-in-itself(in-themselves) that caused either one, and that requires we remove logic, math, space, time, and various categories of the understanding. Without even logic, theres no real intelligibility to your argument here.
Hello Bob
Isn't it the case that when your sensibility is 100% accurate and everything about the thing-in-itself can be and is gathered by your senses, you cannot fail to know it?
In T.I. the reason that you cannot know the thing-in-itself is that your senses cannot catch it. In other words, Thing-in-itself is not sensible, therefore you cannot know it.
Saying that your sensibility is 100% accurate and everything about the thing-in-itself can be and is gathered by your senses, but you would never know it, sounds like a contradiction, if not misunderstanding Transcendental Idealism, no?
So you have knowledge of a representation of the thing-in-itself, but that does not count as any sort of knowledge of the thing-in-itself. Then where does knowledge of the representation of the thing-in-itself come from? I read you saying, it is not the thing-in-itself.
Attention is one of the few things I enjoy paying!
A shame. It is apparent that arguing the point pushes you to defend Kantianism, reinforcing it in your mind.
Quoting Bob Ross
Yep. You say that as if it were a bad thing. I suggest that the idea that we need a proof that things exist is affected, an intellectual pretence. Descartes' bad idea. There are other ways of dealing with sceptics.
Quoting Bob Ross
Doesn't that sound a bit too good? A bit like the way in which disciples will praise the words of their Guru? Are his ideas perfect, and if not where do they go astray? If idealism is that good, it's odd that philosopher overwhelmingly reject it. Perhaps Kant was right, so far as he went, but was asking the wrong questions.
Quoting Bob Ross
Your very participation here shows that you hold that there are others who understand something of what you are saying and will participate in a dialogue with you. You're already well past "I think therefore I am".
As I alluded earlier, flirting with Descartes, Kant, Spinoza and so on is a philosophical rite of passage. It's lack of critique that marks the novice. Can you tell us where Kant went wrong?
It's the culmination of tautologous premises #1-5.
Hello Corvus,
Me as a representative faculty would, but me as a self-reflective cognition (i.e., reason) or psychological tip of the iceberg (ego) would never know. Another way to put it, is that one epistemically would never have any justification to say their sensibility was 100% accurate, even if it turns out, ontologically, it was.
It is just an ambiguity between our uses of indexical pronouns (e.g., you, I, etc.). You are deducing from, ontologically, ones representative faculties being 100% accurate whereas I was starting from what one could epistemically justify with reason (and not the understanding).
Hello Corvus,
Correct. The thing-in-itself is necessary not the thing (the sensations): the former is whatever exists for and in itself, not whatever was sensed of it.
The cognitions come from intuitions, and intuitions from sensations; and sensations from objects-in-themselves. The sensed object, is not the object-in-itself but, rather, whatever ones sensibility could capture of it (and thusly not the thing-in-itself).
Hello Banno,
Banno, I am not interested in throwing insults back and forth at one another. I am not interested in any badges, prestige, nor pretentious rite of passages. I am only interested in the truth. So, what arguments do you find convincing against transcendental idealism? I have my own reservations of it, but I am not here to make your argument for you. If you have contentions with the view, then please share them!
Conversing with people does not entail the cogito argument at all: it could entirely be the case that I do not exist in reality as it is in-itself and still can have a conversation with you right now.
Most of them?
I think it's been made clear, by myself and by others, that there are problems with the very idea of a thing in itself.
There's also the problem of one or two worlds - an area of disagreement amongst Kantians in themselves...
When you count the things that exist - say the chair on which you sit, or the cup on your table - how many do you count? Is it one, roughly the cup-in-itself as you perceive it? Or are there two, the cup-in-itself, unamenable to conversation, and the cup-as-perceived, about which we somehow can converse?
Or will you agree with me that being obliged to ask this question shows that something has gone badly astray?
How? Nothing I argued entails ontological solipsism. Perhaps epistemic, but not ontological.
And, paradigmatically, I am perfectly fine saying other people exist as bodies just as much as I do.
:roll:
I dont think you have said much in terms of your contentions yet.
Interesting: could you please elaborate?
Is this the problem of one or two worlds? Irregardless, I would say that, in terms of your cup example, there are two.
I am failing to see why this would be the case: could you please elaborate? To me it makes sense to separate the thing-in-itself from the thing (i.e., the sensation of it).
:100:
Yeah, I can see your lack of comprehension.
Quoting Bob Ross
That's what the rest of my post does... the counting bit is the one/two worlds problem. So you are happy that you have two cups, when realism and common usage says there is but one.
See how metaphysics leads one astray?
Not to butt into someone else's argument but . . . aren't we getting a little over-simplistic here?
@Banno, surely Kant didn't "deny that things exist outside the mind" -- he merely sought to discover the limits of our knowledge of them. And I think he was quite sure his chair existed. What he questioned -- rightly, in my opinion -- was whether "My chair exists" is a statement about some bedrock Existence-with-a-Capital-E (the Ultimate German Noun! :smile: ) which would have the same qualities if it did not appear as a phenomenon to us. Indeed, what we now learn from physics seems to support this.
Is it "metaphysics" or just the lazy habit of reifying abstractions?
I would have thought that, where a metaphysics leads you to count two cups where there is otherwise but one, that alone would be grounds for doubt.
:up:
I basically agree with your position vis-a-vis Kant, but I don't think it is right to associate metaphysics with Kant and dissociate it from Realism. If the claim that there are two cups is metaphysical, then so is the counterclaim that there is only one. As the tired truth goes: you cannot rebut a metaphysical claim without appealing to another metaphysical claim (generally speaking). If the question about cups is metaphysical, then so are the answers.
Edit:
Quoting Banno
Perhaps your claim was more rhetorical, then?
I like simple. I don't understand "bedrock Existence-with-a-Capital-E".
I did like your
Quoting J
...except that I think what's going on is mostly veridical. There are true statements about the world. Lots of 'em.
(Edit: and I'll add that most of them are not just about my perceptions.)
I wasn't appealing to "another metaphysical claim", but to common usage.
I won't ask a Kantian to get a cup out for tea. Heaven knows what might happen.
Well you appealed to "realism and common usage," but the relevant question is whether you made a counterclaim in response to a metaphysical claim. Wittgensteinian hand-waving isn't a real response.
Probably not, given certain prejudices about what a "real" response might be.
But it might be the best we can achieve.
Perhaps the rest is just shite we make up. Maybe that's important, too. But I'll reserve judgement.
:smirk:
All I am seeing are thin double-standards about what is shite and what is not, or what is metaphysical and what is not.
I'll admit to a prejudice towards a relatively direct, common usage sort of realism. No apology.
Do you inhabit some metaphysics-free space?
The place the comment addressed was Bob's thread "Metaphysics as an Illegitimate Source of Knowledge". Bob seems to have changed his mind.
So do I.
Quoting Banno
Of course not. Do you? You seem to claim the power to shoot down metaphysical claims from a metaphysics-free rooftop.
Quoting Banno
If you try to understand what your cup of coffee is, you will find that you always bring up uses and situations of cups of coffee, and also what others told you about it from when you experienced being young. What the cup is "to itself" is another question (Kant's question). So maybe people who are telling you the representation is all that's practically needed are the true idealist. All they need is what their thoughts "see" around them. This can come apart even further though when analyzing our own thoughts, the very structure of them, as we think of the parts of objects. What does it mean to say atoms exist? The word atom is said in the mind and images are brought up and combined with pure thoughts one has about research into atoms. The thoughts don't stand alone without the images. But if the images are wrong, completely not applicable to reality, how much reality is left when it's asserted atoms "exist". Hence Bohr as already been quoted in this thread. Some founders of QM were into idealism as well. To say we only know what we say about the world and not the world in itself is idealism. So who is the real idealist?
Eh, but my initial post to you asserted that Realism is not "metaphysics-free," to use your phrase. You responded by eschewing metaphysics and pointing to your appeal to common usage while ignoring your appeal to Realism. ()
Are you now accepting that Realism has metaphysical commitments?
I get the impression you are not laughing at my jokes.
Good, that's all I wanted.
Quoting Banno
It's a fine argument, and I agree. It's just not non-metaphysical.
Quoting Banno
I just don't understand why this always has to be like pulling teeth.
Edit: Just to be sure,
Quoting Banno
...was a joke directed at Metaphysics as an Illegitimate Source of Knowledge, another thread in which Bob questioned Metaphysics on the grounds that it was, at it's core, imaginary stories. The aim, roughly, was to draw attention to Bob's apparent change of heart, given his endorsement of the two-worlds view of Transcendental Realism. It was a crude attempt at asking how Bob might reconcile these apparently incongruous views.
Thank you for not recognising this, Leo, and putting me to the task of making explicit this vital aspect of the discussion.
Hello Bob
You seem to have forgotten to add your ESP, which can know the future, God and afterlife too. :)
Quoting Bob Ross
What do you mean here? The only thing ambiguous is the statement. I used 'you' to denote you = Bob Ross, and 'I' to denote me = Corvus. But I don't think I used 'I' on my previous posts, did I? I used 'you' to denote you for sure.
Quoting Bob Ross
There seem misinterpretation going on even what I asked about. I did not deduce anything, but pointed out, and asked if what you have been saying about Transcendental Idealism could be a self-contradiction or possibly misunderstanding of T.I, or both.
Everyone. At least, of a certain kind.
Not necessarily. All bodies are representations that I experience (including my own), but what they be in-themselves is cut off from me. This is not the same thing as claiming that all that exists is my mind.
That I can only transcendentally prove my own representative faculty exists is certainly true; but I can paradigmatically prove the existence myself (as a body) and other bodies in the same manner.
Although I am not convinced by that kind of argument (which I have spoken to 180 proof about), you are confusing ontological with epistemic idealism. Transcendental idealism is a form of the latter, not the former. Kant specifically denies knowledge of the things-in-themselves: so how could he possibly claim that things do or do not exist outside of minds? Honestly, if anything, Kant is an actual realist; insofar as he does try to argue for real objects outside of minds (which I am not convinced by as a transcendentally true proposition).
All you have said (that I can remember) is:
1. New scientific discoveries nullify transcendental idealism;
2. It is awkward to speak about things-in-themselves;
3. Things-in-themselves dont matter if we can know nothing about them;
4. Two worlds argument; (which was after my post you are responding to here); and
5. 180 proofs argument (which was also after this post).
Up to that post, you had only made the top 3, which I already responded to.
Realism doesnt entail there is one cup in the sense that you outlined. If we sense objects, then it is meaningful and correct to say that there is a cup-in-itself and a cup-that-we-perceive because there is a gap between them. Ontologically (beyond our representative faculties), obviously there is one cup (or a mush of existent things).
Hello Gregory,
I appreciate your response!
Fair enough. Our understanding of the world is constrained to language (or at least initially). I do, however, think we can use language in a way to avoid linguistic dependencies. So I dont find this very compelling.
Depends on what you mean by true idealist. They would not, all else being equal, be an ontological nor epistemic idealist by merely asserting that.
I think a lot of what an atom is is independent of language. Its properties are particularly dependent on the language I speak, nor whatever someone else speaks: it references something independent of language.
Not under my understanding. That would just be a form of postmodernism, but it doesnt entail in-itself that the (1) world is fundamentally mind-dependent ontologically nor (2) all one can know is the ideas from minds. I could see maybe how #2 could be misconstrued to count as that assertion, but it doesnt really refer to language, which is a meta-conscious higher-order operation (like reason) and not deeper mind operations: it could be that we cannot escape language but also that our experiences are not mind-generated (technically).
Hello Corvus,
I am just saying that using you = Bob Ross is ambiguous. Is bob ross my reprsentative faculties? Whatever exists in-itself that that faculty is representing? Etc
I am pointing out that that ambiguity is the source of our dispute (or your question) here: if my representative faculties were 100% accurate, I would never being about to know it with my faculty of reason. This doesnt negate your point that yes, the representations, minus our a priori means of intuiting and cognizing them, would be 100% accurate but, rather, that, even in that case, I wouldnt be able to epistemically (with reason) acquire such knowledge: so I would be forced yet to formulate the thing-in-itself conceptually.
Also, something I forgot to mention, even if the sensibility was 100% accurate, it does not follow that the representation is 100% accurate; because the sensations are intuited and cognized, which is synthetic.
I like simple too. "Simplistic," the word I used, means something different. What I meant, more or less, was that Kant's impressive philosophical system can hardly be reduced to "denying that things exist outside my mind." That would be simplistic -- because it misses all the nuances that Kant tried to explore about concepts like "thing" and "existence."
As for capital-E Existence, this was my whimsical way of referring to Kant's noumena. You can substitute "noumena" for my Capitalized Phrase if that helps.
For every effect there is a cause
We know that one of Kant's Categories was the Category of Cause. There are many passages in the Fourth Paralogism, where the thing-in-itself is declared to be the cause of appearances. For Kant, Knowledge is both formal, a priori through the Category of Cause, and material, a posteriori given empirically through sensations.
I agree with @J who wrote "surely Kant didn't "deny that things exist outside the mind" -- he merely sought to discover the limits of our knowledge of them".
Common sense tells us for every effect there has been a prior cause. EG, a snooker ball on a snooker table doesn't spontaneously move until hit by either a snooker cue or another snooker ball.
Reason tells us that the same effect may have different causes, eg, a broken window could have been caused by either a ball or a bird. Reason also tells us that two different effects have two different causes, eg, perceiving the colour red may be caused by an object emitting a wavelength of 700nm and perceiving the colour green may be caused by an object emitting a wavelength of 530nm.
The perception of the colour of objects in the world
Science tells us if an object emits a wavelength between 620nm and 750nm, all things being equal, we perceive the colour red, and if an object emits a wavelength of between 495nm and 570nm, all things being equal, we perceive the colour green.
For the Indirect Realist, the effect, eg, the perception of the colour red, can have a different kind of existence to its cause, eg, an object emitting a wavelength of 700nm. For the Direct Realist, the effect, eg, the perception of the colour red, has the same kind of existence as its cause, eg, an object emitting the colour red.
For the Indirect Realist, in the absence of any observer, an object emits a wavelength of 700nm. For the Direct Realist, in the absence of any observer, an object emits the colour red.
Does colour exist outside a person's perception of it
When we look at one object emitting a wavelength of 640nm and another object emitting a wavelength of 730nm, all things being equal, we perceive that they are similar in some way, ie, both red. But when we look at one object emitting a wavelength of 640nm and another object emitting a wavelength of 530nm, we perceive that they are different in some way, ie, one is red and the other is green.
The Indirect Realist attributes this to how the wavelengths are perceived in the mind.
Question to Direct Realists
My question to the Direct Realist is, in the absence of anyone perceiving such objects, whilst agreeing that the wavelengths of 640nm and 530nm are different, in what way is it possible for the wavelengths of 640nm and 730nm to be similar?
OK Bob
Thank you for your reply, and explanation. I am not sure if thing-in-itself is an entity that you are forced to formulate yourself conceptually. When you say, it is something that you formulate conceptually, it gives the impression that you know what thing-in-itself is. That is what conceptually formatting implies.
But I think Kant never said that. Thing-in-itself is something that you cannot conceptually formulate. If you can, then it wouldn't be thing-in-itself. Would you not agree?
Quoting Bob Ross
This statement seems to say that you have sensibility, representations, intuition and cognition in order to perceive an external object. Suppose you made a cup of coffee, and placed it on the desk. And you suddenly have a sensibility of the cup, a representation of the cup, an intuition of the cup, and then a cognition of the cup, and then if you are not 100% sure of all of them, you also have a thing-in-itself cup too. Which one are you going to drink? :chin:
Anticipated by whom? Not by Kant, I think, or whatever Kant-in-himself may have been.
For my part, I blame Descartes for this adventure in the preposterous, and much else for that matter. He started the ball rolling, and doomed otherwise fine minds to the remarkably silly task of determining whether they and all they regularly and continually interact with every moment really exist and are what they are shown to be while we interact with them. To Kant, though, is reserved the claim that there is, e.g., some thing which I call a chair and sit on all the time, which although it is in all respects a chair as I understand a chair to be and I use it as such, cannot be known.
That's fair enough. I did not see <this post> before I wrote my first post to you. As soon as I saw it, I edited my first post to ask about it, but you must have begun your reply before my edit went through. Thanks for the clarification. A misunderstanding, then. :up:
(My purpose is of course to try to restore metaphysics' reputation to a certain extent.)
We all have the concept of a chair in our minds, and we only know what a chair is because in our minds is the concept of a chair.
It is true that you can point to something in the world that corresponds with your concept of a chair, but you cannot point to something in the world that is your concept of a chair. IE, concepts exist in the mind, not in a world outside the mind.
Kant is not saying that we have no concept of chair in our minds, but he is saying, as would an Indirect Realist, that concepts only exist in the mind and not in a world outside the mind.
To my understanding Kant became a dualist because of the arguments by Hume that physical "laws" cant be known and that the world is a-mechnical. Kant thought this was a strong position if the world is just as we experience. But if there is phenomena between the thing-in-itself and us, then laws do apply to everything we do. Now someone can argue against him and ask "why shouldn't phenomena be capable of any change? Why can't a monkey suddenly appear next to you if its all mental." The concept of laws, physical laws, mean that instantaneous change in that sense is not possible. It seems to me Kant was protecting his sanity by he insistance on a noumena.
Also i'd like to say that if a positivist says he is not an idealist, why won't he just call himself a materialist then?
Quoting Ciceronianus
Quoting Ciceronianus
This is a little off topic, but Im always curious about positions like this. Lets say, for the sake of argument, that your position is true, i.e., Kant and Descartes were engaged in a preposterous, silly task involving, among other things, denying that a chair could really be known as such. In your opinion, then, what accounts for the fact that thousands of first-rate philosophers have taken D & K seriously, devoted enormous scholarship and brainpower to investigating the pluses and minuses of the Cartesian/Kantian tradition, built upon this tradition to explore many modern philosophical questions, etc.?
You see what Im getting at. If D & K are not merely wrong as they may be but preposterous and silly, how can you explain so many other philosophers inability to grasp this, which ought to be very obvious, as most preposterous things are?
Im not being snarky. Id really like to know what the truth of this position would entail about the history of philosophy, and the intelligence of philosophers. Youre not the first philosopher Ive put this question to, and have garnered some remarkable answers over the years! (My favorite is, "The only good philosophers are the ones that agree with me!") Whats yours?
I would say there is no "thing" called a concept floating about in a thing called a "mind." Concepts and minds all exist in the same world as chairs. What we call "concepts" are a consequence of our interaction with the world of which we're a part. We'd have no concept of a chair but for the fact that, as living organisms of a particular kind in an environment, we found it useful and desirable to sit on something different from the ground or a natural object, and we call what results from that a "chair."
I tend to think this is the right frame. Hence we can well ask the question -
Quoting 180 Proof
:up:
It's astonishing, I know. I don't know if it can be attributed to only one or even a few causes. I think we find some of the answers in the Analytic and Ordinary Language philosophy that developed in the 20th century--that is to say, the fact that the intelligence of philosophers was bewitched by means of language, as Wittgenstein said. That bewitchment may result from reification of concepts, for example. Another factor may be an adherence to a correspondence or spectator view of reality, criticized by Dewey and others, or the dualism resulting from the claimed mind-body distinction. There may have been a tendency to distinguish "ordinary" or "common sense" knowledge from "pure" or "absolute" knowledge, a kind of aristocratic view, drawing a distinction between practical knowledge (requiring consideration of probabilities and exercise of judgment) and knowledge of unchanging truth, available only to the wise.
Is your goal here to see how well you understand transcendental idealism as generally presented or how well transcendental idealism holds up to scrutiny?
If the latter, I would have a few contentions.
1. Ok.
2. Why must something "produce" experience? Why can't experience just exist? It seems you are assuming causality here. But from whence cause and why invoke it here if you're "starting from nothing" ala the cogito?
What causes the thing that "produces experience" to exist and why should we find it more likely that "something that produces experience must exist" than simply that "experience exists?"
3. Seems to hinge on justifying #2.
4. This just seems to beg the question. I can see 1, but then we jump to "something must produce experience," and now to "it must produce that experience due to causes external to itself (inputs)."
5. Sure, if you assume something like: "data input ----> processing ----> output." But why not assume something more basic, like light passing through a window. Something like: "Experience exists. Experience flows, changes." - seems to require fewer presuppositions.
Personally, I think the attempt to build up a foundation for knowledge from something like 1 is just the wrong way to go about things. Epistemology seems to inevitably be circular and fallibilist to me. But, if you're going to do it that way, then it seems like presuppositions need to be limited (else it is just assuming what you set out to prove).
Why must we have "absolute certainty" when it comes to "ontological purposes?" History seems to show that we're bound to be wrong either way. Building up one's system from a "firm foundation," doesn't seem to make it any less likely to crumble. That being the case, it seems like the methods of science are good enough to inform ontological questions (where relevant obviously).
Could it be said that all systems of philosophy try to be as exact as mathematics, but fail?
Interesting answer, thanks. Though I can't help thinking that something so clearly absurd (in this telling of the story) would have been noticed long before Wittgenstein . . . Pretty strong enchantment! Also, now that LW has unbewitched us, wouldn't that kind of put an end to serious metaphysics? Yet all the phil. journals I read still haven't got the memo, apparently. Or does the anti-spell only work for some philosophers? What do you suppose makes the difference?
Quoting J
One man's nuance is another's sophistry, perhaps.
Quoting J
I can't make much sense of "noumena", either, for reasons already given.
I don't think it was under threat, at least not from me. Metaphysics is inevitable. But I lack your forbearance.
Here's a small chance, a chink in the wall of Kant*. What if talk of the cup perceived and of the cup's ding an sich are talk of the very same thing? Perhaps there is just one cup?
* Yes, that's a Kant/cant joke.
Quoting Banno
I heard that someone once said to Kant after he had introduced himself "Oh, I'm an automatic cunt".
:100: :fire:
Science is impossible without Metaphysics. Causality, gravity, relativity, atoms, ... they are all metaphysical concepts. In the external world, there are only the objects, motions and energies. Without the metaphysical concepts, Science have no way to establish theories and scientific laws. I have been telling that to Bob until the face got blue in his last thread "Metaphysics as illegitimate source of knowledge for science". :roll:
You are quite correct "Metaphysics is inevitable."
Quoting Corvus
Yes... but I guess it still leaves us with open questions about which metaphysical models we may be willing to engage with, or accept as worth our time.
Quoting Janus
Nice. :wink:
I'd say those are physical, not metaphysical, concepts. They are concepts which describe/ explain what is observed. Causality, gravity and relativity are not directly observable, but atoms are observable via electron beams just as microbes are observable via microscopes.
I don't suppose anyone would take the whole Kant's system as some valid or useful system today. The world has moved on, and 200+ years is a long time even in Philosophy. But there are definitely interesting bits in the system, and some philosophers extract the useful bits from Kant, and synthesis with their own system e.g. Wilfrid Sellars. For Sellars, Thing-in-Itself is a legitimate scientific existence, where the objects and phenomenon are unclear and daunting at first. With ongoing investigations and observations, Thing-in-Itself can be manifested as the real scientific objects and phenomenon. But P.F. Strawson didn't accept that at all.
And Kant's system gave the foundation for Husserl's Phenomenology, which is a very prevalent and influential system today. So, old metaphysics is not totally useless or bad. For me, it is great study and reading material. :)
I don't agree with that at all.
There are actually n cups my friend, where n = the number of people experiencing, and thus representing the cup.
From this, we [s]can[/s] [I]must[/I] conclude that there are at least some 8 billion Moons, many more once you include the moths and other animals. This might be what is causing sea levels to rise. You get that many Moons in one place, and the pull of their combined gravity is sure to increase.
I really do not much care which account of Kant is the correct one - one world or two. Rather, my point is that, that this is such a bone of contention counts against the utility of the whole Kantian enterprise.
So if poor old @Bob Ross had answered that there were only one cup, I'd have skewer'd him on the other horn of the dilemma, that since there was only one cup there is no difference between observed cups and cups-in-themselves.
Very droll. I approve.
I think the 'dual aspect' as opposed to the 'dual world' interpretation of Kant is the only coherent one, but I do get where you are coming from.
Even if that is rejected on the basis that those are all experience of the cup, and not the cup itself; leaving experience aside altogether it remains trivially true that there are indeed many cups in the world. :smirk:
I think I'm in agreement with you. I can only speak for myself, but this type of metaphysical construction is of almost no use to me personally and has absolutely no utility in my life. This of course doesn't speak to the truth of it, just how much I care.
Although, as a matter of curiosity I do care; I have long wondered what it actually means to be a Kantian. I marvel at his ongoing influence or the ghosts of Kant.
Quoting Corvus
Sure. I understand this. What use do you make of it in life? Is it just of academic interest, or something more?
I find phenomenology - the littIe I understand of it - intriguing. I simply don't have time or the disposition to make a proper study of it.
I don't understand phenomenology to be metaphysics except in the sense that metaphysical speculation shows us what we are capable of imagining. Husserl methodologically bracketed the metaphysical question as to the mind-independent existence of an external world.
Similarly, I think science has no need of metaphysical realism or materialism, and also can safely bracket the question of the role of the subject in constructing phenomena; it can simply take things as they appear and imagine explanatory hypotheses, unpack what such hypotheses should lead us to expect to observe and then proceed from there to further experiment and observation.
So, I remain unconvinced and unconcerned about purported "blind spots" in science; I just find that critique to be inappropriate.
That's probably right. Phenomenology seems to examine how we experience reality as opposed to identifying what reality is. But it seems to me that in the unpacking of our experience, phenomenology may well show us that much of what take to be reality in the first place is a construction of culture, emotion and perception, with brains busily at work, sense making. Or something like that.
Quoting Janus
Sure. I think most people would agree. But many might say this approach is a mistake.
Quoting Janus
I guess this is fair but we can dissolve most metaphysical problems by simply pronouncing that we'll bracket them off. Is that fair?
I am sure there are some aspects that is useful for strengthening the Scientific principles for the Scientists from theoretic stance. For me personally it is purely for love of the knowledge and learning.
We both have the concept of a "thing" in our minds. If our concept of "thing" doesn't exist in our minds, then where does it exist?
Quoting Ciceronianus
It seems that your position is that of Idealism.
First, you have inferred that the chair can be known:
To Kant, though, is reserved the claim that there is, e.g., some thing which I call a chair and sit on all the time, which although it is in all respects a chair as I understand a chair to be and I use it as such, cannot be known
Also, you have said that minds exist in the same world as chairs:
Concepts and minds all exist in the same world as chairs.
Kant was a philosophical Realist. From the Wikipedia article Philosophical Realism
Philosophical realism usually not treated as a position of its own but as a stance towards other subject matters is the view that a certain kind of thing (ranging widely from abstract objects like numbers to moral statements to the physical world itself) has mind-independent existence, i.e. that it exists even in the absence of any mind perceiving it or that its existence is not just a mere appearance in the eye of the beholder
From the Wikipedia article on Idealism
Idealism in philosophy, also known as philosophical idealism or metaphysical idealism, is the set of metaphysical perspectives asserting that, most fundamentally, reality is equivalent to mind, spirit, or consciousness; that reality is entirely a mental construct; or that ideas are the highest form of reality or have the greatest claim to being considered "real"
Yes, empirical knowledge is insufficient by itself for understanding. In today's terms, Innatism is also needed.
Quoting Gregory
If Positivism is the philosophical theory that holds that the only true knowledge is scientific knowledge, based on data and experience, then Kant was not a Positivist.
Given your position as a Direct Realist, and assuming Direct Realism, when we look at an object and perceive the colour red, science may tell us that the object has emitted a wavelength of 700nm
How can the Direct Realist justify that a perception of red in the mind and a wavelength of 700nm in the world are the very same thing?
Kant does in fact claim things do exist outside minds, and that necessarily so. In fact, there are two arguments in affirmation of it, concluding from either subjective a priori** or objective a posteriori*** major premises.
So, what you think the warrant for those claims was unjustified, or, you think he had no warrant at all?
**the gigantic footnote to Bxxxix
***Bxx: . and that things in themselves, while possessing a real existence .
Hello Corvus,
I dont think it does. I can know X is not Y without knowing anything about the properties of Y. I know that the limits of my knowledge is that of bananas and never cucumbers; so a cucumber could be just like a banana, but I can only know about bananas.
It depends on what you mean by conceptually formulate: it can be formulated in so far as it is however the thing exists independently of what was sensed of it.
A representation is the production of senses [of a thing-in-itself or multiple] being intuited (in space and time), and intuitions being judged and cognized (with the understanding).
There is a cup-in-itself or something-in-itself that excited my sensibility. I get sensations of it. That gets intuited (into space and time). That gets judged and cognized. The aftermath of which is a representation.
Perhaps I misunderstood you: I was under the impression that you were just noting that things-in-themselves, if this theory is correct, are completely from our grasp and, thusly, are practically meaningless. Is that not what you were saying?
Why is this a silly task? Would you rather blindly trust some of your perceptions? I dont see any other options here.
. We shall thus spare ourselves much severe and fruitless labour, by not expecting from reason what is beyond its power, or rather by subjecting it to discipline, and teaching it to moderate its vehement desires for the extension of the sphere of cognition .
(Think carefully about what you dont know)
. To maintain a simply negative position in relation to propositions which rest on an insecure foundation, well befits the moderation of a true philosopher; but to uphold the objections urged against an opponent as proofs of the opposite statement is a proceeding just as unwarrantable and arrogant as it is to attack the position of a philosopher who advances affirmative propositions regarding such a subject .
(Speak even more carefully about what you dont know)
It is talk of the same ontological thing. I am not saying there are ontologically two worlds: I am saying epistemically there must be two, ontologically one.
@Janus
I think @Banno is confusing the ontological with the epistemic consideration of the cup (in their hypothetical situation they posited): just because epistemically we must treat the ontological object as two (viz., the thing-in-itself and the thing) does not entail in any manner that there are actually two objects in reality which we are describing.
The only one I remember off the top of my head is his "refutation of idealism" which only proves that there must be real things outside of me in space for my representative faculties to empirically determine the 'I'; but this doesn't prove that the sensations or intuitions themselves must be non-fabricated. If there is an argument for that, then please let me know.
After an amputation, some people experience pain in the part of the limb thats no longer there. This sensation is phantom limb pain. The pain is real. The phantom part refers to the location of the pain: the missing limb or part of the limb (such as fingers or toes) (Leveland Clinic - Phantom Limb Pain)
Moore famously put the point into dramatic relief with his 1939 essay Proof of an External World, in which he gave a common sense argument against scepticism by raising his right hand and saying "here is one hand," and then raising his left and saying "and here is another" (Wikipedia - Here is one hand)
Who is to say that Moore hadn't had both his hands amputated after an accident, and only imagined his hands were still there?
All of which was the point. If you already know there is a proof of a claim (things do exist outside the mind), I dont understand why you would then ask how could he possibly claim that things do or do not exist outside of minds.
And what's any of that got to do with fabrication? How are you assigning this condition, what do you mean by it?
You are on the right path, by my thinking. But you need to take the next step, and this is a very big step: Kant found noumena in some impossible beyond, but this entails that all that stands before us in intelligible structured existence stands apart from noumena, which makes talk about noumena impossible, rendering the concept worse than a mere necessary postulation: it is no less than nonsense of the order of, say, denying the principle of contradiction. Apodictically impossible, as Kant would put it.
Not only does this make any proposition about noumena nonsense (like Wittgenstein said about "the world" or value), it draws an impossible line, that between noumena and phenomena, as if all that is there in plain sight is of another ontological order entirely. If noumena is supposed to be true, unconditioned and eternal Real, then how is it possible to draw such a line which excludes my occurrent apprehension of this lamp on my desk? Excluded how? To draw such a line, as Wittgenstein reminds us, one has to know both sides to make sense, so how does one make sense of delimiting noumena?
What the Kantian concept fails to see is that noumena is all pervasive. This obviates the nonsense about ontological divisions: there are none. (One odd conclusion of this is that analytic philosophers lean toward the Kantian side of the issue, maintaining that talk about metaphysics is nonsense, while seriously opposing any talk about Kant.) One has to except that this lamp is noumenal, that phenomenal events are noumenal events. The trouble lies not in ontology but epistemology: there is something about this lamp that I am not seeing yet is there always already IN the seeing.
This is the kind of sh** that drives analytic philosophers crazy. Keep in mind that Russell called Wittgenstein a mystic because of his "threshold" claims and there is an entire philosophical tradition called phenomenology that travels right up this alley.
Neither you nor I have minds lurking within us, separate from the rest of us. We think as part of our interaction with the rest of the world. Language as well is a result of that interaction, as are the definitions arrived at in the use of language.
Quoting RussellA
More that of Deweyian Pragmatism than anything else, I think.
Well, there's the "common sense philosophy" of Thomas Reid and others, in reaction to the balderdash of Hume's skepticism and Berkeley's subjectivism (I tend to exaggerate on this issue, I know).
I think (but don't read enough to know) that modern efforts in metaphysics benefit from the therapeutic philosophy of Wittgenstein, Austin, Ryle and others, and may be of more worth as a result.
Well, this doesn't make the essential move, which begins with the logical structure of the statement about a nose bleed. Kant is doing an analysis of knowledge relationships, so there you are observing such a thing, the nose bleeding, and within an everyday sense of things, it is routinely familiar, something everyone knows about, like grass growing. But what is the knowledge relationship? This is what Kant wants to analyze. And epistemological determinations dictate ontological ones.
This is really a pretty familiar method. After all, your nose bleed has a number of analytical perspectives. What would a particle physicist say it "is"? Or an immunobiologist? Kant is a transcendental idealist. Look at the matter from his perspective. Alas, you have to read the Critiuqe of Pure Reason to do this.
Good point! A Physical thing, like a chair, is real, specific & tangible, requiring little thought to perceive. But metaphysical models are ideal, general & abstract, so they require a greater investment of time & thought to conceive.
Historically, artists, philosophers & scientists were the ones who were willing to put-in the effort to look beneath the surface, and "see" the universal essence of chairness : In German --- der stuhl-en-sich. Physically, a specific chair is an aggregation of invisible atoms, which take-on a functional form. Philosophically, a chair is an instance of non-specific "sitting support", which includes such tangible objects as an Eames Chair, and intangible concepts as The Holy See in Rome. :smile:
Chairness ;
if the term chair is to have definite meaning, there must be something in common to all chairs. This is what an artisan must have knowledge of if s/he is to fabricate a chair. This thing that is common to all chairs that all particular chairs participate in, is called the form of the chair, or chairness.
http://guweb2.gonzaga.edu/faculty/mcreynolds/phil301/forms.htm
Ceci n'est pas une chaise
This is not a chair, it's a representation of a chair ; which is an instance of chairness
If I interpret thing-in-itself as some sort of copy or separate entity of an object, it sounds absurd to me. Therefore I look at it this way. Thing-in-itself is the part that is not caught by my sensation. When I look at an object, I cannot catch the whole part in my perception from one angle from where I am and my perspective.
I am looking at this clock on the desk. All I see is the front face of the clock. It is a real clock. But the back of the clock is not visible to me because it is facing away from me, so the back is hidden. That part of the clock which is hidden from the view is the clock-in-itself in noumena. The front face of the clock which I am seeing in real time and space, so I can read the time, is the clock in phenomena.
Just like that, you see your nose protruding out from your face when you look at it with your eyes slightly downward focusing on the nose. You see the top of the nose ok, and it is the nose that is caught by your visual sense, but the rest of the nose hidden from your sight. The hidden from the sight part of the nose is the nose-in-itself in noumena. The part of the nose that your see is sensible nose in phenomena.
Some objects never appear in our senses, although we have abstract concepts such as God, afterlife, causality etc. They are thing-in-itself without any possible sensation or perception. This is my interpretation, and would be definitely way off the mark from the proper academic interpretations. I am just a hobbyist reader. This interpretation of thing-in-itself as an unobserved part of objects sounds not too absurd, and actually quite reasonable and agreeable to me. But you may find it totally absurd and disagreeable on the idea, so feel free to agree to disagree, and forward your thoughts and ideas. :)
I believe in Enactivism, the philosophy of mind that emphasizes the interactions between mind, body, and the environment (Wikipedia - Enactivism). I agree with Dewey's cultural naturalism, where philosophy should be seen as an activity undertaken by inter-dependent organisms-in-environments (SEP - John Dewey)
We agree that we as humans interact with the rest of the world, but the central question remains unanswered, where exactly is this world that we interact with?
For example, this question was never addressed by Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations.
There is certainly a world that we interact with, but is this the world of the Direct or Indirect Realist.
Is it the case as the Direct Realist believes that the world as we perceive it exists independently of our perception of it but exactly as we perceive it, or is it the case as the Indirect Realist believes that the world as we perceive it only exists as a representation of something that exists outside our perception of it.
Yes, there is a chair in the world that we interact with, but does this world of chairs exist in our minds or outside our minds?
Nicely put. But as someone who is neither an artist, philosopher or scientist, I feel I don't need to concern myself with idealism and such speculative frames. They add nothing to my experience. :wink:
Both are fine by me!
Something must produce experience because the content of experience is within space and/or time, which are but forms of experience. Thusly something permanent must exist outside of those forms which is the content of it. Otherwise, space and time are somehow producing the content (which is impossible) or nothing is (which is equally impossible).
Also, I dont think the cogito argument works. Just because there are thoughts does not mean that there is a thinker in the reality as it is in-itself.
In terms of causality, I am not presupposing physical causality (necessarily); but perhaps some causality between what was sensed and the process which occurs to produce a representation of it.
The content of experience must be supplied from something, even if it is from the same being. input is just whatever is being supplied.
Well, so the processing part comes from the transcendental recognition that we have a priori knowledge; and so it cant be like a light passing through a window. Even in that case, though, it is worth mentioning that there is input ? outputso you seem to be agreeing implicitly with #4 on this part. Also, are you saying that a the window doesnt provide a representation in the form of output? I would imagine that the light coming into the window doesnt 1:1 pass-through unscathed (unless this is like a really, really, really clean window or perhaps a special one).
Interesting. I would say that I know 1-5 based off of fallibilist, evidence-based reasoning and not absolute grounds.
Its not that we need absolute certainty: it is that we are incapable of knowing the things-in-themselves, which limits the outreach of science (and ontology proper).
I guess it depends on what you mean by "exist outside of the mind". For kant, space is a mode of intuition, so all he was saying (as far as I can tell) is that in order for the mind to be represented for experience there must be things outside as indicated by our intuitions which is not our mind. However, this doesn't entail that those intuitions themselves are not completely made up (by our representative faculties, a different faculty, or someone/thing else). By fabrication, I just mean it in the sense of something being simulated and not real. Our intuitions could be simulations of real objects which would have spatially separated things outside of us vs. us all the same. So, for you, why would you say that, as well as things in our intuition indicating things which are separate from the mind, there exists real things that impact our sensibility (and are not just made up)?
:up: :up:
One must somehow choose a set of 'categorical axioms', so to speak, as non-Euclidean geometers have done in order to explore both possible and impossible versions of the world.
Quoting Banno
*Boom!* :smirk:
:up:
It doesn't.
But when we talk about the cup, the pot, the cupboard, we are not talking about our private perception-of-cupboard, or the pot in itself, or one's mental image of a cupboard, but about the cup, cupboard and pot.
This has been pointed out previously.
Thats fine. Intuitions are made up, fabricated. Kant calls it something else, but works out to be close enough.
Quoting Bob Ross
Sensibility is a big place involving the entirety of the non-cognitive human intellect; best break it up into proper parts.
Because without real things that impact us there is no accounting for sensations. Sensation is just a message that there is an object present and affecting the senses, but can offer nothing as to what the object is. As for making it up .there is nothing in the physiology of perception that permits making stuff up. That is to say, under the assumption making it up implies contingency, all the human sensory devices function according to mode-specific natural laws, which do not lend themselves to being contingent. In other words, for that range of wavelengths there will be that impact on the eyes; for that chemical composition there will be either that impact on the nose or that impact on the tongue, or both, and so on.
T.I. exhausts precious little effort on the impacts on sensibility; it just is that which is given on the one hand, and that of which we are not conscious on the other. What is done with the given at the point of becoming conscious of it .thats where the fun is.
Quoting Bob Ross
I cant unpack this. The mind is represented conceptually, but no mere conception is an experience. To represent the mind for experience requires the intuition of it as phenomenon, which requires the mind to be a real object conditioned by space and time, which contradicts the conception. Youve got me over the proverbial barrel here, I must say.
I understand youve qualified this entire thread with your interpretation of the original view of transcendental idealism, which is fine, youre perfectly entitled. Perhaps for my benefit you could re-phrase the in order for . to elaborate on how it relates to that original view.
Quoting Bob Ross
Quoting Bob Ross
That you have to make such sophisticated an argument, sundering ontology from epistemics, what is from what we know, does not bode well.
I suggest, humbly, one cup, about which you and I and others hereabouts may talk, may see, may hold, fill with tea, drink from, put back in the cupboard. Doing such things is evidence enough that there is a cup; we need not doubt that without good reason.
And I rather think that you might agree with me, were it not for the need to hold your own on this forum.
A chemist may talk of the ceramics that go into the making of the cup, a physicist may talk of the interaction of the particles that make up the cup. And both are talking about the cup. The cup need not cease to be a cup by being described in another way.
This ordinary language is where we all start, even Kant. Doubt is learned.
Edit: about the image. Lots of folk get as far as "question everything". It has a huge pop status, a mark of rebellion, sticking it to the man, talking truth to power, and so on. "Why?" goes a step further, asking what grounds our skepticism, when we should doubt and when we are obliged to certainty. Does the one spraying graffiti question the paint can? The wall? What must be taken as granted in order to engage in doubt?
I wonder whether the purely descriptive activity of phenomenology can tell us where our experience originates or what explains it: that seems to be more in the domain of epistemological and metaphysical conjecturing.
This is not to say that phenomenologists have not ventured beyond the bounds of description into the realms of speculation and hypothesizing.
Quoting Tom Storm
It's fine to say that the scientific methodology which leaves the subject out of the picture and just focuses on the phenomena as they present themselves is a mistake if you can explain how incorporating the subject into scientific investigations would make a difference to the results and also how it could even be done. For example, how would you incorporate the subject into chemistry, biology or geology? are there any sciences that would accommodate the incorporation of the subject? I just can't see any conceivable way of doing it. Am I missing something?
Quoting Tom Storm
I don't say we shouldn't indulge in metaphysical speculation; I think it's a great creative exercise of the imagination; but I don't think metaphysical question are decidable and I can't see how they could be incorporated into scientific investigations. Findings in QM and biology, for example, may give rise to metaphysical questions for some folk, and be subject to metaphysical interpretations, but that wouldn't seem to change the findings themselves.
Is there not a coherent conceptual distinction between what is and what we know, or in other words between what we believe to be so and what is true or actual? Not to say that the two might not coincide, but there seems to be no guarantee that they must.
I think this is a question only if we assume that we or our "minds" are separate from (outside) of the world. That's not an assumption I think we should make.
We are a part of the world, not outside it. The chair is a part of the world as well. The chair isn't part of us. We aren't a part of the chair. We are a part of the world. The world isn't inside us, as we're a part of it.
We have certain characteristics as human beings. We interact with the world as human beings do. We see as human beings do, hear as they do, etc. There's nothing surprising about this, and it doesn't establish in itself that we can't know what it is we encounter or interact with. And, if we can't know what "things in themselves" really are, what possible difference would it make?
I can't see a ready answer to this either, but I'm not philosophically inclined to such views. Possibly @Wayfarer would provide us with an account of how this might be of use. It's probably not so much that adding the personal experience is possible, but recognizing that our scientific views are a form, perhaps, of intersubjective agreement, which ultimately fall short of that elusive thing: reality.
It's not as if one's ontology can be utterly seperate from one's epistemics. Each informs the other. Indeed, if what we know does not "coincide" with what we know there is, there is a big problem.
This is how philosophy often proceeds; There's an initial conjecture, in this case that there is a something about which we can know nothing. Objections are raised, replies are found, and a protective accretion forms around the initial conjecture. With someone of Kant's vintage, there's a veritable atoll surrounding the initial speculation.
There is a need to go back to the question: how many cups are there?
I'm with you on this, I think, though I don't think the problem of recognizing that science only deals with things as they appear to us should find too much opposition, at least among those who have thought at all about it at all; I mean I think it is pretty much tautologously true.
Quoting Banno
I agree, but what we know there is for our experience does not necessarily coincide with whatever there is absent us, and that is not at all a problem really, well at least not a practical problem, even if it might be a metaphysical problem for some folk; and if that is so, then that is really a psychological problem for them.
Quoting Banno
There is only one cup for us; the one we all perceive. Do our perceptions of it exhaust what it is? Will there always remain something unknowable about the cup?
Quoting Janus
But for Bob, there are two cups:
Quoting Bob Ross
That's OK. I am also none of those professions. But, my retirement from the money-grubbing world, allows me to dabble in metaphysical speculation, with no expectation for learning practical knowledge. I don't "need" to concern myself with essences to put food on the table. I just enjoy sampling possibilities, like fine wine, searching for that sine qua non.
If you have "no need", or desire for metaphysics, why are you posting on a philosophy forum? What does it "add to your experience"? Are you simply looking for arguments against Idealism & Metaphysics? You'll find plenty of that negativity here, but you might have to wade through some mushy unfounded "speculations", including materialistic metaphysics, to get to the hard stuff. :smile:
Metaphysics :
In modern philosophical terminology, metaphysics refers to the studies of what cannot be reached through objective studies of material reality.
https://www.pbs.org/metaph-body.html
Sine qua non : an essential condition; a thing that is absolutely necessary.
Literally "don't know what", but "it means more or less "Without (something), (something else) won't be possible."
The difference in parlance is a deeper issue.
Sure, there are things about the cup that are unperceived, and things about the cup that we don't know. But perhaps you want to say something more than that?
No, I would not want to say more than that except I might say "can't know" instead of "don't know", because I want to acknowledge that there could be things about the cup which are just not perceptible at all.
I mean as implausible as we might think it is, there is the metaphysical or logical possibility that the cup is, as Berkeley would have it, an idea in the mind of God or some collective entangled consciousness rather than just being a physical existent, but we can never know which is true or what the differences between such existences could be, because it is beyond the range of perceptibility.
Ive noticed that physics, as an example, and up to a point, deliberately excludes the context of an observation or experiment, by concentrating exclusively on the aspects of phenomena which can be accounted for in completely quantitative and observer-independent terms. Whereas biology has had to begin to pay more and more attention to context, which appears in the form of the environment, as it has become clear that organisms cant be completely understood except for in that context. Also because epigenetics and many features of genetic adaptation are activated by environmental factors. And quantum physics too has had to grapple with the questions of context and environment, specifically in respect of the observer or measurement issue. The realisation of the limits of objectivity is like the boundary between the modern (period between Newton-Einstein) and the post-modern (after quantum physics).
That touches on what I was driving at in the mind-created world argument. Objectivity assumes a very specific context, namely, one in which there is clear separation of observer and object. With the advent of physics as paradigmatic for science generally, this separation becomes kind of an unwritten assumption within philosophy also - the ego/subject in a domain of objects driven by supposedly impersonal or objective laws (the paradigm of modernity). But that is just what is called into question by transcendental idealism which points out that the transcendental unity of apperception is never itself amongst the objects of scientific scrutiny but which is the ground of rational analysis. That dovetails with the unknown knower analysis which is found both in non-dualist philosophy and later phenomenology (an eloquent commentary on which is provided by Michel Bitbol.)
Plenty of scientific work can proceed without paying any attention to that. Where it shows up is in questions about what it means.
Quoting Janus
Call me credulous, but when I have the tea in my hand, that's what I mean by talk of 'physically existent".
Quoting Banno
Quoting Janus
Well, it's atomic structure is not something I'd call perceptible. Yet I am sure there are folk who know about such things. You want something more than that, I suppose, an acknowledgement not that we don't know everything, but that there are things we cannot know even in principle? Here you are bumping up against paradox: if there are things beyond knowledge, then what can you claim to know about them?
I'll admit the possibility and then choose silence. Many a philosopher will wax prosaically at length on this topic. That seems muddled.
Quoting Tom Storm
Looking through comments, you caught my eye. Just a comment or so. I would guess (guess, not know) that you haven't come to see the course of thought that lies through and beyond Kant. Something Kant did not see, for he was a rationalist, rigidly so, and therefore was unable to draw certain conclusions about where inquiry ultimately goes in philosophy. But when he affirmed that one had to go through epistemology to get to ontology, that is, that claims about what is real are entirely contingent on what one can know, he made it clear that it was impossible to disentangle the former from the latter. But he was such a dyed in the wool rationalist, he couldn't make the Kierkegaardian "qualitative move", something that rings throughout subsequent phenomenology: This cup on the table is bound to my mental grasp of it being a cup, and this latter defines the extent the understanding can know the cup. But what about the irrational feels and fleshy tonalities (Michel Henry talks like this) and the bare presence of this thing?
There is, of course, a lot written about this, but the point would go like this: when we turn our attention to this conscious grasp of its object, and we turn explicitly away from its contextual and logical placings, which is to say we shut up about it and thereby allow (Heidegger borrows the term 'gelassenheit' to talk about this yield to the world as opposed to applying familiar categories) the world to speak, so to speak, the presence of the object steps forth. This is an existential move, not a logical inference, away from all that makes the cup the usual familiar cup.
Why bother to do this? Because the reality of the world rests with familiarity, not with some sublime connectivity between science and reality. When Kastrup talks about the brain, he simply assumes what Kantians, or neoKantians, take up in analysis. But Kant gets lost in his own tendency reduce things to form and structure, and it never occurred to him that he was making assumptions in his "objective" thesis that were themselves grounded on a profound and pervasive indeterminacy. Or, he did know this, but could make the move to affirm it, because he didn't see what Kierkegaard saw: that a concept, on the one hand, and this bare givenness of things on the other, had absolutely no continuity between the two. They are qualitatively radically "other" than one another, and this is made profoundly clear in extreme phenomenal affairs, like having your tooth pulled without anesthetic: clearly on is not witnessing reason at work; nor is a simple phenomenological grasp of the color yellow reason at work IN the yellow color.
Didn't realize I had written so much. At any rate, the value of this line of thinking lies not in some propositional statement. It is existential, like an awakening, because one realizes for the first time in this discovery that one actually exists. This is the existential foundation of religion. Of course, this take practice and study, but this is the brass ring of philosophy.
I agree with this, but this a case of realizing that no organism is isolated or can be properly understood without taking into account its interactions with other organism and also the inorganic environment.
The so-called observer problem in QM is the closest context I can think of to bringing the perceiving subject into the picture. But even there what constitutes an observer is controversial. For the doing of science considerations of the perceiving subject seem to generally be bracketed, but of course I agree it should be philosophically acknowledged that science deals with what appears to us, and not anything beyond that ambit.
Quoting Banno
Atomic structure is still no more than an appearance, and a mathematically based theory, albeit made possible by perception augmenting technologies. We cannot have more than that, so that leaves open the possibility that there may be real things, as opposed to imagined possibilities, which we cannot know even in principle; we don't even know if there are such things or not, so we really cannot claim anything at all about them. But we can exercise our imaginations, and I see that as a valuable creative exercise in itself, and that's why I say the distinction between 'for us' and 'in itself' is important for human life.
I agree with you that from the perspective of propositional knowledge such "waxing" is "muddled", but I don't think that matters, I don't think that negates its value.
Consider what it is that is silenced: it is the ordinary sense of the world that usually and immediately makes the claim on the moment. This is suspended. Where those who takes this kind of thing seriously differ is what this "nothing" reveals, but to even grasp at all what is at issue, one has have the prior exposure to the philosophy that opens inquiry into this.
What philosopher that seems muddled are you talking about? What is the source of the muddle? This is the question is begged here.
Here? Following on from the OP.
Yep. It's a question of preference, of what "parlance" one chooses, but I'll go with there being one table, described in two ways, participating in two language games, and hence that the table one sits at is the space mostly strung together with forces.
Why pursue philosophy? If you have a choice, perhaps best not.
Do you mean to say that we shouldn't bother to pursue philosophy unless we want to? I would take that as read, because the alternative would be that we ought to pursue philosophy even if we don't want to which seems absurd.
Quoting Astrophel
Not sure I can use this and I have, of course, heard such things expressed for much of my life. I spent my early life with Theosophists, followers of various forms of Buddhism, Hinduism, Gnosticism and mysticism. What is the discovery that one actually exists mean?
Quoting Astrophel
I don't disagree, but how far to take it? I think of science as a tool for acquiring tentative models that are useful in certain contexts. Is the gap between science and reality or the gap between anything and reality worth filling with speculations? For me it isn't. An issue for me is that reality itself is a gap. It's an abstract idea, we fill with our values and anticipations.
As an Indirect Realist, I agree with your paragraph, as would a Direct Realist, but this does not address the topic of the thread "A Case for Transcendental Idealism". In other words, "A case for Indirect Realism".
Both an Indirect and Direct Realist would agree that both us and the chair are part of the same world, but they would disagree as to the nature of this world
You inferred before your support for Direct Realism as opposed to Indirect Realism
To Kant, though, is reserved the claim that there is, e.g., some thing which I call a chair and sit on all the time, which although it is in all respects a chair as I understand a chair to be and I use it as such, cannot be known.
I am persuaded by Bertrand Russell's support for Indirect Realism as he sets it out in the beginning of his book "The Problems of Philosophy"
My question is, how does the Direct Realist answer Indirect Realism's objections to Direct Realism?
Quoting Ciceronianus
This morning, when making a cup of tea, it didn't pass my mind whether the cup was an appearance or a thing-in-itself. But this is a Philosophy Forum, where such considerations are of interest.
I don't think Kant must have thought there were two cups when he was making a coffee for himself, and took out a cup from the cupboard.
There is a cup on his worktop, and that is it. But there is a cup-in-itself according to his TI. So you might say Kant says that there are two cups? That is absurd.
But this is where Kant's Transcendental Logic kicks in. TL will say, no this is the only cup in the worktop, and that is it. TL is supposed to correct when your reason goes astray, and have illusions or broken thinking on the perceptions.
With TL operational, you know that you have only one cup on the worktop, and there is no confusion in that. In Kant, Logic is not just A -> B, B -> C, therefore A -> C, like some other folks seem to believe.
Logic is the engine of how rationality, intuition, perception, understanding and judgement works.
For the idealist, the contents of what they visualise, believe, remember, imagine and think in their minds are also significant, as the object they see in real world. I think we must allow that, because it is the foundation and source of all arts and creativity in human nature.
Of course the realists only allow what they see in the real world as the only existence, disregarding the mental contents. But that is what the realists are.
Both the Indirect and Direct Realist see a red cup, take it out of the cupboard, boil the kettle and make themselves a cup of tea.
However, the Indirect Realist takes into account the fact that science has told us that the cup we perceive as red is actually emitting a wavelength of 700nm. This causes them to question whether what they perceive as a red object is actually red. They then begin to question the relation between the appearance of an object and the object as a thing-in-itself.
However, Direct Realism turns a blind eye to scientific discoveries and continues to insist that when we perceive an object to be red it is actually red.
The Direct Realist refuses to address Kant's concerns about the ontological nature of objects in the world, and limit themselves to Wittgensteinian Linguistic Idealism, whereby language games are founded on hinge propositions, such as "I see a red cup". Such hinge propositions remain true regardless of the ontological reality of the world .
Part of the problem is that whilst the Direct Realist wilfully ignores Kantian concerns with the ontological nature of reality in favour of Linguistic Idealism, the Indirect Realist is willing to take into account not only Kant's ontological concerns but also Wittgenstein's Linguistic Idealism, acknowledging that language is needed to talk about the non-linguistic.
When I look at a cup, in my mind is a two-dimensional appearance, but science tells me that what I am actually looking at is a set of atoms in a three-dimensional space.
In one sense there are two cups, the cup as it exists as a two-dimensional appearance in my mind and the cup as it exists as a three-dimensional set of atoms, both of which are very different. But in another sense, there is only one cup, the cup as a thing-in-itself in the world as the cause of the cup as an appearance in my mind.
What is crucial is a logical connection between the thing-in-itself in the world and the appearance in the mind, and this connection is what Kant understands as the Category of Cause. Kant's Category of Cause is what ensures that there is only one cup, even though the cup may exist in different forms, first as a set of atoms in three dimensional space in the world and then as a two-dimensional appearance in the mind.
Kant's Category of Cause is crucial to the viability of his Transcendental Idealism.
Quoting RussellA
Not sure, if science has to be consulted for that assurance. Wouldn't common sense or intuition do?
And we don't really care about a set of atoms unless for some peculiar reason. To me atoms are just an abstract concept, that doesn't exist in the real world. Or if it did, it has nothing to do with me, or daily life.
This response nicely sets up what for me is a key meta-philosophical problem. Traditional metaphysics, in my understanding, isnt willing to concede that basic ontological questions are verbal disputes. And by traditional, I dont simply mean historic; I think this is still the case with people like Kit Fine, Karen Bennett, Ted Sider, and many others. Of course the other position is attractive: Maybe there isnt really a fact of the matter, and we are simply faced with a choice of parlance, a preference among various ways of assigning words to concepts and/or objects. Which position is true, Im not sure. At a guess, Id say it varies depending on the ontological topic. But the point I want to make is that this very question remains philosophically meaningful. It requires argument, in other words, to demonstrate if one can that problem X is a matter of terminology and hence not worthy of metaphysical argument. Or the reverse, of course.
The OP refers to Kant and post Kantian thinking. The muddle is what is in question. It is a difficult question for anyone who takes the categories of empirical science as a sound board for philosophical inquiry, but what you call muddle is simply the nature of our world, which is foundational indeterminacy. If you don't deal with Kant and his legacy and try to imagine two centuries of continental philosophy (I continuing on into the present through Levinas, Derrida and post Heideggerians) as something you can just "skip" and still remain in in good faith, then you are simply deluded.
No offense intended in saying this, but to speak of a cupboard, as you do above, like Moore speaks of his hands, then you really haven't even begun.
This is a huge question, and I have found reading mysticism and the Eastern descriptions of deeper insight simply assumes what has to be shown. The Cloud of Unknowing and Meister Eckhart sermons, say, are extraordinary statements, but how does one get there, to the essential thought and experience, from here, this everyday world, given that the latter constitutes a level of engagement history has really never seen before. This didn't exist when Eckhart was around, this inflated cultural construction that is entirely open to expansion, reducing our world to stereo instructions, if you will.
Only way competent inquiry can begin, is with the infamous phenomenological reduction of Husserl. Husserl speaks through European tradition, so we can understand as he does and follow along, and not in some exotic distant language of another time and mentality. Husserl is meticulous (boringly so) but he takes this OP line of thinking to its only possible conclusion: when we start asking those Kantian questions about the relation between a thought, its consciousness, and the world, the original relation is between transcendence and and me, not to put to fine a point on it. Transcendence here is really just a simple concept: I am me and there is a cup, so the cup transcends me because it is over there and not me at all. So how is it that one spans the gap between the two? Notice that if this cannot be dome, the cup is simply, and rightly called, transcendent.
Kant never went this way. He held transcendence to be perceptually beyond access. Husserl puts it there, right in your face. This is where the entire body of mystical writing humans have ever produced begins, in this simple encounter with transcendence: this cup is noumenal; phenomena are noumenal, if you want to talk like that. Husserl was no mystic, but this is because he was like Kant, strong intellectual gifts, but weak on intuition.
Quoting Tom Storm
Take Kastrup's Is Reality Made of Consciuosness (someone mentioned earlier and I looked him up): Certainly not that he is wrong. Not at all! But this is more at scienctific speculation than it is philosophy. But, I won't quibble about words. Talk about particles and particle interactions just beg the question: how does anything out there get in here, a brain? He is right to dismiss ontological divisions and tossing out mind body pseudo problems, but he stays in the scienctific speculative mode. The problem of consciousness is always personal, in the extreme personal, for there is no actual collective consciousness, and therefore the concrete evidence lies not public affirmation that science makes, but in the actuality of consciousness itself. The premises one seeks for one' argument about the nature of consciousness and the world lie in the objectivity of scientific inquiry (there is no other than the scientific method. Tying my shoes and affirming the Eiffel Tower is in Paris are applications of the scientific method) into consicousness itself. That is, in "me".
Science can tell us things that intuition cannot, such as when we perceive a red object, such as a post-box, the object may have emitted a wavelength of 700nm.
I only mentioned science to try to distinguish between a subjective mind and objective world. Coming from a position of mereological nihilism, my belief is that the cup as appearance does exist in the mind but the cup as thing-in-itself doesn't exist in a world independent of any mind.
In a sense, "atoms" are a convenient figure of speech for mereological simples, whatever they may be, but could be fundamental forces and fundamental particles existing in time and space.
I looked into this further, and it seems to me Kant's Category of Cause is a concept to be applied to the external world events as cause and effect. It is not to do with perceptions or the mental principles of reasoning.
I still think the process of reasoning coming to judgements activated by intuitions, perceptions or thoughts is operated by Logic. Could you please confirm your thoughts on this? Thanks.
Strictly speaking, wouldn't it be the instruments (invented and calibrated for their own convenience by humans) which tells the wave length of 700nm emission, rather than science? It would still be a mental idea when read by humans. The reading would be a contingent figure which has no meaning to the people in daily life. If the aliens made the instrument, it could be calibrated to read it as 10nm or 100 million nm.
Quoting RussellA
See, could be, not necessarily or for definite. "could be" sounds a negativity in disguise here. :)
Well, philosophy isn't necessarily devoted to questions or issues which make no difference. It's been called the love of wisdom, for example, and wisdom to me doesn't involve doubting where is no reason to doubt. It would seem wiser to accept that the cup we use every day without mishap is, indeed, a cup rather than something else.
Regardless, I think that what you call Indirect and Direct Realism reflect a pseudo-problem.
Let's take as an example what you say in response to Banno:
Quoting RussellA
Judging from this, both Direct and Indirect Realists see a cup emitting a wavelength of 700nm. If that's the case, both see the same thing. They can agree that there is a cup emitting a wavelength of 700nm which isn't part of them. What is the problem? What are they supposed to see? Presumably, they're not supposed to see a cup which doesn't emit a wavelength of 700nm. Is the problem the fact that a cup emitting a wavelength of 700 mn looks red to us? Why is that a problem? It might look to be another color to a hamster. It remains a cup emitting a wavelength of 700mn, though. It looks to be another color to a hamster because it's a hamster, not a human being.
The cup is made up of atoms (another example). We see a cup made up of atoms, then. Does that make it any less a cup? Might it be a plate or pan?
Difficult to escape from a metaphorical use of language. I am using "science" is a figure of speech that includes the instruments of science.
Quoting Corvus
Wholes have parts, which in turn have parts, which in turn have parts. But sooner or later one assumes there are parts which have no parts, ie, simples. In contemporary mereology, a simple is any thing that has no proper parts. Sometimes the term "atom" is used, although in recent years the term "simple" has become the standard.(Wikipedia - Simple (philosophy)). It may be that fundamental forces and fundamental particles are simples, but science may discover it to be something else altogether.
As Bertrand Russell in The Problems of Philosophy wrote:"But the notion of being 'in' the mind is ambiguous. We speak of bearing a person in mind, not meaning that the person is in our minds, but that a thought of him is in our minds."
In the expression "we see a cup made up of atoms", the underlying problem is the inherent ambiguities within language. It is not a cup that is the object of consciousness, but rather the thought of a cup that is the object of consciousness. There is no cup in our minds, only the thought of a cup.
There is the act of apprehending a cup in a mind-independent world, but this does not mean that there is a cup in a mind-independent world that is being apprehended.
The question as to whether cups exist or not in a mind-independent world is certainly not a pseudo-problem, as it is crucial to our understanding of the nature of reality.
I am still saying that, just the red patch colour visual perception would be more meaningful than the scientific instrument reading of the red patch emission of 700nm to the most ordinary people. :)
Quoting RussellA
ChatGPT says that atoms can be viewed with the special technical setup in the lab with the powerful laser powered microscopes, but I don't subscribe to that. There have been too many fabrications in science theories and allegations on what they have achieved, and what is possible by the new technologies and scientific discoveries, but soon found out to be hoax fabrications. ChatGpt can be handy for quick reference of simple queries, but it tends to spew out meaningless and groundless stories at times too, so I don't take it seriously.
Unless I am in front of the microscope and seeing the atoms, I won't believe the allegations on the existence of atoms claimed by ChatGpt, some shady Sci-Fi forums or web sites. Even if the supposed Atom images are seen in the microscope, how do you know they are atoms? The concept atom was first made by the ancient Greek philosopher Democritus to denote the micro substance making up the universe.
There is no legitimate conceptual, definitional or essential connection between what is being seen in the microscope and the concept "atom" apart from pure random arbitrary fanciful imagination, yes?
It is shocking to see some people blindly believe and trust without questioning or reasoning whatever is thrown to their faces under the label of science , and then try to push that to the others. In that sense, science can be just like religions. It might be just symptoms of the popular science in general devoid of metaphysics.
Sorry, but I don't think there is such a thing as a "thought of a cup." We may think of a cup, certainly, but no "thought of a cup" results; we create no "thought of a cup" thereby.
No. I meant that if you have a choice, you'd perhaps best not do philosophy.
This is an interesting observation and you have suggested as much in other places.
Can you say some more about what you mean by 'if you have a choice'?
I don't think of myself as someone who 'does philosophy' and I find much of it irrelevant or dull, but I am interested in what people think and why.
You don't see the cup as having depth? Odd.
Do you regret having done it or wish you could stop doing it? I don't.
Wittgenstein's philosophy as remediation, or Midgley's plumbing.
You do philosophy when you pick at folk's thinking, trying to get at what is going on underneath. Isn't there something you should be doing instead? Are you just procrastinating, or is reading this really more important? Do you have the feeling that there is something wrong in what is being said, together with a compulsion to put your finger on what, exactly, it is? To show the fly out, to fix the leak.
q.v.
Are you not familiar with the depth perception due to parallax? Is there really any such things as a two-dimensional image? Even lines and the paper they are on are really three-dimensional. A truly two-dimensional surface would be non-existent. Where is this purportedly two-dimensional image of yours to be found, and where the "surface" upon which it is purportedly projected?
It's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it. Not me necessarily.
I think most reflective people can't help but wonder to what extent they can justify their ideas and what's going on in presupposition land (or underneath in the realm of plumbing) when people say out loud some of the odd things they believe in.
We might be in agreement here, I'm not sure. Some folk would read the above as diminishing the import of verbal disputes. But I suspect that what we are doing in these disputes is choosing between various logics, grammars or language games; stetting up the game, as it were.
Wittgenstein sets the ground for this way of thinking about metaphysics, but it's seen in Popper, at least via Watkins; and I think Gillian Russell lends it some weight with Logical Nihilism. Midgley is more explicit on much the same point.
The atom used to be the stand-in for 'simple' in that it was 'indivisible', not composed of parts. Regrettably, nature did not oblige, as it turns out atoms are far from simple. Nevertheless the model of simple, quantifiable particles has been extremely fruitful pragmatically, as mathematical physics lies at the basis of a great deal of science, and much of science is built around the scaffolding of such mathematical simples related through hypotheses and algorithms. But as you point out, that is not what we experience. That is where the phenomenological analysis comes in, which considers that object as experienced. That can be traced directly back to Kant, although Schopenhauer states it more clearly: no object without subject.
[quote=Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p. 92). Springer International Publishing. Kindle Edition. ]A fact exists only when a mind extrudes it from the undivided flow of ongoing physical process. Indeed, the external world is a seething cauldron of activity where every molecule is in continual random motion. What we take to be a fact is deeply embedded in this maelstrom, and must be painstakingly and precisely cut out by a living mind. This feat is accomplished by an almost uncanny process which requires huge amounts of unconscious mental computation. The mind-independent world is not naturally divided into individual parts: At the most fundamental level, we can say that external reality is a continuous flow of ongoing cosmic process. [/quote]
Quoting Banno
I think the intuition behind philosophy is something wrong with what we understand as the reality of existence, that there's some kind of deep error in the way we understand the world, which can't be mitigated by glib phrases about flies and bottles.
I've noted your playing at cat-and-mouse on this thread.
This means, I take it, that thought of a cup, understood as some sort of object or newly created ontological entity, doesnt exist. Very well. What language would work better to talk about thinking of a cup? Might we call it an event? A process? A heebeejeebee? (that is, coin a new term?) Using existence in a particular way that privileges thing-hood doesnt change the fact that we still need some designation for what happens when we think of a cup. Thinking of a cup is no less real because it doesnt qualify as existing-like-things-exist. Or, if you want to put it in terms of quantifier variance, Ex requires an interpretation at the quantifier level, not just the domain of possible Xs.
"The Cartesian anxiety refers to the notion that, since René Descartes posited his influential form of body-mind dualism, Western civilization has suffered from a longing for ontological certainty, or feeling that scientific methods, and especially the study of the world as a thing separate from ourselves, should be able to lead us to a firm and unchanging knowledge of ourselves and the world around us. The term is named after Descartes because of his well-known emphasis on "mind" as different from "body", "self" as different from "other" - Richard Bernstein
"Thinking about a cup" seems to me a fairly good description of thinking about a cup. But thinking about something takes place; thinking is a process. We think in certain circumstances. We don't think about a cup when we look at it. We might think about a cup when we need to use it and wonder where we left it, for example. When we do that, an image of the cup doesn't suddenly form in our mind; we don't begin scanning objects around us comparing them with the image. "Is that the cup? No, it's a toaster--it comports with the thought of a toaster in my mind, not the thought of a cup." That doesn't happen. We know what a damn cup is; we refresh our steps, we check the cupboards we normally put cups in, or the dishwasher.
It's probably more the case that I'm ambivalent and therefore inconsistent.
That's what they say. I set out a little story on that for you, which we didn't finish chatting about.
:wink:
That's an interesting frame. I quite like it. I've generally thought that there is something wrong with the plethora of contradictory values humans hold, which seem to cause conflicts and suffering at wholesale levels. Mostly people seem to lack critical thinking skills - I'm not sure it even gets to philosophy for the most part, but of course all positions rest on presuppositions which are philosophically derived. But there is a problem of attribution at work here. It's all too easy to identify a 'paradise lost' scenario, or to claim that enlightenment thinking and the loss of gods has lead to untrammeled capitalism/climate change/Trump/apocalypse.
Quoting Astrophel
which I thought a very good but mainly un-noticed post. It goes on:
Quoting Astrophel
:ok:
I think the resonance that has for me is what is called 'tathata' in Buddhism - suchness, or just-so - and also quiddity in Scholastic philosophy, in which an essential nature is grasped at a glance.
Well, but only fairly good. Put it this way: Before time T, I'm not thinking about a cup. At time T, and for a certain time after, I am thinking about a cup. Let's stipulate that no new "thing" has come into the world at time T. The question is, What has changed? To reply, "I've thought about a cup" doesn't help enough. We know that; what we want to know is, How are we to understand this thought event if it isn't a thing and it isn't an image? (though I think it is, sometimes). Again, it won't do to keep saying, "Thinking about a cup" or "It's a process" in reply. Surely a neuroscientist wouldn't be satisfied with such an answer, and I'm suggesting that a good old metaphysical phenomenologist wouldn't be either.
That said, your description of how we use thinking about a cup to find a cup is accurate and well reported -- which for me only adds to the sense that we know very little about what's going on here.
An Australian friend traveling in America got to slightly know a homeless African American man and his young son. They were sleeping rough and begging near the hotel. It was cold and the son needed medical treatment they could not afford. My friend asked them, "Would free health care be a useful policy?" The man shuddered and became angry. 'We are not Communists. This is America."
Right, I dont at all mean to diminish the significance of identifying and, if possible, resolving verbal disputes in philosophy. Ordinary language philosophy, practiced in the modest way that I believe its originators intended, can be enormously helpful. So can metaphysical investigation, though I know youre less enamored of that.
But take the question up a level. How do we decide the meta-question of Is this merely a verbal dispute, or is there some genuine issue that could be settled by further thought and/or empirical investigation?? What Im saying is that this question cant be settled using a result obtained at the original level. That would be arguing in a circle, or elaborately begging the question. Rather, its a genuine fresh question requiring a new argument.
I don't think anyone does.
As I said earlier, metaphysics is inevitable. Analytic philosophy is particularly helpful in showing inconsistencies and lack of clarity in metaphysical suppositions.
Quoting J
One of the few useful things I found in studying management was the Cynefin framework, especially the notion of the chaotic context. See this Harvard Business Review article.
Metaphysics sets out the background against which the world is ordered, and is as much fiat as observation. One can avoid the circularity by recognising this.
To address that point more directly - I think that, for me, this is where Buddhist faith comes into the picture. It too teaches that the normal state is radically deficient, and analyses the root cause of that state of dissatisfaction ('dukkha') - whereas much of the thrust of secular culture is to accomodate and normalise that unsatisfactory state of being. I don't claim to have any resolution and am still plagued by numerous hindrances and doubts but there it is. (As I've mentioned a number of times, this is where T R V Murti's book Central Philosophy of Buddhism has been formative in my case, at it contains comparisons between idealist and Buddhist philosophy.)
That is interesting.
You may like Kierkegaard.
Quoting Wayfarer
It's rich material for speculation, but I am unclear what it tangibly provides me with. I have often felt this way as a boy. Everything around us has a strangeness if you're able to park your lifeworld, sense making approach.
Quoting Wayfarer
The funny thing is that almost any religion or political philosophy, if followed closely in a coherent (and loving) way by all, would probably deliver us from most of our ills. And yes, this might create new problems too.
The key issues we are also grappling with are incoherence and pluralism. Now I'm all for pluralism... but it also includes a fair few fuck-knuckles who can kick predictability and ontological safety into dangerous places.
Nice place to be. But how is it different to collecting antiques?
Quoting Gnomon
It's because of my conversations with others about metaphysics that I have arrived my position. And note, I didn't say 'no need for metaphysics', I said no need for certain speculative forms thereof. Quite different. I enjoy reading about what others think and why, and, parenthetically, should I learn something new, I might be able to use it. I didn't think there was any particular way to use a forum like this (other than being respectful).
Quoting Gnomon
I look for good arguments against and for any number of positions, from physicalism to idealism.
Never liked the word faith. Endorses silliness. But if you take a few years to study and actually come to understand what this post Kantian tradition in philosophy is about, then you would realize you've been duped. It has been very clear for a long time that conversations in analytic philosophy are no more than painfully well written justifications for avoiding metaphysics. I mean, absent metaphysics, there is really nothing to say. This reduces philosophy to a trivial play of words, and does little to advance an understanding of the world at the most basic level.
MY acts if faith?? Look, someone told you long ago not to read certain philosophy, and they were wrong.
No. I read certain philosophy, and found it was wrong. There's a tad too much presumption in your prognosis. And very little of any substance to your replies.
To say that the our fields of perception alone give us phenomena i think is contrary to phenomenology, which Kant may have have been the first author of. Mentally we have, or for now have, a "frame" and we put all our sensations on this 2d frame in order to organize it. The phenomena of the window behind me is behind me, and the noumena could be anywhere. I even think sounds exist objectively. A reality outside of us
Again, why 2d?
Where were we?
You'd kindly listed some of the argument so far.
Quoting Bob Ross
To be sure, (1) was that we understand vastly more of what lies behind our perceptions than in the science that Kant had access to, well over two hundred years ago. "Awkward" in (2) was used somewhat sardonically; "impossible" would presumably be more accurate. (3) was not just that they don't matter, as that they are irrelevant. That the two worlds argument is so central to Kantian Exegesis demonstrate an at least apparent incoherence. And @180 Proof's argument - which one?
Should we get back to the topic at hand?
Yes, as you say, most ordinary people can understand Naïve Realism.
Quoting Corvus
Yes, even the atom is a representation of something deeper, which is why my position is that of Indirect Realism. As the IEP article on Objects of Perception writes:
The indirect realist agrees that the coffee cup exists independently of me. However, through perception I do not directly engage with this cup; there is a perceptual intermediary that comes between it and me. Ordinarily I see myself via an image in a mirror, or a football match via an image on the TV screen. The indirect realist claim is that all perception is mediated in something like this way. When looking at an everyday object it is not that object that we directly see, but rather, a perceptual intermediary. This intermediary has been given various names, depending on the particular version of indirect realism in question, including sense datum, sensum, idea, sensibilium, percept and appearance.
In order to write the sentence "Sorry, but I don't think there is such a thing as a "thought of a cup."" you must have had the thought of a cup.
Parallax can be used to determine the distance of an object, as nearby objects show a larger parallax than farther objects, but it doesn't allow us to see the back of a three-dimensional object.
What is parallax doing? Is it giving us information about the distance of an object from us or is it giving us information about the three-dimensional space that the object occupies?
:up:
Thanks, I have downloaded a copy and will read it. :up:
===============================================================================
Quoting Banno
Are you using the word "see" metaphorically?
In my field of vision, I can only see the surface of any object facing me, which appears two-dimensional, but in my mind I can imagine the three-dimensional space the object occupies.
===============================================================================
Quoting Banno
I didn't actually say that, but even if I had, I would be in good company.
The BBC Science Focus notes that:
For example, we know the size of things from memory, so if an object looks smaller than expected we know its further away.
Might be closer to the case to say, there had to have been the thought cup, simply from the fact you must have had is already given by the thought itself.
And even that isnt as close to the case as, there must have been a judgement that the conception represents cup.
It may do well to note, in addition, as long as were making a case for transcendental idealism, that since it is merely the thought cup, there is already the experience of that particular object by the same subject to which the thought belongs, for otherwise the subject wouldve not had the authority to represent it by name.
Quoting Banno
Wittgenstein in para 293 of Philosophical Investigations makes a strong case that we can speak about things-in-themselves.
He writes:
But suppose the word "beetle" had a use in these people's language?If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty.No, one can 'divide through' by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is. That is to say: if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of 'object and designation' the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant.
A word such as "red" does not describe a thing-in-itself, but replaces the thing-in-itself, allowing us to sensibly talk about things-in-themselves.
IE, in Wittgenstein's terms, there is an equivalence between the words "red", as in "I see a red post-box", and "beetle".
Hello Bob,
What you argue is pretty interesting, but I don't know to what extent you accept or deny the existence of things-in-themselves. On the other hand, I see your premises and arguments as a subject of Philosophy of Language. I hope I am not on the wrong path to understanding it either.
The mind analyses every stretch of language as some mixture of memorized chunks and rule-governed assemblies.
Last summer, we had a funny debate on the trick word: 'Jack-in-the-box' and its big debate on pluralize such word. I have to quote @Dawnstorm here, because he made a precise analysis and maybe you could be interested in reading it:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/825242
By the way, what @RussellA has previously said in his latest post is very interesting too. This thread is exquisite for rookies like me who wants to keep learning on Philosophy of Language - or metaphysics -.
IDK, some systems seem to vocally criticize the attempts to make philosophy like mathematics. It seems to vary.
How can a thought be named ?
Is it the case that we have the thought of a cup and then name it, or is Wittgenstein correct
in his belief that we cannot think without language. He wrote in the Tractatus para 5.62: the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
If Wittgenstein is correct, then the mere act of writing "the thought of a cup" presupposes the thought of a cup.
I am not sure even Kant says you have a 2nd frame where your sense contents get transferred into for further organisation. Anyway, Kant was not a Phenomenologist, and Phenomenology didn't exist when Kant was alive.
In Phenomenology, the content of perception appearing in your consciousness is all there is in perception. You see your nose, and that is your nose. There is no such thing as impression, ideas, or sense data of your nose. But it doesn't end there. Your perceived nose can trigger all other parts of your consciousness as experience.
Your perception is also your experience with intentionality. You know that your nose is part of your body, it can smell, it can have a bloody nose, it also supports your sunglasses if you wear one. In that bracket of the nose in your consciousness, it has all the mental properties attached to it such as memory, imagination and belief in the nose.
So it is not that simple. If you are interested more in Phenomenology you could read Husserl's book "Ideas", "Logical Investigation in 2 volumes", and even "Philosophy of Perception" by Merlou-Ponty, which are all meaty heavy going works by the main historical Phenomenologists.
Anyway, like you, some people seem to interpret Kant as a naive idealist who claims that you have objects in your mind, and that they are the real objects. There are objects in the external world, which cause the senses to perceive the objects, but you don't know if they are the real, and there is the world of Thing-in-Themselves independent of your perception.
That is the exact problem many people have been objecting to. I think it is just an interpretation of Kant among many other different interpretations of him. But in reality, Kant never said that in his CPR or any other books he wrote. He just said the existence of objects which look like they exist, but don't get caught by our senses are called Thing-in-Itself, and that is the way the world is, and how our perception works. He doesn't push into the details of how they exist, why or what they really are.
It isnt, which was the point: thought of a cup is to name the thought, whereas the thought cup references that which is thought about.
The thought is just the system doing its job, in T.I., the synthesis of representations, and is an image. The name, then, in the form of a word, belongs to the image as its representation, and is its conception, and the different particular instances of that general conception are its schemata.
I would not be so presumptuous as to call W wrong. I have no problem whatsoever, on the other hand, in dismissing OLP, insofar as it is the case no word is ever presented that isnt first thought. It is never the case we think with language, or by means of it. The only reason for language in the first place, is to objectively express, to communicate, the cognitive systems functionality, but is not a necessary condition for it. Want proof? Read a book, to yourself of course, then reflect on what it was you were actually doing.
Quoting RussellA
Close. We think, and name that which is thought about, the object of thought, cup. Or we could just be recalling a priori what was already resident in us as that represented named thing. Some call that residence consciousness, others call it memory, some call it intuition. Doesnt matter; its just meant to represent that which has already been done, which just is, or given from, experience. The initial experience is not a priori, but the recalling of it by mere thought, is. How else to know a thing in a different time than its immediate perception?
-
The limits of my language is the limit of my world that I can tell you about. When I was bulletproof, many MANY years ago, by sheer accident I put a chainsaw into my left foot. Now theres a part of my world I will never be able to tell you about. No matter what I say, your experience will never relate to it unless youve done the same thing, and then, our experiences will only match in content and not the least in effect, and proof positive there is that in my world beyond, and therefore not accountable by, my language.
Why OLP? So we relieve ourselves of the hard part of inquiring where words come from. Its so much easier to examine the games we play with language, then to examine how the games we play are even possible. Funny, innit? That every single word ever, and by association every single combination of them into a whole other than the words themselves, being at the time of its instantiation a mere invention, is for that very reason entirely private? Gell-Manns language wasnt private, but Joyces, from whence it came, certainly was.
People are funny. They think that because they are taught the name of a thing, the thing always came with the name they were taught to know it by, theyre comfortable believing the name belongs to the thing as its identity. And maybe thats true for them, but it wasnt always. And simply from that fact, speculative cognitive metaphysics is justified.
No. I knew instead what "a thought of a cup" would mean in the context of our discussion. When I think about a cup I'm doing something, but no "thought of a cup" exists.
Remember I asked you: "What philosopher that seems muddled are you talking about? What is the source of the muddle? This is the question is begged here."
Come on Banno, speak!!
If you're looking for an answer that would satisfy a neuroscientist, I can't give one.
We walk. Walking isn't a thing, nor is it an image. We eat. Eating isn't a thing or an image. We understand what it is to walk and eat even though they aren't things or images. Walking, eating and thinking are activities we engage in when interacting with the rest of the world; they're part of how we live.
I agree. I have a pain in my left hand whose exact nature is inexpressible in language. The fact that I cannot express in language the exact pain does not mean that there is no pain. As Wittgenstein himself wrote in PI 293 of Philosophical Investigations: "The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all"
Quoting Mww
We look at the world and see an object that has been given a name by the Community within which we live.
Both the object and name are physical things that exist in the world, and we link the object and the name through Hume's principle of constant conjunction.
The name doesn't describe the object, but is linked with the object through Hume's principle of constant conjunction.
IE if every time I saw the Eiffel Tower and at the same time heard the name Eiffel Tower, I would begin associate the name Eiffel Tower with the object Eiffel Tower
As a name is only linked with a thought of an object by Hume's principle of constant conjunction, the one can exist independently of the other. IE, one can have the thought of an object independently of any name it may or may not have been given.
Quoting Mww
Many years ago, I had a garden fork go though my right foot, so I do have an idea of what you experienced.
Quoting Mww
Yes, for example what I understand by the word "tree" is unique to me, as no one else has had the same life experiences. IE, the meaning of "tree" for an Icelander can only be different to the meaning of "tree" for a Ghanaian.
It is only possible for you to write that "but no "thought of a cup" exists" if you already know what the thought of a cup is.
IE, I can only say that that building over there is not the Eiffel Tower if I already know what the Eiffel Tower looks like.
Similarly, you can only say that the thought of a cup doesn't exist if you already know what the thought of a cup is.
Youre right, and I may have placed the emphasis misleadingly on the idea of an activity in general. Walking and eating are unproblematic examples of activities, because understanding them seems to begin and end with some description of how our bodies work, and why we perform the activities. But thinking or, more controversially, having a thought has a lot of room for questioning. Like you, Id welcome some definitive input from a neuroscientist, but thats probably decades away. Even without it, we can recognize that the activity of thinking has aspects namely, the thoughts themselves that dont easily reduce to process-level description, and in fact invite the analogy with creating something or bringing something into being namely, the intentional object of the thought. I agree that this is often misleading, but I think we have to acknowledge the difficulty of accounting for the contentful aspect of subjective experience.
Superficially true, but insufficient to explain empirical discovery by a solitary subject.
Quoting RussellA
.has more to do with the relation of cause and effect than to perception and cognition. It is the case that the relation of perception to cognition is under certain conditions entirely a priori, the validity of which Hume vehemently .and quite mistakenly ..denied.
Quoting RussellA
Yes, but because of constant conjunction alone? I rather think not, insofar as Humes carries the implication of necessary antecedent impression, whereas pure thought of things is exclusive of it. Constant conjunction refers this object to this impression as a matter of habit, but the mere impression of an object is not enough to name it.
Quoting RussellA
But you just said the name is given by a relevant community, and if tree is that name for an object looked upon in the world by yours ..how can it be unique to you? If it is unique to you, it contradicts the proposition it is named by a community.
Life experiences are not identical but they can still be congruent, or similar enough to eliminate self-contradiction.
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HA!!! Like me and my foot, did the fork experience take your ego down a peg or two? One could say it was just a life experience, but the truth is, it perfectly exemplifies how to be a dumbass. Well .for me anyway.
My mental image of the Kantian frame-image is that it is not fully dimensional. That is, whatever dimension it has, the phenomena (not the noumena mind you) has more. Even other galaxies exist as phenomena when nobody is there to see it. Kant knew he lived in a real world, but he tried to reduce it to a philosophical formula. We don't want to be depersonalized (a classified disorder in the West) just because we like philosophy. As for phenomenology, it's father is Husserl but who is the great grandfather? "To the things themselves" they said but those things were "phenomena", hence the name of the movement. This dualism was enabled by the influence of Kant on latter philosophy. Phenomena is not understood by the immediate sensations anyway, hence the mere fact that I know the moon is there when everybody closes their eyes
Quoting Corvus
This sounds like Plato. Kant has a different "feel" to his work but that may be from the historical distance between them. Is it possible Kant was just a Platonist?
Interesting way to define the role of Metaphysics : to give us a general "background" understanding of how the world system functions. Aristotle described how the natural world works in his Physics, then, in the section known as Metaphysics, looked into how the Cultural (mental) realm imposes human will onto Nature.
I could be wrong, but I think was responding to your intimation about "ideology", with an ironic example of ideology-in-action. A man in need of affordable healthcare, scorns the idea of socialist medicine, where personal needs are more important than economic ends. Apparently, his adopted ideology is not in his own interest.
Your definition of Metaphysics in terms of military-style top-down order-by-fiat, seems to imply that Authoritarian rule is how things get done in the world. By contrast, a truly Democratic world would go around in circles. Maybe the perceived need for imposed order from above underlies both Religious and Political thus-saith-the-Lord Ideology. The sheep (masses) may need a strong-arm shepherd, but autocratic order may not be in the best interest of independent thinkers, such as philosophers.
Historically, Authoritarian leaders have had little patience with peer-to-peer philosophy and rule-by-the-unruly-masses Democracy. They see themselves as god-like figures imposing order on a rudderless world. Socratic philosophy, though, focuses on the self-imposition of order (self-discipline) for individuals. On the other hand, even Plato's justice seemed to settle for a pragmatic middle ground, by granting authority to counter-balancing tribunals in lieu of his transcendental ideal : Philosopher Kings. The American constitution also compromised with popular elections of a tripartite government, instead of a single hereditary sovereign King : an imperfect blend of top-down "fiat" and bottom-up freedom. :smile:
As a solitary subject in a strange land, what would your intuition of the meaning of "ngoe" be ?
Quoting Mww
From the IEP article on David Hume: Causation
Whenever we find A, we also find B, and we have a certainty that this conjunction will continue to happen.
If every time I see a particular object and hear someone say "Eiffel Tower", there is a good chance, though not absolute, that the name of this particular object is "The Eiffel Tower".
In a sense, the object does cause someone to say "The Eiffel Tower", in that there is a causal link between the object and the name.
Quoting Mww
The Icelander and Ghanaian can agree with the Communal definition of tree as "a woody perennial plant, typically having a single stem or trunk growing to a considerable height and bearing lateral branches at some distance from the ground".
However, each will have their own unique understanding of what trees are based on their very different lifetime experiences.
For me, Philosophy is a retirement hobby. But personally, I prefer collecting new ideas instead of old furniture. The difference is ideal vs real archetypes. Which is more valuable depends on where you "store your treasures". :smile:
Quoting Tom Storm
Can you give me an example of non-speculative, empirically proven, Metaphysics? Chemistry may be the least speculative form of Physics. But, some people denigrate Quantum Physics because its inherent uncertainty invites speculation.
Check-out 's description of Metaphysics above. He implies that you can avoid the circularity of conflicting opinions by having your opinions given to you by a higher authority. Is that the kind of non-speculative metaphysics you prefer? :cool:
Ok. Thanks.
You ought to know that nothing is certain. :razz: But lack of certainty is no reason adopt an untrammelled fantasy life. As I've said to you previously, I don't think humans arrive at capital T truth and notions of 'reality' are human constructions. There are experiences and concomitant understandings of the world we can't really avoid unless we want to die young or cause harm to others. I can presuppose I experience a physical world which I share with others. I don't need more than this. Idealism, for instance, makes no difference to how we live.
Sounds to me like you may be fighting a battle against old fashioned materialists and certain forms of science and that 'educating' others is part of your project. Ok then. I've also noticed that many people seem to be attracted to expressions of metaphysics and religion to appease the ghosts of their unhappy childhoods. Good luck to them too.
forfucksake. :roll:
Well, that's a first.
If you haven't been able to follow the thread so far, there's not much point in continuing.
Where did that come from?
The clowns have certainly taken over this thread.
No, he doesn't.
There is continuity between Plato and Kant. Plato's Forms or Ideas are intelligible structures that make sense of the sensible world, while Kant's categories of the understanding are a priori concepts that structure our experience.
Kant's categories were adapted in slightly modified form from Aristotle who was of course a (critical) student of Plato.
Both Plato and Kant posit that what we perceive with our senses is not the totality of things - for Plato, the sensory world is a shadow of a higher reality. Kant likewise argues that things-in-themselves (noumena) exist beyond our sensory experiences (phenomena), even though they are not directly knowable. Plato and Kant both maintain a close connection between knowledge and ethics - for Plato, knowledge of the Good is crucial for ethical behavior. Kant also sees moral action as connected to rationality and autonomy, asserting that ethical conduct arises from practical reason.
Both emphasize the role of reason as a crucial faculty for understanding. Plato's rationalism is evident in his theory of recollection and the ascent to true knowledge, while Kant's critical philosophy is an investigation into the powers and limits of pure reason, but again with a strong emphasis on the a priori elements of knowledge, arguably inherited from Plato.
In both Plato's "Republic" and Kant there's the ideal of the philosopher as a mediator between the intelligible and sensible worlds, someone who, through reason, can guide others or even society toward a better state (for example Kant's famous essay What Is Enlightenment?) But it's also important not to downplay the way in which Kant differed from Plato, particularly in his rejection of the idea of the intuitive, direct knowledge of the Forms - it would overstate the case to call Kant 'a Platonist' but there is discernable continuity between them.
Is there nothing I can do to make you explain something? By any standard, you're just too vacant and glib. Is this what analytic philosophy's positivism has done to you? An economy of expression of such efficiency that sparsity itself is its primary tenet?
How about this piece of yours: "Metaphysics sets out the background against which the world is ordered, and is as much fiat as observation. One can avoid the circularity by recognising this."
Of course, here, with this OP, the metaphysics starts with Kant. So, and we all know how this leads on to discussions about epistemic failings of naturalistic models, like Quine's. This doesn't sound muddled to me. The issue here is principally how one can establish what is the case in the world at the level of philosophy, the most basic level, without an analytic of the structure of the relation between the known and the knower. This relationship is foundational to any ontology, and this goes directly to what BOB ROSS opened with.
Let the analysis begin, Banno. What say you regarding this matter of the lack epistemic grounding that pervades any and all that can be the case?
I believe Kant and Hegel both were against this "intuitive, direct knowledge of the Forms". What -immediate awareness of oneness with God in the present moment- meant to mystics was different than philosophers. The latter desire to reach the ultimate by thought's guidance. Thoughts are fun
Are you certain that Transcendental Idealism is about free-floating fantasies? Or is that just a prejudice against philosophical Idealism (science of ideas)? The OP is looking into "preconditions of experience", one of which is Life and another is Sentience (Mind ; Consciousness). Are those topics fantastic, and off-limits, to you? Is it a waste of time to discuss the reality behind physical appearances, that Kant called ding an sich (essences)? And what cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman called "core reality"?
Apparently, you free-associate Metaphysics with Religion & Spiritualism. But, for me Meta-physics is Philosophy, the science of minds & ideas : the non-physical non-fantasy aspects of Reality. For example, Psychology is about Metaphysics (res cogitans), while Neuroscience is about Biology (res vita). Have you seen anyone on this thread talking about gods & ghosts? Or is the association with Fantasy merely a figment of your imagination? That might be a topic for another thread. :smile:
A Case for Transcendental Idealism :
By transcendental idealism, I just mean the original view, plus my interpretation of it, made by Immanuel Kant; which starts with the core idea that we cannot know what is transcendent to us (viz., what may exist completely independently of our representative faculties) but, rather, only what is transcendental (viz., the necessary preconditions for the possibility of experience) . . . .
Quote from OP
Note --- Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle says that we "we cannot know both the position and speed of a particle, such as a photon or electron, with perfect accuracy". But we don't have to fantasize those properties, we can interpolate them ("what may exist") from observational evidence. Physics is about what we can know via the physical senses. Metaphysics is about that which transcends the capabilities of our senses. The fact that our senses have limitations is not a fantasy. For example, invisible Oxygen is an interpretation of relevant evidence, not a perception --- yet it's essential for life. Likewise, electrons have never been seen or photographed, but they are essential for material properties. The orbit "image" below is calculated from mathematical data, not from visible light.
I think I can see this. As a non-philosopher, with a tendency towards postmodernism (often with reluctance - it's cultural) I generally hold an anti-foundationalist orientation. I think everything humans believe is constructed by us, a kind of performative interpretation of the world we think we know. Some of these ideas work better for certain purposes than others. Many of our preferences seem to be held for reason of aesthetic satisfaction - it pleases some of us to 'find' meaning, and others not to find meaning.
:100:
Put another way, a metaphysic is a statement of what must be the case, in order for the world to be as it is. Most analytical philosophy deprecates such endeavours, on the grounds that the world is all that is the case. Hence leading to relativism and subjectivism:
Quoting Tom Storm
You often seem to present your ideas in the manner of a Christian or Muslim apologist, with the loaded rhetorical questions.
Answer: no.
Quoting Gnomon
Really? Why do you say that? And why did you put capitals on these subjects? I already know they are important to you. But it would be true to say that the outcome of certain metaphysical beliefs are the building blocks of certain religious or spiritual views - just as Aristotle is foundational to Thomist beliefs.
Quoting Gnomon
Another loaded rhetorical question about a subject I don't recall raising.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't think you can justify 'must be the case'. You can presuppose it. You can wish it. But can you say it must be true? Mostly metaphysics are tentative theories aiming to explain why the world seems to be how it is. But I don't think we even have a way of establishing precisely how the world is, let alone answering the why part.
:up:
The world appears to us as three dimensional. As I see it there are no two-dimensional images; you have length and breadth and depth in any image. without depth the image cannot exist. Think of paintings; colour and tonal relations give the sense of depth. We might want to say the canvas is a two-dimensional surface, but it is not so.
As @Banno said even those with sight in only one eye still experience depth-perception. Of course, this experience is amplified by parallax, but it is a matter of degree not all or nothing.
My question earlier, which you have not attempted to answer was 'what two-dimensional surface do you think the purportedly two-dimensional image of our visual field is projected onto"?
Isn't there a connection between metaphysics and the domain of necessary truth? I am thinking of the idea that 'there are things which are true in all possible worlds'. Logical principles and arithmetical proofs are often included under that heading. That idea is associated with Leibniz, and also with the principle of sufficient reason, which is precisely concerned with the reason why things are the way they are. (But then, of course, Leibniz' style of metaphysics was one of Kant's targets of criticism.)
In contemporary terms, all such ideas as principles of sufficient reason and the domain of necessary truths are regarded as outmoded ways of thought. But then, I ask, on what authority are such judgements made? This is why I've become interested in neo-thomism and contemporary Aristotelian philosophers who make the case for a revisionist form of metaphysics in full awareness of the scientific worldview and of Kant's criticism of metaphysics. 'Philosophy', as one of those neo-thomists said, 'always manages to bury its undertakers'.
I understand that people may argue this. But since we only have our possible world to go by, how do we know that the logical absolutes, for instance, transcend our world or, for that matter, the human cognitive apparatus? I don't believe we do.
Logically grounded theories in the metaphysical discipline necessarily justify, or validate if youd rather, whatever is the case given by the course of the argument.
It never was that metaphysics sets out the background against which the world is ordered, but sets the background by which the subject orders himself, such that the science by which the world is ordered, by and for him, becomes possible.
By rational argument. That some fundamental logical principles must obtain in order for a world to exist in the first place.
Thats a great description of the kind of metaphysics based on transcendental deduction, of which Kant was the master. I think its possible to invert it, though, and describe metaphysics as the investigation of whether basic structure can be discerned in Reality (substitute for this term whatever you think comprises the widest possible field of investigation). This is an inversion because it puts into question the term the world as it is, and asks whether a correct metaphysics might change our understanding of that world.
Quoting Wayfarer
An excellent contemporary philosopher (not an Aristotelian, I dont think) who does this is Theodore Sider. His Writing the Book of the World is a bravura performance and really shows what metaphysics can look like today.
But you never leave the world of human cognition, which holds the scheme of understanding by which this makes sense and can be employed. The logical absolutes are not a view from nowhere.
Quoting Tom Storm
That's where the distinction between intelligible and sensible objects is relevant. To quote Einstein, 'I cannot prove scientifically that Truth must be conceived as a Truth that is valid independent of humanity; but I believe it firmly. I believe, for instance, that the Pythagorean theorem in geometry states something that is approximately true, independent of the existence of man.' But it is something that can only be grasped by a rational intellect. As Bertrand Russell remarks in his comments on universals, that 'universals are not thoughts, but they appear as thoughts.' Why? Because they're again only discernable by reason. Due to the empiricist prejudices of modern culture, I maintain we've lost sight of the significance of that.
This goes back a long, long way in philosophy. For the Greeks, nous (the rational intellect) was that faculty in us which allowed us to perceive the logic of the cosmos, the domain of universal truth. Now, of course, it's just the evolutionary adaptation of an advanced hominid, mainly considered for its usefulness. ;-)
Not an unreasonable view, although everything sounds bad when reduced to a slogan like that.
In the end this comes under interpretation - your preferences suggest to you that the logical laws are instantiations of the transcendental. I don't see how we can make that claim since knowledge of such principles are predicated on human understanding and cognitive processes.
The new Plato's Cave?
Does the law of identity, or the law of the excluded middle, begin to exist as a consequence of biological evolution? Or are they principles that are discovered by a being that is sufficiently evolved to grasp them?
[quote=Thomas Nagel]The only form that genuine reasoning can take consists in seeing the validity of the arguments, in virtue of what they say. As soon as one tries to step outside of such thoughts, one loses contact with their true content. And one cannot be outside and inside them at the same time: If one thinks in logic, one cannot simultaneously regard those thoughts as mere psychological dispositions, however caused or however biologically grounded. If one decides that some of one's psychological dispositions are, as a contingent matter of fact, reliable methods of reaching the truth (as one may with perception, for example), then in doing so one must rely on other thoughts that one actually thinks, without regarding them as mere dispositions. One cannot embed all one's reasoning in a psychological theory, including the reasonings that have led to that psychological theory. The epistemological buck must stop somewhere. By this I mean not that there must be some premises that are forever unrevisable but, rather, that in any process of reasoning or argument there must be some thoughts that one simply thinks from the inside--rather than thinking of them as biologically programmed dispositions.[/quote]
Indeed, but of course transcendental arguments are fragile. X is a necessary condition for Y; Y is the case; hence, X is the case. That first assumption is an easy target.
How would we demonstrate either?
What, then, to make of Paraconsistent Logic? Devolution?
I suggest you would have to deploy reason in support of an argument, and that it's a logical argument, not necessarily requiring empirical validation.
Quoting Banno
I didn't say they were. I asked the rhetorical question, can such principles be considered a consequence of evolutionary development. The reason being the claim of the role of 'human cognition' in deriving truth statements - that everything we know is dependent on our cognitive capacities. I'm trying to demonstrate that there are things we grasp - quite fundamental things - which are not dependent on our cognitive apparatus, which are grasped by reason.
At back of all this there is a distinction between the unconditioned and the contingent. I think that is a large part of what metaphysics was concerned with, and that it has mainly dropped out of the dialogue, nowadays.
Yes, I figured that. I think reason like empiricism has its limits. And using reason to justify reason's sovereignty is, naturally, circular.
Not being an expert in Wittgenstein, I wonder what he thought of people with aphasia, who lose the ability to understand and/or produce language? Surely they still think, right? But it's possible he wasn't aware of those issues. Or is he defining thought in such a way that it always includes language? (Seems odd).
In any event, it seems wrong to say that language would be the limit of our world. Languages can always be expanded, and often are. There is no real limit to what existing languages can convey if properly expanded.
Indeed, all computable functions can be detailed using mere binary code. And it's a strong, (if not super well founded) supposition on physics that the universe "is computable," or "describable in computable terms." This would seem to make our processing throughput, our bandwidth, in essence, our "concious awareness," the limits of our world. And that seems more obvious as the limit.
On the flip side, we also have experiences we lack the ability to put into words. But we can, through hard effort, gnaw around the edges of the ineffable, something you see in Merton, Pseudo Dionysus, Eriugena, etc. But this doesn't show so much a limit on our language itself, but our ability to wield it. It's a limit on languages ability to live up to our full capabilities.
It's not rule following. It's probably something innate.
But as Nagel says, the buck has to stop somewhere. Unless, that is, you take necessary statements as contingent! That's where the circularity enters the picture.
It is. There's just no fact about whether you've ever followed it.
Maybe it comes from an analysis of what we do. Where does the framework for that analysis come from? Not sure.
Quoting ANDREW ABERDEIN
A good read.
Cool! Thanks.
You're treating a thought as if it's an object, a thing. I say a thought isn't a thing. You merely beg the question when you compare a thought with a building. Your analogy doesn't work. Now if you were to claim I must know what a building is to say a thought isn't a building, that seems clear, but I don't think that helps you much.
Caught my eye, this one. Consider: An alternative way to think about metaphysics would be this: it is not that our senses have limitations, nor about what we can know via the physical senses nor about transcending the capabilities of the physical senses. This kind of thinking suggests a kind of meta-science, as if science were on the cusp of metaphysical discovery, making speculative science the cutting edge of metaphysical disclosure. Of course, this kind of thing is miles from Kant, but Kant didn't understand metaphysics at all. He didn't understand that metaphysics is another order of thinking about everything.
Metaphysics makes its appearance not in the laboratory or on the white board of equations and their speculative "interpolation" where paradigms leave off, but in the simple relation between me and this cup on the table in the inquiry that brackets or suspends all superfluous and implicit assumptions that construct the knowledge relationship. The idea is that when I encounter the cup, the perceptual moment is a construct of mine, in which I already know cups and the like and this one here is, upon the familiar encounter, is already known---you know how Hegel made a huge deal out of this, justifying his "rational realism". How, after all, does one get OUT of the universal and TO the actual particular? (noting with some frustration that 'actual and 'particular' are both universal concepts themselves! No way out),or, how does one step out of language to affirm this cup which has a presence that is clearly not at all language? is how someone like Derrida would put it. Anyway, this "already" thickens, you might say, perception, defines and makes conditions for knowing something to be the case. Husserl thought that one could, through his method of suspending the vast bulk of knowledge that implicitly attends me seeing a cu--the cup as a body of coinditioned forethought, acknowledge the pure manifestation. This is existential metaphysics, it might be called.
There are those, including myself, who think that the direction of this Husserlian method takes perception to an impossible clarity of the world, which I want to call the threshold of metaphysics. Very personal, yet, not at all at odds with language and logic, as such. Its "impossibility" lies in its defiance of a shared culture of understanding. Get enough people practicing this method and talking about their experiences, and then a new language emerges. Tibetan Buddhists have a language of words only they can understand, I have read; and Heidegger talked a bit like this in his famous Der Speigal Interview referring to Buddhism.
Transcendental idealism? It is right before your eyes. Drop the term 'idealism'. Better: transcendental phenomenology.
That statement sounds Kantian, the extrapolation from phenomena to an impossible metaphysics. I don't really disagree, because it is right to say that there is more to what IS the case. I take the matter differently: When we observe the world and its phenomena, the metaphysics is not on the other side, so to speak, of what is witnessed, impossible to reach perceptually, but making for sound and necessary postulation. Rather, the radically "other" lies undisclosed, as if forgotten, IN what appears. Kant's "concepts without (sensory) intuitions and empty; intuitions without concepts are blind" rests on the assumption that normal, ordinary apprehensions of the world are all that can constitute experience, and the idea that the noumenal was identical to the phenomenal was entirely lost on him. Noumena entails phenomena, is a way to put it, for the term is supposed to be what really IS real, and therefore cannot have this exclusivity. But this leaves the matter in the hands of logic and speculation about what 'noumena' means, and this doesn't really make the most important point about metaphysics. This latter is IN the actuality of the encounter with phenomena. This is the idea. One has to step out of Heidegger's dasein, out of being. Literally leave this world, if the world is defined as he defines it; a suspension of all assumptions. We are in the mystics world.
Tom Storm is right. But why are we so different? Meaning is discovered in the openness of what Heidegger called gelassenheit, a term associated with the Amish and others, referring to a yielding and suspending of one's understandiing's insistence. He even refers to Meister Eckhart in his Discourse on Thinking. Some may be naturally inclined to take to continental thinking, like myself; but others certainly can be intellectually persuaded for the objective case is there. Husserl was no mystic. Nor was Heidegger. Kierkegaard? I don't think so. But their thinking is rich with metaphysics.
That would be 'Tibetan', would it not? Augmented by knowledge of the Tibetan canon and oral traditions.
Quoting Astrophel
I can see we're going to go deep in the long grass here.
It wasn't that this distinction was lost on him, but that in his philosophy, the terms signify different aspects of the world. He uses pheomena in the standard sense as 'what appears'. Noumena is a different matter and a source of both controversy and confusion. First, etymology - 'noumenal' means 'an object of nous', which is usually translated as 'intellect' albeit with different connotations to the modern equivalent. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy says "Platonic Ideas and Forms are noumena, and phenomena are things displaying themselves to the senses... This dichotomy is the most characteristic feature of Plato's dualism; that noumena and the noumenal world are objects of the highest knowledge, truths, and values is Plato's principal legacy to philosophy."
But Schopenhauer pointed out that Kant's use of 'noumenal' was completely different to the previous usage:
[quote=WWR p556]The difference between abstract and intuitive cognition, which Kant entirely overlooks, was the very one that ancient philosophers indicated as ????????? [phainomena] and ???????? [nooumena]; the opposition and incommensurability between these terms proved very productive in the philosophemes of the Eleatics, in Plato's doctrine of Ideas, in the dialectic of the Megarics, and later in the scholastics, in the conflict between nominalism and realism. This latter conflict was the late development of a seed already present in the opposed tendencies of Plato and Aristotle. But Kant, who completely and irresponsibly neglected the issue for which the terms ????????? and ???????? were already in use, then took possession of the terms as if they were stray and ownerless, and used them as designations of things in themselves and their appearances.[/quote]
That introduces the further complication of the 'ding an sich' (thing in itself) and the vexed question of whether that is the same as, or different to, the noumenal. And one last confusion, that of the conflation between the noumenal and the numinous, which sound similar, but which come from entirely different roots and have very different meanings, albeit with a kind of overlap (in that the noumenal is sometimes conflated with the numinous, which means 'the holy'.)
That said, I'm *kind of* getting what you mean by this question: Quoting Astrophel
That is what I tried to previously compare with the Buddhist 'suchness' or 'tathata' and also the scholastic 'quiddity'. There are some similarities, although also great divergences, in that both seek to articulate the 'true nature' (Buddhist) or 'essence' (scholasticism) of things. (I checked it against ChatGPT, you can review it here.)
I agree with this depiction of the 'thing in itself' from an online primer on Kant:
So all that said, I think I see where you're going with this line, but there are other issues (which I'll leave aside for now.)
I am making use of Daniel Bonevac's Video Kant's Categories.
Reason doesn't create logic, rather, what we reason has been determined by the prior logical structure of the brain
The brain must have a physical structure that is logically ordered in order to make logical sense of its experiences of the world. IE, the innate ability of the brain to process such logical functions as quantity, quality, relation and modality. In other words, Kant's Categories, aka The Pure Concepts of the Understanding.
For example, in our terms, Relation includes causality, and Quantity includes the Universal Quantifier ? and the Existential Quantifier ?.
In Kant's terms, there are certain a priori synthetic principles necessary in order to make logical sense of experiences of the world . These innate a priori synthetic principles are prior to Reasoning about the phenomena of experiences through the Sensibilities. It is not the case that our reasoning is logical, rather it is the case that our reasoning has been determined by an innate a priori structure that is inherently logical, one possible consequence of the principle of Enactivism.
Our understanding of the world must be limited by what we are able to know of the world and what we can know of the world is limited by the innate structure of the brain. Taking vision as typifying the five senses, the human eye can detect wavelengths from 380 to 700 nm, which is only about 0.0035% of the total electromagnetic spectrum . In addition, understanding is also limited by the physical structure of the brain. As no amount of patient explanation by a scientist to a cat will enable the cat to understand the nature of quantum mechanics, by analogy, no amount of patient explanation by a super-intelligent alien to a human will enable the human to understand the true nature of quantum mechanics.
Kant is in effect saying that Chomsky's Innatism is a more sensible approach than Skinner's Behaviourism.
From my books on Kant, they all seem to agree in saying that Kant's main point for writing CPR was to draw a boundary on the power of human reason i.e. reason can only operate within the limits of our senses. What is not entered in the sense are not legitimate objects of human knowledge making Metaphysics as invalid form of knowledge.
I don't agree with those views in the books, because Kant made clear himself, that he loves Metaphysics. Kant wanted to establish Metaphysics a subject which is different from Science in methodology and domain. Not invalid form of knowledge.
In doing so, he had to create the concept of the thing-in-itself as an object of an unknown world, and the upshot is the 2 different type world i.e. noumenon and phenomenon which looks like a typical dualism. But whether it was a real dualism as such would be subject for debate. My view is that it wasn't a dualism, but was just a way of drawing boundary between what human reason can do reliably, and not.
Quoting Gregory
I thought about Kant as a Platonic dualist too at one point, but as @Wayfarer pointed out, there are clear differences between Kant and Plato. In Plato, the world of ideas was the real world. The phenomenon world is a transit temporary and shadowy world.
That view was coherently supportive of the Christianity doctrines and had been adopted by the apologists from the ancient through the medieval times and even today. Platonic realism is the universals are the part of the reality in the world of idea, which is the true universe. I don't think Kant would have agreed on that.
Pitiful, aint it? Just as ol Henry didnt understand production efficiency. Landry didnt understand football. Gandhi didnt understand civil rights. Wright didnt understand buildings. Just what we of the vulgar understanding didnt realize we always needed, huh? Another fool coming along, disrupting the status quo, knocking us from our collective intellectual comfort zone.
Quoting Wayfarer
You know what its like? Its like .dog food and house paint both come from a can, therefore dog food is the same as house paint. As my ol buddy Forrest would say .thats all Im gonna say about that.
When we look at the world, we initially see a two-dimensional image. I am not aware of any two-dimensional surface that this two-dimensional image is projected onto.
:up:
I dont want to overlook this important quotation. Nagel is telling us that, as @Wayfarer says, the epistemological buck stops with what Nagel calls thinking from the inside -- that is, from within rationality rather than from an alleged viewpoint that claims to somehow evaluate rationality from outside. In order to claim, for instance, that reasoning is a biologically or evolutionarily programmed activity, you would still need reasons for the claim, which can only be discovered by, once again, thinking from within rationality, because thats the only place you can find reasons.
However, I think theres an equally important insight here that can get overlooked: Nagels claim is an epistemological one, not a metaphysical one. Hes not saying that there must be some premises that are forever unrevisable, that is, metaphysical discoveries that are incorrigible and which can be used as foundational premises. That would be a misunderstanding. Ive read a lot of Nagel and I think hes agnostic on the question of basic ontology. But he firmly argues that the only way to approach the question is from within rationality.
Not quite right, in that reason alone does not account for PURE reason, right there is the title of the book.
This attempt to introduce a complete revolution in the procedure of metaphysics ( ) constitutes the aim of the Critique of Pure Reason .
The boundary on the power of pure reason merely follows necessarily from the revolution in its procedure.
Quoting Corvus
Close, but still not accounting for Pure reason.
. Reason must approach nature with the view, indeed, of receiving information from it, not, however, in the character of a pupil, who listens to all that his master chooses to tell him**, but in that of a judge, who compels the witnesses to reply to those questions which he himself thinks fit to propose*** .
**operating within the limits;
***operating no matter the limits.
The revolution in metaphysical procedure extended reason into that which has nothing to do with the senses, but establishes the possibility and validity of pure a priori conditions, which had always either been unacknowledged, or when acknowledged then outright denied. You know .consign it to the flames kinda nonsense.
The main point in CPR ended up being, pure reason can only operate, with justice, within the limits of, not experience, which just is practical reason, but possible experience, and that is its proper boundary, transcendental philosophy, then, being that which sets the boundaries as to that of which the justice consists. That is, that which is otherwise is illusion. Junk knowledge.
Except for the quotes, a personal interpretation of the original view, whatever its worth. Still, if reason were limited to the senses, itd be pretty hard to not only justify, but to even come up with, some modern scientific theories.
A "judge who compels the witnesses to reply to those questions which he himself thinks fit to propose". He takes this further in the Critique of Judgment where we fill the world with purpose that is not in the phenomena and which we do not know exists in the noumena. Plato thought the world was a reflection of the forms. Kant said we can know nothing at all about noumena. I see that now. He divorced the shadows from the forms such that we cannot know what a form even is. Agree?
I love irony, but spell it out for this fool. The question is, why am I saying Kant didn't understand metaphysics? I also insist Kant knew nothing of the essence of ethics. Indeed, he had no understanding of the generational basis for ethics at all. His position rests on unexamined presuppositions. This as well can be discussed.
My issue with his transcendental idealism is that it entirely fails to grasp the Wittgenstieniam point that if someting is affirmed to be true, then we have to be able to make sense of it not being true. This is why he refused to discuss ethics and metaphysics in terms of value and "the world." Their denial makes no sense. This is another way of saying they are not contingent terms, but absolutes, that is, simply givens int he world. Kant didn't understand that what is transcendental is what is right before one's perceptions IN the empirical phenomenon. His exposition on synthetic judgments was important, of course, but he didn't ask why it is that one simply must postulate noumena; he didn't face the requirement that given that all we ever experience is phenomena, the term must have its grounding IN phenomena.
This is borne out in post Husserlian thinkers like Michel Henry. Husserl posited that the object, this candle in front of me, stands, without the intentional epistemic cord to constitute a relationship, as a transcendental object, which simply means it is there and away from me and transcends me. Kant's world had the Real noumenal X entirely beyond recognition. Husserl starts with what is clearly there, in the phenomenal event that is originally given, and the candle is not questioned for its distance "over there". Fink called Husserl's method the completion of Kant's Copernican Revolution. See the way he opens his SIxth Meditation:
.....the phenomenological reduction, brought us into the d imension in which we stand before the problem-field of philosophy. Instead of inquiring into the being of the world, as does traditional "philosophy" dominated by the dogmatism of the natural attitude, or, where inquiry is not satisfied with that, instead of soaring up over the world "speculatively," we, in a truly "Copernican revolution," have broken through the confinement of the natural attitude, as the horizon of all our human possibilities for acting and theorizing, and have thrust forward into the dimension of origin for all being,
The ineffability that inspires the transcendental positing is an actual threshold for Fink, where analysis can go and reveal. You see here here Fink talks in dramatic terms like "the dimension of origin for all being." Analytic philosophers rolls their eyes skyward at something like this. But then, that is all they do, because they simply cannot and will not deal with the world. They only deal with arguments.
Yep. Purpose relates to how the subject feels about a thing, regulated by aesthetic judgement. Phenomena relate to what a subject knows about a thing, regulated by discursive judgement.
Quoting Gregory
Ehhhh .he doesnt give us much to work with here. Forms .exist a priori in the mind . Supposedly, any instance of a form, form of this, form of that, is meant to be that which exists a priori in the mind as the possibility for whatever this or that is.
Kant says we can know nothing at all about noumena, but .why? Therein lay the solution to the nonsense.
If a thing is affirmed to be true, the sense of its falsity must already be given. If we know it is this, we must already know why it is not that.
How is this not covered end to end in Aristotle?
-
Quoting Astrophel
Theres a ton of references to just that. He did understand it, in his own way. Just because someone understands it differently only indicates they approach from a different direction, and doesnt negate the antecedent.
Definitions of terms I don't hold with any great value. Heidegger went to the Greeks because he found something closer to the phenomenological account he was trying to put together which was intended to distance philosophy from traditional metaphysics. But to him, Plato's metaphysics was the first step away from the "primordial" world of what lies originally before one prior to philosophy. I am interested in this primordiality and not in other realms of possibility. To me the theory of forms places the grounding of what is real in this world "elsewhere". Take a look at that infamous Third Man Argument, the one about a form including itself, ad infinitum: This is close to Wittgenstein's objection to logic being able conceive of itself: in order to understand what logic is as logic, one would have to assume a perspective apart from logic; but then, to understand this, one would have to assume yet another perspective, and so on. This is the kind of thing that a rationalist metaphysics will produce. It is nonsense to think.
Plato is entertaining to read, but little help for understanding the world. And historical definitions only muddle things: concepts are open, not closed affairs, and this is radically true for concepts like noumena and phenomena. One must ask about the context Kant was in when postulating noumena. Talk about pure forms of the categories of pure reason as the ultimate grounding for reality is a flat out dismissal of experience as we know it, and this "as we know it" is all there is from which a metaphysics can be determined. The noumena/phenomena distinction he discusses has to be abandoned, as do all such talk of an impossibly distant metaphysics.
I have come across a lot of such things and they all miss the direction of metaphysics in the givenness of phenomena. One has to put aside tradition suggested by this passage altogether. You are in the history of philosophy, this puts the discussion in a context of academic interest, like writing a paper about who said what and how things are different, arguing one way or the other.
What is needed is a method, not an argument. Of course, one has to argue for the method, but this insists on a descriptive approach to the world, and Kant is useful for this. He just left out the part about the world, as Schopenhauer alludes. However, the direction Kant took is now basic to responsible thinking in philosophy: ontology follows on epistemology. And for this, one has to be descriptively responsible, like a scientist, committed to the evidence that lies before one, and no more or less, for knowing is an integral part of what there, in the phenomenon. This does harken back to Plato, no? See Theaetetus where we get the ancient equation for knowledge as justified true belief. The reason those absurd Gettier problem analytic philosophers obsessed about (still do?) is because they simply refused to admit that there is no P in S knows P, independent of justification. We are bound to P and P to us in the construction of P.
Consider this from Michel Henry's Essence of Manifestation:
[i]Phenomenology is the science of phenomena. This means that it is a
description anterior to all theory and independent of all presuppositions,
of everything that presents itself to us as existant, regardless of order
or domain. Understood as a description, phenomenology inrplies the
rejection of all hypotheses, of all principles having some unifying
value, whether real or supposed, with regard to some area of knowledge,
and finally, the rejection of a sector of reality which would contain
in it a rule of intelligibility as a necessary condition for its existence[/i]
I offer this only as an indication of the way I think philosophy must move forward. Henry jumps directly to Husserl's reduction. This reduction is, as I see it, the only way OUT of philosophical inertia. How so? The drive is toward, well, the thing itself! The terminal point where indeterminacy falls away.
This, I argue, is exactly what being Buddhist is all about. And I hasten to add that this idea finds agreement in the literature, in the Buddhist philosophical tradition, only to the extent that is it has its justification in the clear exposition of phenomena. A term like noumena is simply absorbed in the discovery. This is not about an historical thesis or a paper on Kant.
Not my kind of thinking. Instead, I view Metaphysics as literally beyond the scope of reductive materialistic Science. You can atomize matter down to evanescent Quarks, but you still won't find any evidence of Mind or Consciousness or Being.
For me, Metaphysics is the role of Philosophy, which synthesizes particular evidence into general principles. In that sense, Einstein was a philosopher. His "speculative science" was indeed on the cusp of "metaphysical disclosure" : Relativity is a general metaphysical principle, not an observed physical fact.
Quoting Astrophel
Yes! Metaphysics and Philosophy are all about Holistic inter-relationships not about Reductive isolated objects.
Quoting Astrophel
Yes, again! Phenomenology is about things & events "out there", But Transcendental Phenomenology would be focused on the ideal mental representations and interpretations of those real physical things. Traditional Idealism tended to reject reality as an illusion. And Materialism rejected ideality as an illusion. Perhaps your term will rise above those either/or worldviews, to accept that our world is both Mental and Material.
Phenomenology :
[i]1.the science of phenomena as distinct from that of the nature of being.
2. an approach that concentrates on the study of consciousness and the objects of direct experience.[/i] ___Oxford dictionary
Kant didnt force anything, is what I think. There is a truth buried in there but doesnt have anything to do with force. Or Nietsche.
On what basis do you say we initially see a two-dimensional image? I don't, and don't recall ever, seeing a two-dimensional image.
I'm not sure what you mean to refer to by "logically grounded theories". Are not all consistent and coherent theories logically grounded?
Also, I see metaphysics as positing imaginable models of world ordering, and phenomenology as describing the ways in which we, on reflection, find our experience, perception and undertsnding to be invariably ordered.
A good video for the topic. Thanks. :up: However, I never said that reason creates logic. :D
When you say reason doesn't create logic (whoever said reason creates logic - NOT ME), it sounds like reason is some kind of a biological or living entity itself as a lump of substance. That would be Sci-Fi, not Philosophy.
Reason is a way our thoughts work. Logic has had many definitions since Aristotle's invention. In Kant, logic is the way reason works along with the Categories. Categorical items are not something that operate themselves. They are schema, i.e. form with the a priori concepts to be applied to the objects in the senses. How does it work? It works according to the logic.
I was thinking about what reason would be in general terms, and also looked for its dictionary definition. It is a rational basis for one's action and judgement. It is a really abstract concept. You cannot tell anything about reason without its content i.e. what it was about, i.e. some description on your motive for your action, or your argument or proposition on something. Without this content, it doesn't make sense in talking about reason. And of course you can talk about reason as a property of mind just like in CPR.
Quoting RussellA
Quoting RussellA
Reason cannot be located in the brain. Again this is the hard problem on mind and body connection issue you brought up. Kant never said a word about the brain in all his works as far as I am aware. Maybe he did. I am not sure. I doubt it very much. He would have really nothing much to say about it even if he did. Talking about Brain and TI in the context of its location or connection would be a categorical mistake.
Chomsky's Enactivism sounds like a type of SocioBiology subject. I am sure it has nothing to do with Kant's transcendental Idealism. Neither Skinner's Behaviourism.
I had in mind that empirical science theories are grounded in observation. For some of those there is precedent where syllogistic logical coherence has been set aside, or at least fought over, as in the uproar ca 1920-25, even if mathematical logical coherence holds.
I have 4 different versions of CPR. They are ones translated by,
JMD Meiklejohn,
NK Smith,
Max Muller,
Paul Guyer and Allen Wood
None of them seems using "pure reason" in the PREFACE apart from the JMD MeikleJohn version. They all use "reason" to denote "pure reason".
So I am under impression "pure reason" and "reason" are being used as the same term in CPR.
Maybe we are looking from different angles. I think of empirical science theories as grounded in models of causation, and causation as not being observed, but inferred. Certainly, the entities, except perhaps those posited as fundamental, that are understood to be causally acting and acted upon are observable.
Sure. A good point. :up:
I was just commenting on the main point for writing CPR.
But now that you mention it, why do you suppose he devoted everything after A293/B350 to PURE reason, practically two thirds of the whole work, in Kemp Smith pg, 293 to pg.669, if reason and pure reason where so interchangeable.
I think the key is in pure, rather than reason.
Sure, the causes may be inferred, but wouldnt models of causation be predicated on observable effects following from them? Working backwards kinda thing, donchaknow.
To be sure, that's not what Wittgenstein said; it was The limits of my language mean the limits of my world" (Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt). These are perhaps his most misunderstood words. In context, it's not placing a limit on our capacity to make sense of the world. We expand our language, and in so doing, our understanding.
Yes, this is actually excellent point. I haven't read CPR that far yet, but looked it up now. Indeed you are right. Thanks for pointing it out. :100:
I found it so interesting. We assume that how we experience reality is the noumena in our practical lives. But according to Kant time itself is part of our mind, and space too at that! So objects (noumena) are hidden below the scheme we project on reality from the mind. Philosophy has a way of saying that same thing in different ways. Mellisus (and of course Kant) remind me of the block universe of Einstein, a man who stood on the shoulders of giants.
Depends whether you are using the word "see" metaphorically or literally.
Are you not seeing a two-dimensional image on the screen of your computer/laptop/smartphone at this moment in time as you read these words?
Efficient law-like agent of change. Has a nice ring to it, for sure.
I swear, Feynman had a cool phrase like that, talking about how fields should be treated as real things. It was in the Caltech lectures, but I could never find it again. Wish-Id-thought-of-that moment, lost to time and weakened memory.
:up:
Quoting Corvus
Where is reason exactly?
As a logic gate is a particular type of structure within a computer, I suggest that reason is also a particular structure within the brain. As the logic gate is a mechanical entity, a lump of substance, similarly, reason is a biological entity, a lump of substance.
As a logic gate has a physical existence, has a concrete existence, the logic gate cannot be said to have an abstract existence. Similarly, as reason has a physical existence, has a concrete existence, reason cannot be said to have an abstract existence .
However, I agree that the thought of a logic gate is an abstract concept, as the thought of reason is an abstract concept. This raises the question as to what are thoughts?
As a CPU within a computer interprets, processes and executes instructions, I suggest that within the brain are also particular types of structures that interpret, process and execute instructions, where a thought is no more than a difference in the physical structure of the brain between two moments in time.
However, if a thought is a difference between two things, can a difference have an ontological existence. For example, there is a difference in height between the Eiffel Tower and Empire States Building of 81metres. In what sense does this difference exist? Either differences do have an ontological existence, in which thoughts ontologically exist, or differences don't have an ontological difference, in which case thoughts don't ontologically exist.
Philosophy cannot be carried out in a vacuum, by a philosopher sitting in a dark room shut off from the world with only their thoughts. The philosopher must take the world into account within their philosophising.
As a logic gate is a mechanical entity, reason is a biological entity.
True, Kant didn't talk about the brain, but then neither did Plato talk about Kant.
But surely, comparing and contrasting is an important evaluative tool in learning and developing understanding about a topic.
You compared and contrasted Kant with Plato when you wrote:
I thought about Kant as a Platonic dualist too at one point, but as @Wayfarer pointed out, there are clear differences between Kant and Plato.
You also compared and contrasted Kant with knowledge he had and knowledge that only came later, when you wrote:
Anyway, Kant was not a Phenomenologist, and Phenomenology didn't exist when Kant was alive.
I find Kant's Critique of Pure Reason relevant and interesting precisely because it can be explained in today's terms. It is not a dead historical subject, but has insights as to contemporary problems of philosophy.
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is a battle in the war between Innatism and Behaviourism, as exemplified by Chomsky and Skinner. The a priori and the innate are two aspects of the same thing, the first from a 18th C viewpoint and the second from a 21st C viewpoint.
These we can compare and contrast.
Th difference between the physical structure which interprets, what you call the logic gate, and the human mind, is that the human mind does not necessarily have to follow the procedure when the input is applied, while the logic gate does. This is the nature of free will. The logic gate has an outcome determined by the input and the system. The outcome from the human mind is not determined in the way that the outcome from the logic gate is, because the human mind has something else, called free will, which implies that the system is not closed in that way, which necessitates the product. The initial conditions cannot predict the outcome with logical necessity.
You're assuming free will rather than determinism.
Why do you think humans have free will rather than being determined by forces beyond their control?
:up:
I figured it might be something like that. I've read the Tractus and PI, but not particularly closely (I don't think I ever finished the Tractus) and PI in particular doesn't exactly lend itself to easy interpretation.
I am assuming that humans do not necessarily follow the results of logic in their actions. This is evident and common, every time one is "overcome by passion" or something similar and does not act according to what was figured to be logically necessary. And, I am pointing out that this type of behaviour, where one acts contrary to one's own logical process, is explained by the concept of free will.
Quoting RussellA
In the context, this question does not make any sense. If there are "forces beyond their control" these are forces not understood, because understanding them allows us to make use of them, therefore control them. Therefore we cannot know whether such proposed forces are deterministic or not, and cannot assume that a person would be "determined" by them, as you propose.
I would argue that some sort of determinism is a [I] prerequisite[/I] for free will. We can't choose to bring about some states of affairs and not others based on our preferences [I]unless[/i] our actions have determinant effects. We must be able to predict the consequences of our actions, to understand ourselves as determinant cause.
Likewise, arbitrary action is not free. Randomness isn't free, it is simply determined by nothing. But to be free, we must be determined [I]by ourselves[/I]. Self-determinination is always relative for human beings, we can be more or less in control, more or less our authentic selves.
So the problem with 's contention for me is not in assuming free will, but in assuming that freedom comes from not being determined by "inputs." But if our actions aren't determined by the way the world is, inputs, what would they be determined by? And in what way would they now be free?
To my mind, Plato has the best answer to this conundrum. The fact that a person will tend to always prefer "what is really good," over "what they currently think is good," (Republic 5) shows the potential for reason to always go "beyond itself." It is in going beyond, in transcending current belief, emotion, and opinion, that we can achieve an "ascent" towards self-determination. And then, what is self-determining (not mere effect caused by external sources) is, in an important sense, more real (hence, self-"actualization.")
Ah, I've misunderstood you then. I was thinking of the way in which a logic gate is deterministic in roughly the same way neurons, cells, etc. behave as such.
But you are right, the structure of computers is set up with all sorts of artificial constraints such that inputs will flow into outputs in a straightforward manner, based in human logical operators. A person does not work this way, I agree.
The difference between serial processing and the single set of "instructions" in the Turing Machine head and the decentralized parallel processing at work in animals is profound.
You wouldn't call or equate a lump of computer chips and memories as mind, reason or consciousness. :)
Of course the physical existence of the chips and memories are the body where the software defined logic and machine reasoning can be set, and happening. But they are at the software level, not hardware. Software operations are conceptual just like human mind.
There is a clear difference in software and hardware of any computer architecture. They work together but one is not the same as the other, and vice versa.
Quoting RussellA
Speculative philosophy can be done in a dark room full of vacuum for sure, because its tool is the concepts, logic and reasoning. :) Of course, philosophy can work on any topic or subjects, but they would be topics of themselves.
Plato couldn't talk about Kant obviously, as having not been born for almost another 2000 years, Kant wasn't around when Plato was alive :)
Quoting RussellA
Yes, I suppose you could look at any contemporary system or thoughts under the light of Kant's TI, and draw good philosophical criticisms or new theories out of them, and that is what all classical philosophy is about. But as I said, it would be a topic of its own.
Correlations drawn between different things.
The basis upon which the speculation happens cannot happen in a vacuum.
I'm objecting to the very notion. Speculative philosophy requires common language. One cannot acquire common language without conceptions.
I see a truck approaching me at speed.
If things were going well in my daily life, the logical thing to do would be to step to one side. This would be an example of Determinism, acting logically.
If things were going well in my daily life, even though the logical thing to do would be to step to one side, out of passion, I decide not to step to one side. This would be an example of Free Will, acting illogically.
In practice, do people act illogically? How many times do we see people in a city centre, when seeing a truck approaching them at speed, decide not to step out of the way?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The fact that gravity is a force beyond the control of humans does not mean that humans don't understand gravity.
The fact that humans understand gravity does not mean that humans can control gravity.
Logic does not always determine how one reacts in such circumstances. It's not like everyone has pondered what to do at the time based upon some logical calculus. There's no time to run the rules through one's mind while the train is approaching. One avoids danger successfully, nonetheless.
Logic does not determine how one reacts in such circumstances. It's not a logical thing to do.
Quoting RussellA
Determinism is the name of a position one may take upon how the world works. Determinism is a worldview. Worldviews are not the sort of things that 'act logically'. Determinism is not the sort of thing that acts logically any more than Indeterminism, or Theism.
Free Will does no acting.
One may logically decide to step out in front of a train. They may plan to do so. They desire the effect. They want certain things to happen as a result of their deliberate choice. They do so in order to make the world match their desires...
According to you this is illogical.
Number one is a powerful statement. Being here refers to what can be "totalized" or assimilated into a system of understanding. I thing does not appear before one at all without it being a part of a totality, a matrix of contextual embeddedness. No object has this "stand alone" non categorical status, for context is an epistemic necessity. The question is never whether this "eidetic horizon of structures" is there to constitute the knowldege experience, because this structure is what makes intelligibility possible. The question is, IN this matrix of possibilities (Heidegger's potentiality of possibilities) can one encounter the world of actualities ('actuality' being itself a contextualized partical of language)?
A massively interesting question. Is there anything prohibitive about language being the "opening" to the world, that which makes things "unhidden" (alethea is the Greek term) to us and that defines our radical finitude, that makes the "leap" (Kierkegaard) to a non cognitive and non propositional understanding impossible?
I hold the answer to be, no, there is nothing prohibitive like this about language and logic and the context nature of knowing.
...to there... from where exactly?
Yes, there is the problem of how free will can transcend what would otherwise be determined.
1) Imagine two people X and Y at time t with the same physical state of mind A.
2) Suppose person X has no free will. Suppose their physical state of mind at time t + 1 is B
3) Suppose person Y has free will. Suppose their physical state of mind at time t + 1 is C
4) The change in the physical state of mind of person X from A to B has been determined by A
5) The change in the physical state of mind of person Y from A to C cannot have been determined by A, otherwise person Y's physical state of mind would also have changed from A to B.
6) As both person X and Y at time t had the same physical state of mind A, person Y's free will must exist in addition to their physical state of mind.
If free will exists in addition to a person's physical state of mind, and determines changes in a person's physical state of mind, how is free will connected to a person's physical state of mind?
Yes, in practice people commonly act illogically. Your truck example is just so extreme, it would rarely occur. Take something more simple for example, like when someone buys a lottery ticket, or breaks the law, knowing that getting caught would have serious consequences. There are many other common instances, like when we are overcome by passion to act violently or lustfully for example.
Quoting RussellA
Humans do not understand gravity. They can predict the effects of gravity, but they do not understand how it works. One cannot control something without understanding how it works.
The brain can be equated with hardware and the mind can be equated with software
I would not equate a computer chip with the mind, but I would equate the computer chip with the brain.
However, there is not a clear distinction between what a thing is and what it does. There is not a clear distinction between what the brain is and what the brain does. There is not a clear distinction between the hardware within a computer and what the software the hardware enables.
A physical structure can only do what the physical structure is capable of doing. A microwave cannot play a DVD, a cat cannot debate the literary values in Ernest Hemingway's novels and the human cannot reason about things that are outwith the physical limitations of its brain.
There are forms such as the brain and hardware in a computer and there are processes, such as the mind in a sentient being and software in a computer. Form and process are distinguished by their relationship with time. The brain and hardware in a computer exists at one moment in time, but the mind and software in a computer need a duration of time in order to be expressed.
That both the mind and computer software require a duration of time to be expressed does not mean that within this duration of time either exist in some form other than physical. IE, when considering one moment in time, neither the mind nor computer software exist outside the physical form of either the brain or computer hardware. The mind and computer software are not some mysterious entities existing abstractly outside of time and space, but rather, exist as the relation between two physical forms at two different moments in time.
As you say that software operations are conceptual, we say that the mind is conceptual, But this does not mean that either the hardware of the computer or brain of the human need to exist outside of time and space in order for the software of the computer or mind of the brain to be expressed.
===============================================================================
Quoting Corvus
A philosopher can only philosophise about something
A tool isn't a tool until it is used. A piece of metal at the end of a piece of wood isn't a hammer until it hammers something. As a thought must have intentionality, a thought isn't a thought until it is a thought about something. Similarly, reasoning must be about something. For example, for what reason do apples exist. Tools, concepts logic and reasoning cannot exist if they are not about something, if they don't have some object of investigation.
A Philosopher cannot work in a vacuum. A philosopher cannot philosophise if they have no topic to philosophise about, even if that topic is philosophy itself.
===============================================================================
Quoting Corvus
Kant should be looked at for his philosophy not as a historical figure
True, but as we can compare and contrast Plato and Kant in order to evaluate their respective positions, we can compare and contrast Kant's Transcendental Idealism with contemporary Indirect Realism in order to evaluate their respective similarities and differences.
I think that looking at Kant as a historical figure from the viewpoint of the 18th C may be interesting as a historical exercise, but I don't think it contributes to our philosophical knowledge and understanding.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Free Will may be an illusion
Suppose I saw someone act in an unexpected way. For example, they had bought a winning lottery ticket and then proceeded to tear it up. As an outsider, how can I know their inner logical processes in order to say they are exhibiting either Determinism or Free will.
On the other hand, if I had bought a winning lottery ticket, and freely decided to tear it up, I would think that I was exhibiting Free will. However, what if in fact my act had been determined, and what I thought was Free Will was in fact only the illusion of Free Will.
How can I know that what I think is Free Will is in fact only the illusion of Free Will?
We could throw caution to the wind and call a "flat" three-dimensional image a two-dimensional image. :smile:
Yes, I suppose the brain and mind's closest analogy would be computer processor and software. But again there are too many gaps between them to equate. Human brain and microchip cannot compare in complexity and also capacity. Same goes with the human mind and computer software.
Quoting RussellA
It is not to do with existence in time and space, but the complexity and capacity gaps, computers and human mind cannot be equated.
Quoting RussellA
Philosophy can be done in a dark room in vacuum I believe. You go into the room, put on a light, shut the door, take out some of your favorite philosophy books, do some reading, meditating, reasoning, and write what you think about them. To me that is good enough philosophy for a casual reader. If you are a professional philosopher, perhaps you must also prepare the lecture notes.
If you were a scientist, then it would be different. You must have a lab, and all the test equipment, the books, notes, and you would be doing experiments, observations and verifications. You must then try to come up with the conclusions for your experiments, and try to make up some theories.
Quoting RussellA
The most compelling point for Kant's TI are still, whether
1. Metaphysics is possible as a legitimate science or is it just an invalid form of knowledge.
2. Whether Thing-in-Itself is a true independent existence on its own separate from human cognition therefore unknowable, or whether it is part of human perception, which is possible to be known even if it may look unknowable at first.
These are the compelling points that have attracted different opinions and interpretations. All other points are, I still believe, separate issues and subjects of their own.
When we act, is it from Free Will or Determinism. It has been said that we can act illogically because of our free will, inferring that somehow Determinism is logical. This raises the question of what is logic, the subject of numerous Threads, such as the recent thread What is Logic?
My definition of logic is that is that of repeatability, in that given a prior state of affairs A then the subsequent state of affairs B will always happen. It would then be illogical for someone to say that given a prior state of affairs A, then the subsequent state of affairs may or may not be B. Repeatability must be the foundation of logic
For me, Determinism is an exemplar of logic, in that given a prior state of affairs A then the subsequent state of affairs B will always happen.
True, but the principles each operates under may be the same. Gravity can attract a ball to the ground and can attract Galaxies together. A difference in complexity but the same principle applies.
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Quoting Corvus
True, as long as they have something to think about.
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Quoting Corvus
A Metaphysician asks "what are numbers". An engineer asks "what does 130 plus 765 add up to". The engineer in designing a bridge doesn't need to know the metaphysical meaning of numbers.
Though different, both the metaphysician's question and the engineer's question are valid, both are legitimate and both are forms of knowledge.
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Quoting Corvus
We as humans know that for every other animal in the world there are some things that are unknown and unknowable to them because of the physical limitations of their brains. For example, we know that a cat can never understand the literary nature of Hemingway's novels.
It would hardly be surprising that as we are also animals, there are some things that are unknown and unknowable to us also because of the physical limitations of our brains.
Quoting RussellA
We seem to be in agreement. :cool: :up:
Quoting RussellA
True, but the problem is the engineer would sometimes say, all metaphysical knowledge is invalid, because it deals with things that we cannot see or touch. At that moment, the engineer has forgotten that he has transformed himself into a metaphysician in undercover, and claiming metaphysical statements. Metaphysics is invalid form of knowledge is also a Metaphysical claim, which is contentious i.e. true or false depending on what we are talking about.
Quoting RussellA
So your interpretation seems to say that there is a thing-in-itself as legitimate existence out there, but the human brain cannot know it due to the limitation of what the brain can know. Fair enough.
My interpretation was similar in that, human perception cannot catch every properties of perceptual objects in one single sense data, hence there are always parts of the perceived object, unperceived. That is thing-in-itself. It is not known, but we know it exists.
On the next perception of the same object, the unperceived properties of the objects might be perceived, and the thing-in-itself gets clearer in its nature due to more meditation, by chance, or from different angle of perspectives etc. And one day the thing-in-itself becomes totally known object (ideally) hopefully. Some thing-in-itself objects are not likely ever to be perceived at all, but we can still feel, intuit or reason about them such as God, human soul and the universe.
Harsh on engineers. The engineer wouldn't say that the physicists knowledge of string theory was invalid because we cannot see or touch one-dimensional objects called strings.
Quoting Corvus
Yes, as regards the apple in front of me, I am unable to perceive the quarks that make it up.
Quoting Corvus
Yes, we now have photographs of individual atoms.
Quoting Corvus
I don't agree. There is as much a chance of humans being able to feel, intuit or reason about some things-in-themselves as a cat will ever be able to feel, intuit or reason about Western Literature.
As a cat cannot transcend the physical limitations of its brain, neither can a human.
Upon further reflection, I completely agree (with everything you said): the noumena would be perfectly unintelligible, which undermines our reasons to even think they exist in the first place. I mean, if I can't say logic pertains to the things-in-themselves, then why think that things-in-themselves even excite my sensibility, let alone that I have sensibility?
But, for the cat's brain to actually register something, that thing has to already fit with its perceptual schema. There is an experiment I keep citing where a meaningless tone that is within the cat's audible hearing range is played, but the cat's brain does not appear to register having heard the tone. Subsequently, after the tone is associated with something meaningful, the cat's brain will display the signature of auditory stimulation.
So it is "mechanically" possible that there are exactly such unregistered events as Corvus is postulating. With what concomitant causes, who is to say?
Wasn't it what Bob Ross and his supporters were claiming in his previous thread "Metaphysics as illegitimate source of knowledge"? I was sure they were the engineers transformed into the metaphysicians undercover. hmmm your short memories :rofl:
Quoting RussellA
From here, suppose it is up to personal opinion. Of course, if you are a dedicated esoteric magician, you could see thing-in-self God, human soul no problems, and the Kabbalistic Tree of Life would be your universe :D
But the real objects which excite your sensibility could be fabrication by a higher power, could they not?
Likewise, it could be the case that, if real things are required for sensibility, there is no sensibility but there are intuitions (which we self-fabricate).
The underlined portion is where I think you went wrong: just because there is a set of intuitions which contains a separation (in space and time) of a self vs. other does not mean that the object which impacted you exists as something which excited your sensibility (as it could be fabricated by a different faculty of which you have) nor exists as something non-fabricated by a higher power.
Despite your insinuations and imputations about my intentions, I, upon further reflection, think that your "two worlds" argument is a good point; and I agree with you that it is an incoherence in Kantianism. If the things-in-themselves are completely unintelligible, then I honestly no reason to believe they exist in the first place (since I no longer think it is possible to prove that I have a representative faculty transcendentally and the empirical evidence for it presupposes various forms like logic and math, which I allegedly cannot assume of the things-in-themselves). Banno, the cup is, in fact, to your point, one cup: the cup-for-us is an indirect window into the cup-in-itself, and so the in-itself is not completely unintelligible.
Hello Javi,
I accept the existence of things-in-themselves.
I dont think so: it would be more in the realm of metaphysics and ontology.
I was not, in the OP, making an argument about anything pertaining to how we speak or formulate languages.
There are two aspects, being able to perceive something and then being able to make sense of it. Even if a human showed a cat a page from the book "The Old Man and the Sea", it could never make sense of it. Similarly, even if a super-intelligent alien showed us a page from "The True Nature of Reality", we could never make sense of it.
Yes, if man tried to explain the universe to an amoeba it wouldn't translate.
But essentially, the amoeba eventually becomes a man. So maybe it does happen?
It will happen. The more life evolves the more it will be able to understand. However, although life has been around for over 3.5 billion years, humans still have trouble using a MP3 player, so I don't hold out much hope.
Sure. But why would we care? We work with what were given. In the case for natural real objects, say, what do we gain by asking if something we know absolutely nothing about created that of which we know very little? And for real objects humans make for themselves, it doesnt even make sense to ask if a supersensible whatever created rakes and dump trucks.
Quoting Bob Ross
Thats precisely what it means, insofar as intuitions are proven only and always sensuous. If denied, such that intuitions do not depend on the existence of real things that affect the senses, then you have falsified T.I., at least the original view of it, without sufficient reason.
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I forget if Ive asked already, but assuming I havent how does a ding as sich have a name?
I agree. But this just demonstrates that there is no such transcendentally (valid) argument for there actually being real objects beyond our intuitions.
What is the argument for intuitions necessarily being sensuous (in the sense of real objects exciting a sensibility)? I don't see how one could transcendentally prove that.
What do you mean? Like how is it called a "ding an sich"?
Indeed we could. which indicates that much comes down to differences of parlance. I think, as I said, there is really no such thing as a two-dimensional image or existent of any kind, and that that realization ought to be reflected in how we speak about these things when we are giving them serious consideration.
In any case, talk of screens and other flat surfaces aside, the original point of contention was the idea that our visual field is a two-dimensional image, and I see nothing whatever to support that assertion.
The issue I see with that criticism, is that it reads too much into what Kant intends with the term 'thing in itself'. He's not positing a set of 'unknowable things', which we will forever fail to see. That reading imparts an apparent urgency to trying to 'peek behind the curtain' and see what the mysterious things in themselves really are.
I've quoted this from an online primer on Kant before, but I think it provides a better idea of his intention:
[quote=Emrys Westacott]Kant's introduced the concept of the thing in itself to refer to reality as it is independent of our experience of it and unstructured by our cognitive constitution. The concept was harshly criticized in his own time and has been lambasted by generations of critics since. A standard objection to the notion is that Kant has no business positing it given his insistence that we can only know what lies within the limits of possible experience. But a more sympathetic reading is to see the concept of the thing in itself as a sort of placeholder in Kant's system; it both marks the limits of what we can know and expresses a sense of mystery that cannot be dissolved, the sense of mystery that underlies our unanswerable questions. Through both of these functions it serves to keep us humble.[/quote]
Transcendental arguments are not intended for empirical conditions, so, no, there wouldnt be one. No need to argue for that which gives you a bloody nose, or a headache, or hurts your eyes if you look at it too long.
. The science of all the principles of sensibility à priori, I call transcendental aesthetic. There must, then, be such a science forming the first part of the transcendental doctrine of elements, in contradistinction to that part which contains the principles of pure thought, and which is called transcendental logic .
Quoting Bob Ross
There isnt a proof. Remember .were not even conscious of this part of the system as a whole. The transcendental argument sets the technical groundwork, nonetheless, as the first part of the work.
Quoting Bob Ross
No. Like .how is it called a cup-in-itself.
Well, this is the question. One might say, with Derrida, that since there is no center from which springs the basis for all meanings, nothing inscribed in the world that gives the world to our understanding, we stand rudderless in a fathomless no where. But then, Derrida didn't exactly mean for this to be altogether a nihilation, for it does a kind of apophatic job of ridding us of thought and discovering actuality. It may be from a context or determinate form, and to the same, but then, there is also in this realization an opportunity to terminate the invocation of context entirely. LIke a Buddhist might do. This leads to a disclosure of a radically different kind.
The point was that people act in ways contrary to their own logical process. They know that it is illogical to buy lottery tickets, yet they still do. They know that the law enforces consequences for illegal actions yet they still proceed in those actions. They bypass safety precautions which they know the reasons for. There is an endless amount of examples.
The conclusion therefore is that we cannot characterize people in the way that the "logic gate" was characterized, because we know that the people are not bound to follow what the logical process dictates.
Quoting RussellA
Whether or not free will is an illusion is not the issue. The issue is whether people are bound (determined) to act according to what their own logical process dictates. And the answer is clear, they are not. I said that the concept of free will accounts for the reality of this fact, that people are not determined in this way. Whether or not this concept of free will is itself faulty, and free will is an illusion, is not the question right now. What is the question is whether or not the concept is sufficient to account for the fact that people are not determined to act according to their own logic.
Seems clear to me that that is precisely the wrong way around. We do not go from propositional and cognitive understanding to non-propositional and non-cognitive understanding. There is no such thing as non-cognitive understanding. There is such thing as non-propositional thought, belief, knowledge, and understanding. It's what precedes the propositional.
You agree that a screen in a flat surface. What is the difference between seeing a portrait of a person in an art gallery and seeing a portrait of a person on a screen. Don't both these appear the same in our visual field, ie, as two-dimensional images?
How can we know that. I cannot look at someone and know their internal logical processes. Even I don't know my own internal logical processes.
Basically, because we name the unknown cause after the known effect.
As an Indirect Realist, if I see a red postbox, which is a representation in my mind, I name the cause of this representation "a red postbox". I don't need to know the true cause of my representation of a red postbox in order to give this unknown cause a name, ie, "a red postbox".
In ordinary language we say "Clouds of acrid smoke issued from the building". This is a figure of speech for saying that the smell is acrid, not that the smoke in itself is acrid.
In ordinary language we say "Eating sugary or sweet foods can cause a temporary sweet aftertaste in the mouth". This is a figure of speech for saying that the taste is sweet, not that the food in itself is sweet.
It is not the case that we believe that effects have causes, but rather that we know effects have causes. In today's terms, Innatism, and in Kant's terms, the a priori Category of cause.
We know the effect, whether the colour red, an acrid smell or a sweet taste because the effect exists in our minds. We know that effects have prior causes. Therefore we know that there has been a prior cause for our perceptions of the colour red, acrid smell and bitter taste.
It is then a straightforward matter, knowing that there has been a cause, even though we don't know what the cause was, to give this cause a name and name it after the effect.
For example, the unknown cause of our perception of the colour red is named "red", the unknown cause of our perception of an acrid smell is named "acrid" and the unknown cause of our perception of a bitter taste is named "bitter".
The unknown cause of our perceptions is in Kant's terms a thing-in-itself. Even though we don't know what this unknown thing-in-itself is, we can name it. We name it after the effect it has on our perceptions, which is known.
The names "red", "acrid" and "bitter" don't describe unknown things-in-themselves, but in Wittgenstein's terms as he describes in Philosophical Investigations, replace the unknown things-in-themselves.
As regards the cup-in-itself, "cup" names what we perceive in our minds, not something unknown that exists independently of our minds.
One can know it by self examination, introspection. It looks like you haven't tried it, or gave up to soon without the required discipline.
Is this possible?
Is it possible to have a thought about an internal logical process, when the internal logical process has caused the thought in the first place?
In other words, can an effect cause itself?
If you see a red postbox, then it is the case the thing comes to you already named, which makes you a direct realist. And to perceive alone, is not to represent.
If you dont know the true cause of your representation, how did it get the name red postbox immediately upon you seeing it? And if you dont know the true cause, how can you say that which you see is in fact a red postbox?
I submit, that when you say youre seeing a red postbox, it is because you already know what the thing is that youre perceiving. But there is nothing whatsoever in the perceiving from which knowledge of the perception follows.
If what you say here is the case, how do you explain those times where you dont know what causes your perception? You feel a tickle on the back of your neck, what tells you it is a hair or a bug? The sound from around the corner ..backfire? Firecracker? Dump truck tailgate? Something dropped from a roof? According to your system, you should be able to name the sound without ever actually perceiving the cause of it. If you always know a red postbox is what youre seeing, shouldnt you always know the name of what youre hearing? It is obvious this doesnt always work, which casts doubts on a system operating in accordance with those conditions.
Kant was aware that the thing perceived is always at that time undetermined, but not that it was undeterminable, otherwise every single thing ever perceived would immediately be identified as a certain thing, which contradicts natural occurrence. The thing you perceive may indeed end up being named a red postbox, and that for each subsequent perception as well, but the name cannot arise from the mere physiology of your vision. And this is what makes you an indirect realist.
Realism: the attribution of properties such that an object is determinable;
Realist: one who attributes properties as that by which objects are determinable;
Direct realist: one who attributes properties as belonging to the object itself and which are given to him as such, and by which the object is determined;
Indirect realist: one who attributes properties according to himself, such that the relation between the perception and a series of representations determines the object.
I submit you dont see a red postbox. You see a thing, to the representation of which you attribute the properties in the form of a series of conceptions, by which the thing becomes the experience of, becomes known to you as, a red postbox.
Quoting RussellA
Right. Cup names. I asked about how the thing-in-itself gets a name, which is what happens when there is a cup-in-itself, in that the thing now has the name cup. How can a named thing exist independently of that which named it? And if it cant, where did cup come from when attached to -in-itself?
Quoting RussellA
I dont think so. The (immediately) unknown but (mediately) determinable cause of our perception, is the thing; the unknown and always undeterminable cause of the thing of our perception, is the thing-in-itself. And dont make it an issue that a cause is unknown. A cause doesnt have to be known, it just has to be such, for an effect that is itself determinable.
Both the Indirect Realist and Direct Realist see a red postbox.
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Quoting Mww
For the Indirect Realist, the name is of the representation in the mind. For the Direct Realist, the name is of a material object in the world .
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Quoting Mww
This problem applies to both the Indirect and Direct Realist.
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Quoting Mww
True.
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Quoting Mww
Very true. Both the Indirect and Direct Realist need things they see to have been named in order to be able to use the name in language.
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Quoting Mww
Very true. Even though an object emits a wavelength of 700nm, and we perceive the colour red, the Direct Realist believes that the object is red, whereas the Indirect Realist believes that only their perception of the object is red.
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Quoting Mww
Depends on what you mean by the word "see".
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Quoting Mww
Suppose we see an affect. We know that if there has been an effect there must have been cause, even if we don't know what the cause was. Let us name the cause A
Suppose we see a broken window. We know that if there has been an effect there must have been cause, even if we don't know what the cause was. Let us name the cause of the broken window A.
IE, we have named something even if we don't know what it is.
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Quoting Mww
I agree. If I see a broken window, I know that something has broken it.
We know there has been a cause when we perceive an effect.
There are two significant differences between the Indirect and Direct Realist. The Indirect Realist approach is that of metaphysics, whereas the Direct Realist approach is that of Linguistic Idealism.
Both the Indirect and Direct Realist see a red post box.
For the Indirect Realist, as we know that the object emits a wavelength of 700nm when we perceive the colour red, the expression "I see a red post box" refers to a perception in the mind and not a material object in the world.
For the Direct Realist, the expression "I see a red post box" is in effect what Wittgenstein would call a hinge proposition, true regardless of what exists in the world. In fact, even if in the world was a pink elephant flying through the sky, the proposition " I see a red post" as a hinge proposition would still be true.
However, both approaches are valid, and each has its own place in our understanding.
I don't see a need to bring physical states into it. When we choose something, we either choose it for some reason, or we choose it for no reason at all (it is random action). If it is random action, then it is arbitrary, not free. If we have a reason for chosing something, then those reasons determine our actions.
And our reasons for choosing different things have to do with our beliefs and opinions, our knowledge and judgement. It seems to me like the development of all of these is uniquely tied up with states of affairs in the world, and thus our choices are tied up with (determined by) states of affairs as well. We might choose to love who we love and despise who we despise, but we do so [I]because[/I] of who those people are. Thus, those choices are "determined by," who those people have revealed themselves to be.
Freedom can't be something like: being in state S1 at T1 and, based on nothing but free floating "freedom," we either go to S2 or S3. That's just randomness. The "choice," between S1 and S2 has to be based on something for us to do any "choosing." Further, we seem less free when we are forced into choices by coercion, instinct, uncontrollable drive, etc., so it seems like we can be free in gradations and we are more free when our choices are "more determined by what we want them to be determined by," not when they are "determined by nothing."
And we can't say our "choosing between," is "determined by our freedom," because this is circular. It leaves the choice free floating, determined by nothing, and so random.
Physical states, dualism, etc. don't really make a difference on this point IMO. Rather than speaking of "choosing between," it might be better to say that we are free: "when we do what we want and don't do what we don't want," when "we want to have the desires we have," and when we "understand why we have those desires and still prefer that we have them" a sort of recursive self-aware self-determination, as opposed to a free floating non-determinism.
There is also the humoncular regress to consider. If we "see representations" by being "inside a mind" and seeing those representations "projected as in a theater," then it seems we should still need a second self inside the first to fathom the representations of said representations, and so on. Else, if self can directly access objects in such a theater, why not cut out the middle man and claim self can just experience the original objects?
It's a weird sort of inversion on the Allegory of the Cave. Instead of things being more real by virtue of being more necessary and self-determining, properties understood by the mind are downgraded into the shadows on the cave wall. In this way, the most contingent, least knowable becomes more veridical, the higher "thing in itself," while apparent necessity becomes a "creation of mind."
But if we reject the sort of ontological dualism that motivates such an explanation, I see no reason to assume that a red post can't have properties vis-á-vis how it relates to a person. The mistake is to go looking for an "in itselfness," of things like red. It's like asking "what does a thing look like without eyes?" Or "how is it conceived of without a mind?" Well, it isn't. Relations obtain [I]between[/I] things and asking them to inher "in themselves" in the first place seems to be the category mistake.
Another way to think of it: assume objects are defined by their properties. "Looking red," is a relation an object can possess. Thus, it is a property of an object.
People reach the Kantian problem by other routes through supposing the objects must be more fundemental that properties, that properties "attach" to objects. And here you get the idea in contemporary metaphysics of "bare substratum," and pure haecceities," which start to look very similar to the noumenal on closer inspection. This just seems like a misstep to me, born out of attempts to define "identity," in terms of properties and relations.
As I understand you, I agree that if we were totally free to do whatever we wanted at any moment in time, with no constraints on our actions, we might freely decide not to eat or drink, we might freely decide to jump off a cliff or we might freely decide not to get out of the way of a speeding truck.
But this would be unworkable. Sentient life can only succeed if a limit has been placed on the range of choices available to it within any particular situation. Limits not determined by another mind, but determined by the physical nature of the world. Within limits there is freedom to choose a particular course of action. A certain freedom of choice within a restricted range of possibilities seems an effective evolutionary solution for the development of life.
The question is, what is the nature of this freedom. We feel free to choose between a pre-determined range of available possibilities, but is this freedom in fact an illusion. Is it the case that the range of available possibilities is so restricted that in fact our free will is non-existent.
We are at state S2 and prior to that we were at state S1. Either we are free to choose between moving to future states S3 or S4 or our choice has been pre-determined by state S1.
I can understand the mechanics of Determinism, in that our choice at state S2 has been pre-determined by state S1, but the mechanics of free will elude me, causing me to come to the conclusion that the world is Deterministic and our belief that we have free will is just an illusion.
Suppose free will can cause state S2 to move equally to either S3 of S4, meaning that state S2 can spontaneously and without prior cause move of its own accord equally to either states S3 or S4. This gives us the problem of a spontaneous change in the absence of a prior cause that is not random and somehow determined.
What kind of mechanism can explain a spontaneous change without priori cause that is not random and somehow determined.
Not as I understand it.The indirect realist does not and knows it; the direct realist does not but thinks he does.
Quoting RussellA
Yes, which fits with what I just said, but doesnt fit with both seeing a red postbox.
Quoting RussellA
It cant apply to the direct realist, for he knows the name of the object from the perception of it, which makes explicit there is knowledge in the mere perception. Because of this condition, the direct realist should be able to name the red postbox even if he didnt even know what a red postbox was. In effect, it is a red postbox for no other reason than it is seen, re: I see a red postbox.
Quoting RussellA
Not quite. The indirect realist conceives the color red as one of a multiplicity of properties belonging to the phenomenon representing the thing he has perceived. It takes more than red to be postbox, right?
Quoting RussellA
It shouldnt. To see is that mode of perception in which a sensation is given from that sensory apparatus susceptible to being affected by light. No human can see with his eyes closed.
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Quoting RussellA
Ok. You name it A, but because neither of us know the cause, Im perfectly authorized to call that same cause, B. It follows that anybody that doesnt know the cause, can call it anything they like. Pretty slipshod method for acquiring knowledge, I must say.
Quoting RussellA
Sure. We name stuff all the time without knowing what it is. But in the case at hand, the cause is something, and as soon as it is possibly a certain something, it is determinable. As soon as it is determinable, it cannot be a thing-in-itself.
Quoting RussellA
I can handle that. It might stand as an initial condition, or a major premise in a syllogistic argument, sure.
Quoting RussellA
Perhaps. It then becomes simply a question of which is the more parsimonious, and the less in conflict with what Nature demands.
What does one make of this Kantian claim? AN excellent question for me is, How does one reasonably defend the limitation of what stands outside phenomena, if one's perspective is solely within phenomena. That is, how is it that this notepad stands outside the ontology of what is absolutely real? It would require the real to be somehow exclusive of this notepad, which sound absurd, because such a line would require an understanding on both sides to makes sense and a line (Wittgenstein made an argument like this in his Tractatus).
It is a tough cookie, but take the cognitive dimension of a model proposition like: the cup is on the table. What is the cognitive part of this? It lies with the understanding, in the Kantian way of putting it, and as he says, the synthetic work of the mind to apply universal concepts like 'cup' in an instantiation. I would point out the "blind" sensory intuition ("intuitions without concepts are blind") part of the equation. Put it ike this: in order for this to make any sense at all it has to be that one cna even talk about intuitions absent a concept, but this is impossible, because such talk would itself possess a "blind" claim. Kant can't talk alike this, in other words, for this is just nonsense to talk of a blind anything in this way.
But, and here is the point, we clearly CAN talk like this. I can apprehend the, call it X that is designated by the term 'red'. There is a presence I can existentially grasp as something that, while held within the cognitive act, is identified as altogether noncognitive.
This opens the door to certain existential claims Kant never imagined.
The homunculus, and the informal fallacy of the argument, disappears from a cognitive system as such. For the subject that is the thinker by means of that system, anything that represents that subject, also as a thinker, to the very self that thinks, is superfluous.
It is quite absurd to consider that there is a theater in the brain, so why would a theory describing a method for what goes on in the brain, make room for one?
The mechanics of compatibilist free will, as I see it, are the same as the mechanics of determinism. Questions about freedom are questions about: "to what extent we are self-determining as opposed to being externally determined." This also explains how we can be unfree when constrained by internal causes. E.g. the agoraphobic who cannot attend their daughter's college graduation because they lack control over their fear of leaving the house, the alcoholic who wants to quit drinking, agrees it is the better choice, but cannot resist their urges, etc.
We can be alien to ourselves and lack self-control, and indeed, a good deal of the freedom we care most about is freedom over ourselves, freedom to engage in self-determination. Self-knowledge becomes crucial here as well, as we can be manipulated or choose things out of ignorance. Crucially, gaining knowledge is itself a transcendent act. Learning involves going beyond current beliefs and desires, the expansion of the self. By expanding the self, we can become more self-determining.
Mechanically, it works the same as fatalism, but fatalism seems to ignore the ways in which we also "determine ourselves." We can identify with and exercise control over what determines our actions. For example, if our work is a very important part of our life, then switching to a job with a very horizontal, consensus-based management style gives us more freedom, in important ways. We are freer in that we do more to determine our actions and feel ownership over our work. Likewise, we are always determined by the politics of our locale. But if we identify with our polity and exert influence on it, then the political determination of our actions becomes less external determination, more internal determination, in that we identify with the previously external force that determines our actions and exert causal control over it. But the control we exert still works through deterministic means. An absolute monarch is deterministically influenced by their polity, and yet, they also clearly possess great internal causal powers vis-a-vis their state.
:up:
But then it seems to me that "representation" is really more about how we describe relations within the parts from which the cognitive system emerges, not the relations that obtain between the whole cognitive system and the objects of experience. Our sight of a tree is not a tree, but nonetheless, I feel confident in saying we "see trees," as opposed to "representations of trees," in an important sense. Information is, by its nature, relational, so "in-itselfness" itself seems to be a fraught abstraction.
Id have agreed, if it had said, representation is really more about how we describe relations within the parts of the cognitive system as a whole. I dont think we should say the system emerges from the description of relations, but the relations described emerge from a kind of system capable of it.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
That would be fine, as long as the cognitive system as a whole wasnt comprised of relations. There are established metaphysical theories predicated on just that being the case.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Oh certainly. It is the convention to speak in those terms. I suspect only the philosopher or the philosophy student would use the more precise terminology. I understand no one knows how it is we think, but the average joe barely even knows he thinks. He says, I think this, I think that, but hasnt a farging clue what that means.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yep, agreed. Theres only one use for the term, nothing else need ever be said about it.
I don't see why it has to have caused itself. I think it's commonly known as "reflection".
Logically, how can something reflect on itself?
There are at least two aspects to the question of Indirect and Direct Realism, the metaphysical and the linguistic. When considering an expression such as "I see the red post-box" the metaphysical and the linguistic should not be conflated
As regards the metaphysical, Indirect Realism makes more sense than Direct Realism. We know that when an object emits a wavelength of 700nm we see the colour red. The Indirect Realist would argue that the colour red exists in our minds. The Direct Realist would argue that the object is red.
As regards the linguistic, Direct Realism is more appropriate than Indirect Realism. As Wittgenstein discusses in Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty, words exist within language games, and within language games are certain hinge propositions on which the language game is founded. These hinge propositions are always true within the language game of which they are part. They are not intended to correspond with the world they describe, but create the world that they describe, in that the proposition "I see a red post-box" is true even if in the world is a flying pink elephant.
When considering the proposition " I see the red post" linguistically rather than metaphysically, it should be remembered that any particular world may have many different meanings. For example, according to the Merriam Webster dictionary, the word "see" as a transitive verb may mean:
1 a = to perceive by the eye
b = to perceive or detect as if by sight
2 a = to be aware of : RECOGNIZE - sees only our faults
b = to imagine as a possibility : SUPPOSE - couldn't see him as a crook
c = to form a mental picture of : VISUALIZE - can still see her as she was years ago
d = to perceive the meaning or importance of : UNDERSTAND
3 a = to come to know : DISCOVER
b = to be the setting or time of - The last fifty years have seen a sweeping revolution in science
c = to have experience of : UNDERGO - see army service
4 a = EXAMINE, WATCH - want to see how she handles the problem
b = READ - to read of
c = to attend as a spectator - see a play
5 a = to make sure - See that order is kept.
b = to take care of : provide for - had enough money to see us through
6 a = to find acceptable or attractive - can't understand what he sees in her
b = to regard as : JUDGE
c = to prefer to have - I'll see him hanged first.
7 a = to call on : VISIT
b (1) = to keep company - had been seeing each other for a year
(2) = to grant an interview to : RECEIVE - The president will see you now.
8 = ACCOMPANY, ESCORT - See the guests to the door.
9 = to meet (a bet) in poker or to equal the bet of (a player) : CALL
The word "see" as an intransitive verb may mean:
1 a = to apprehend objects by sight
b = to have the power of sight
c = to perceive objects as if by sight
2 a = to look about
b = to give or pay attention
3 a = to grasp something mentally
b = to acknowledge or consider something being pointed out - See, I told you it would rain.
4 = to make investigation or inquiry
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Quoting Mww
As I don't know the Arabic name for "red post-box" without having first learnt it, the Direct Realist cannot name an object without having first learnt its name.
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Quoting Mww
Yes, objects have many properties. The colour red is a useful example to make a philosophical and linguistic point.
As a side point, it is not the case that objects have properties, but rather objects are a set of properties.
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Quoting Mww
Yes, I can name it A and you can name it B. However, the point is that an unknown thing, a thing-in-itself, has been named.
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Quoting Mww
True, but until it has been determined, it is still a thing-in-itself.
Heres a language game for ya: when carrying on a conversation, the worst one can do is repeat himself.
Quoting RussellA
Nope. We named a possible cause, which could be a possible experience. A thing-in-itself will never be one, by definition.
Say it is the case thing-in-itself is a name. What am I given by it? What does that name tell me?
Quoting RussellA
Yep. The catch being, it never will be determined, because once again, repeating myself ..it is undeterminable, by definition.
This is like telling Henry Ford he didnt invent the Model T. Or, the Model T he did invent, wasnt really a Model T. You cant just take something meant in one way, and make it something else. If Model Ts arent your thing, go drive something more adaptable to your way of getting around.
Start with the premise that this "thing" has a memory. And the thing's existence has temporal extension. Memory allows the thing to revisit its past existence. That is called "reflection". Reflection allows a person to reconsider one's actions relative to one's thought processes and see where the actions did not follow logic.
That it exists.
But what if its non-existence is impossible?
I suppose theres nothing inherently wrong with naming an existence as such. But naming a mere existence doesnt tell me as much as naming the object of my experience.
We can avoid the homuncular regress by acknowledging that the self is not separate to the representations but the self is the representations.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
This raises the question of how we can be self-determining. We say, "I think I will have a coffee rather than a tea". Such a thought did not exist at a prior moment in time, so what caused the thought to come into existence. Either a prior state of affairs, which is Determinism, or the thought itself caused itself to come into existence, which is Free Will.
How can something cause itself to come into existence?
I have an experience which has the name "the colour red". I know that this experience has had a cause, but although I don't know what the cause was, I do know that the cause existed. I can name this unknown cause "A". I can then talk about the cause of my seeing the colour red as "A" and the cause of my seeing the colour green as "B". I don't know what "A" and "B" are, other than that they exist. Something that is unknown yet exists can be named as a "thing-in-itself". Both "A" and "B" are things-in-themselves.
It is true that the names "A" and "B" don't tell me as much as the names "the colour red" and "the colour green", but they do tell me something, that "A" and "B" exist and that "things-in-themselves" exist.
Ok. Thanks.
My understanding of Kant on this point is that if the world is timeless and without space, objects are eternal and the becoming we see is like the motion of the experience of motion pictures. The vase is real but it's eternity acting as becoming, presence showing life. We don't really know what things are in eternity but we can speak of them while in time by observing them acting outside eternity. Try not asking first what noumena is and instead focus time and space being intuitions. Then maybe noumena come into focus
Kant wouldn't put it like that, but there is something close in what you say. His question really is, how are apriori synthetic judgments possible? Take causality: before me lies a context of causally related things, like two pool balls on a collision course with each other. Causality explains the possibility of their altered trajectories at the time of impact. But can you even imagine one pool ball just changing course all by itself? This not just a case of pure logicality, of agreement in a tautology; this is in-the-world impossiblity. Regarding things out there, among the trees and lamp posts, I have knowledge that is apodictic, as Kant put it, apriori, universally and necessarily true, and this isn't supposed to happen. KNowledge about the world like this should be at best inductively acquired. How do we know about gravity? We observe the world and things fall to the grounded repeatedly and without exception. But this doesn't mean things MUST fall to the ground. They just do. But causality tells you something must be the case, just as logic does, e.g., modus ponens or the principle of contradiction.
How does one account for this apriori knowledge IN the outside world? Apriority is supposed be confined to mental constructions. It must be that the outside world isn't "outside" in the usual sense at all. The perceiving agency must be making a contribution to its empirical existence.
Anything that bears the mark of apriority must have its origin in the perceiver's mind, and this goes for time and space, the very formal conditions for the possibility of objective experience. Space and its geometry, time and its sequential structure, both have apriority in their analysis.
That will be a tough sell. Things-in-themselves, for Kant, did not lie in the perceptual world at all. But this here sounds more like Husserl's things-themselves, referring to the eidetically structured visual presence before one's eyes. Philosophers today tend away from this kind of thing, which suggests some kind of non propositional knowledge of red that is there prior language and naming.
Of course they do. In what other world would they lie?
They do not lie in the perceived world.
A thing-in-itself is still just a thing.
There needs to be some flexibility in what we mean by knowledge. For example, I have the innate ability to see the colour red but not the colour ultraviolet. The distinction between knowing how and knowing what is relevant here, a distinction that was brought to prominence in epistemology by Gilbert Ryle who used it in his book The Concept of Mind. (SEP - Knowing-How and Knowing-That). I am born with the innate knowledge of how to see the colour red even if I don't have the innate knowledge of what the colour red is.
In today's terms, we can account for our a priori knowledge by Innatism and Enactivism, given that life has been evolving in synergy with the world for at least 3.7 billion years. We are born with a brain that has a particular physical structure because of this 3.7 billion years of evolution.
Enactivism says that it is necessary to appreciate how living beings dynamically interact with their environments. From an Enactivist perspective, there is no prospect of understanding minds without reference to such interactions because interactions are taken to lie at the heart of mentality in all of its varied forms. (IEP - Enactivism)
Innatism says that in the philosophy of mind, Innatism is the view that the mind is born with already-formed ideas, knowledge, and beliefs. The opposing doctrine, that the mind is a tabula rasa (blank slate) at birth and all knowledge is gained from experience and the senses, is called empiricism. (Wikipedia - Innatism)
Innatism and Enactivism explain our non-propositional knowledge of red.
Quoting Astrophel
We see a snooker cue hit a stationary snooker ball and see the snooker ball begin to move. It is not our ordinary experience that snooker balls on a snooker table are able to spontaneously move. Whenever we see a snooker ball start to move we have seen a priori cause, either another snooker ball or a snooker cue.
Where does our belief in causality come from? For Kant, our knowledge of causality is a priori because the Category of Relation includes causality. In today's terms, our knowledge of causality is a priori because of the principle of Innatism, in that the principle of causality is built into the very structure of our brain. The brain doesn't need Hume's principle of induction to know that one thing causes another, as knowing one thing causes another is part of the innate structure of the brain.
Suppose we perceive the colour red, which is an experience in our minds. As we have a priori the innate knowledge of causality, we know that this experience has been caused by something. We don't know what has caused it, but we know something has caused it. We can call this unknown something "A", or equally "thing-in-itself."
The fact that we know "The most distant objects in the Universe are 47 billion light years away" does not mean that we know 47 billion light years. The fact that we know "for every effect there has been a prior cause" does not mean that we know priori causes. Both these statements are representations, and the fact that we know a representation does not mean that we know what is being represented. Confusion often arises in language when the representation is conflated with what is being represented. What is being represented is often named after the representation. For example, Direct Realism conflates what is being perceived when we say "I see a red post-box" with the object of perception, a red post-box.
So what exactly is "thing-in-itself" describing? When we say "our experience of the colour red has been caused by a thing-in-itself", the thing-in-itself exists as a representation in our mind not something in the world.
No. Things in themselves are neither apriori nor aposteriori. They are not empirical, not in time and space; just postulates. Pure reason is only shown in our visible affairs. They themselves cannot be witnessed.
Agreed. Those are conditions related to experience or the absence of it. Things-in-themselves, as such, in and of themselves, have nothing to do with the conditions of our experience.
Quoting Astrophel
Space and time are the conditions for the objects of our experience. Things-in-themselves are not objects of experience, therefore space and time are irrelevant with respect to them.
Quoting Astrophel
For their place in transcendental philosophy, they are transcendentally deduced conceptions, postulated as empirical existences necessary to explain things that appear to sensibility.
Quoting Astrophel
Pure reason is never shown, if that be taken to mean demonstrated; it is pure transcendental thought and judgement, having no real objects belonging to them. It is, .the faculty which contains the principles of cognizing anything absolutely à priori ..
Quoting Astrophel
Agreed, having space and time already eliminated from them as conditions for being appearances. But it remains that they were conceived for some purpose, and it turns out there were two.
Where does it exist?
I think we've already covered this: of course, we refer to some images as two-dimensional and I have pointed out that they are not really two-dimensional, although for all intents and purposes the elements in such images all appear to be on the same plane. That was not the salient point though: you had claimed that our visual field itself is two dimensional and that is what I took issue with, and I asked you to support that assertion with argument, which you have so far failed to provide.
Maybe the noumena is that which connecs the appearances to reason, not behind but within
But of course, you know this is miles from Kant. Ryle thinks within a tradition that explicitly against Kantian phenomenology and those who follow through in what is called continental philosophy. This tradition has the utmost respect for science and well supported theory of evolution, and does not dismiss any reasonable thing it says. But then, this is not Kant at all. Start talking about an account for the apriority in the structure of thought, and the way hard wired organic brains produce phenomena that have this sense of logicality making all that we experience appear as rigid rules of thought, and you will have to face the obvious question begged: This whole structred conception of evolution itself is just this, a phenomenological consturction, leading right into Kantisn thinking's hands, which is that the true source of rational thought is transcendence.
Quoting RussellA
This account of causality is one example how absurd this account can get. First, it should be made clear that what we call causality is actually an historical construct, and the term is, like all terms, merely a hermeneutical designation, a taking something up "as" causality. This point here being that our language is essentially a pragmatic mode of engagement, so we use this term and refer to soemthing in the world, an intuition, a nonverbal apprehension, like the color red or, here, the impossibility is imagining a spontaneous cause, and this referring is done in a context of an entire body of coherent language use that is implicitly in play as a contextual matrix out of which meanings arise. In other words, there are no stand alone meanings, no one to one correspondence between the term causality and any given occasion of its appearing. Meanings and worldly designations are "whole language" phenomena" and to see this argued out, one should go first to Sausseure's Semiotics, and then on to Derrida. Not that Derrida really cancels the dignity of individual references, but he does undo any confidence we might have in language's ability speak about the world. Second, the absurd part, which is just mind blowing: Localizing the apodicticity of what we call causality in a brain's structure suggest that outside such that this the principle would not apply. So what is outside of a brain? Well, a brain is a finite object in the company of other objects, so outside would indicate being among these other objects---plants and hills and stars and cats and dogs, etc., and the conclusion is, that these objects are not subject to the principle of causality, not being IN the brain matrix, and my pencil may start rolling across the desk with movement being ex nihilo!
Sorry, perhaps I am missing something. Anyway, as I see it, phenomena, and the logical intuitions that bind them in causality and other principles, are all that is and that ever will be experienced. Brains must therefore be phenomenologically conceived; but brains are also what generate phenomena, that is the appearances acknowledge routinely. Therefore, the brain is a construct of the brain.
But, as I like to remind people, it gets far worse: So causality is an innate, brain generated manifestation? But how does brain generated anything produce a reality that is anything but brain generated somethings? This writing I am producing is reducible to brain activity, and so the term brain activity, is also this, as are all sentential constructions, thoughts and any other manifestations, which includes self referencing. One is literally nowhere.
I can't see where we disagree, then.
Yes, I ma sure this is right, but it is not going to be a causal connectivity, as causality in itself is a term that belongs to finitude. What causality really is is like asking what modus ponens really is: it belongs to Kant's impossible metaphysics. As I see it, Kant drew boundaries where he should have. Can one really talk about where eternity and its absolute being ends and finitude begins?
As @mww wrote "For their place in transcendental philosophy, they are transcendentally deduced conceptions, postulated as empirical existences necessary to explain things that appear to sensibility."
In a sense, muons are things-in-themselves, postulated as empirical existences necessary to explain what is observed.
Yes. Kant, who died in 1804, was not aware of what is described today as Enactivism and Innatism. However Philosophers working today in 2023 should be aware of these concepts, and should take them into account when contemplating about non-propositional knowledge.
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Quoting Astrophel
Transcendence has different meanings. It depends what you mean by transcendence. For Kant, "I call all knowledge transcendental if it is occupied, not with objects, but with the way that we can possibly know objects even before we experience them. (Wikipedia - Transcendence (philosophy). Kant does not explain how we can know objects before we experience them. Today, however, because of the concept of Innatism, we are able to explain how we can know objects before we experience them.
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Quoting Astrophel
Why? Why should it follow that because the understanding of causality is innate within the brain the principle of causality would not apply outside the brain? The concept of Enactivism shows that an understanding of causality is innate within the brain precisely because the principle of causality applies outside the brain.
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Quoting Astrophel
It depends what the word "brain" is referring to. Yes, in the sense that the "brain" as a word in language is a construct of the brain as something that physically exists in the world.
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Quoting Astrophel
For the Idealist, reality only exists in a mind, meaning that the reality the mind perceives has been created by a mind. For the Indirect and Direct Realist, there is a reality outside the mind which the mind relates to. This reality outside the mind has not been generated by the mind, but how the mind relates to this reality is generated by the mind. For the Indirect Realist, the reality they perceive is a representation of the reality existing outside the mind. For the Direct Realist, the reality they perceive is the reality existing outside the mind.
There are different opinions as to the source of one's perceived reality.
Does it leads to a conclusion that modern QM is basing some of their theories and hypotheses on Kant's Thing-in-Itself?
Not necessarily, but it does show that good ideas are universal.
and timeless.
Oh, we disagree over a wide range, which is fine.
But, with respect to that comment, Ive been there myself. Pure reasons intrinsic circularity has been obvious for millennia, and advances in neurological science has made it even worse.
The brain goes so far as to manifest itself as an immaterial something-or-other, imbues the seemingness of knowledge into it, but prevents the seemingness of knowledge for informing the immaterial something-or-other of what it is or where it came from. Like, brain says ..YOU are allowed to know whatever YOU think YOU know, in a progressive series, but YOU are not allowed to even think YOU know anything at all in a regressive series, which, of course, includes YOU.
The brain in its mighty magnificence gives its self-manifested subjectivity QM science, a progressive series. One of the tenets of QM science is the fact that observation disrupts the quantum domain by intruding into it, also progressive. A sidebar given by the brain in its mighty magnificence is the incredible density of the constituent parts of itself, informing its self-manifested subjectivity of its ~3b/mm3 synaptic clefts, which is the very domain of QM science .progressive. So eventually the self-manifested subjectivity goes so far as to invent a device for exploring the quantum domain of itself, progressive, searching for a YOU that has been allowed to know ..oh crap!!!! ..regressive.
Now the self-manifested subjectivity takes the chance of disrupting itself, in which case .was it ever there? The brain has tacitly allowed the extermination of its own avatar.
YIKES!!!!
Heh, heh, I don't mean historically. I could equally say the post Heideggerian insights of Michel Henry are entirely missed by the positvism that seems to rule the thoughts of science oriented metaphysics. Henry died early this century.
Quoting RussellA
Sorry, you have to look at that "before" term very differently. He means logically prior, such that when one encounters an object, analysis reveals a structure that is invisible to observation, but is latent within it. In other words, before making, or, in order to make, experience possible at all, there has to be these structure in place just due to an analysis of what experience is.
Quoting RussellA
Because, to borrow Rorty's reasoning, the innateness is not out there, in the same way that propositions and their logical forms are not out there, in the tree, the chair or the compute mouse. Truth, moving into a strong but inevitable position, is not out there, among things. There are no numbers, no concepts out there. We do this.
Quoting RussellA
But to affirm what is not brain, you would have to step out of one. Otherwise, all of your brain references will be about other brain produced phenomena. All the "out thereness" would remain among the complexities of neuronal interface. Keeping in mind that this is NOT the position I represent at all. I am pointing out the impossibilities of such brain talk.
Quoting RussellA
For the phenomenologist, reality is just reality, it is exactly s it appears, and when I say the tree is over there and it is not me and there is spatial separation that separates us, etc., all of this stays in place. Recall that Kant said just this. He just further said that when it comes to philosophy, we have to deal with transcendence and the presuppositions in ontology and epistemology have to be explored and this leads to a whole diffenent set of questions and ideas.
You know, Ryle knew this; they all did and do. Kant wasn't dismissed because he was essentially wrong. He was dismissed because he had been worn out, and after more that a century of post Kantianism, it was understood that there was simply nothing left to say. But analytic philosophy then took a course away from this into common sense (Moore holding his hands up declaring "here is a hand!") and positivism and took off, ignoring what Husserl and Heidegger and the French were doing with phenomenology, basically initiated by Kant. And the further it got away from this, the more science informed its grounding.
Disrupting or liberating? Consider that these are the same. What you call QM disruption is reducible to "the question," the piety of thought. It precedes science, even the most disruptive, for it is the essence of disruption itself: the dialectical mechanism that allows no thesis to go unchallanged. Brain talk always ends up in refutation simply because the question it begs subtends everything conceivable. I have no doubt there is a brain/experience connectivity, and this needs some emphasis. But if some form of Cartesian doubt (the question!) always already insinuates itself between belief and its objects, one is left trying to find an Archimedean point, if you will, that is unmovable to thought at this level, and QM is not this, for it remains a concept embedded in a context of "regionalized thought" and one remains in the hermeneutic indeterminacy.
My position is this: Such indeterminacy is impossible to overcome, and Derrida makes this clear. But Rorty and his pragmatism (as well as others) make all of our language endeavors into pragmatic endeavors and philosophy is just this pragmatic reaching out into metaphsyics, where language terminates, which is impossible. But if you follow Husserl and post Husserlian thought (the French "turn" with Levinas, Michel Henry, Jean Luc Marion, et al), you are taken to the only logical extenson of hermeneutics and Cartesian doubt (this all encomapssing aporia!), which is to the things themselves, the revelatory appearance of the world in the wake of the most radicial reduction.
What makes this radical and opens the door to discovering philosophy's real purpose is that the phenomenological reduction is not simply a thesis; it is a method. An existential method, if you will, one that brings one into greater intimacy with existence by bracketing or suspending everything that is not, to put it roughly. Even Husserl didn't understand this.
Disruption is only a beginning.
Yes, in the same way that we are able to see the colour red and not the colour ultraviolet because the ability to see red is an innate part of the structure of the brain.
Quoting Astrophel
Yes, if the word "innate" is limited to sentient beings, then innateness does not exist in a world external to sentient beings. Causality may then be said to be intrinsic within a world external to sentient beings.
Quoting Astrophel
Do you mean "brain" existing as a word in language or brain as a physical thing existing in a world outside language?
Quoting Astrophel
Yes, when the Phenomenologist sees the colour red, they are interested in the colour red as it appears to them within the context of their other experiences. Their interest in not in making assumptions about a possible cause in an external world.
Quoting Astrophel
Yes, Kant started a conversation and new knowledge gained in the 200 years since his death doesn't make what he said any less relevant.
I just disagree that Kant was meaning 'thing-in-itself' in that manner: he states very clearly throughout CPR that we will never know anything about the things-in-themselves.
Well, then, it appears as though Kant has no grounds to be an indirect realist. Why think there are real objects, then?
There should be. Kant gives a proof for everything he claims; except for his presupposition that there are real objects.
I just made it up for distinguishing between the cup which is experienced vs. the cup as it is in-itself. Is that what you are asking?
I wonder. Say I get famous. In a hundred years, will they take what made me famous, look at it way differently than I meant for it, then call me something I wouldnt call myself, because of the way they looked at what I said?
. the realthat which corresponds to sensation .. All sensations are given directly from perception which is given directly from the appearance of real things, so ..
Why would ever suggest Kant was an indirect realist? If anything, he would be an indirect epistemologist, in that all our empirical knowledge is only possible indirectly from representations of real objects.
Elsewhere, has invited the mediate/immediate distinction, as opposed to the direct/indirect. From a purely subjective perspective .what a guy thinks for himself and not what a philosopher thinks for everybody .the invite is a much better approach, and is used by Kant himself.
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Quoting Bob Ross
Actually, he admits to not knowing how some things he posits work, re: imagination, even reason itself. He posits logical arguments, which are treated as internal proofs, but are never susceptible to objectively repeatable experiment, hence never empirically proven. He cant prove there are representations, conceptions, cognitions and whatnot, but he can prove its logically valid that this or that happens when there are. Its called theory, donchaknow. Or, speculative metaphysics.
Quoting Bob Ross
I asked how a cup-in-itself got its name, and the correct answer is ..it doesnt because there is no such thing as a cup as it is in-itself. No named thing is in-itself; no in-itself is ever named, and no case can be made for transcendental idealism, within its original view, that says otherwise.
The turn from Kantianism to modern phenomenology was a turning toward realism. It was for the world. Which is not to say it's not spiritual in any way. Mystcism has been a big part of German philosophy since the Romantic period
Reason can reflect on itself.
Why call it realism?
"To the things themselves" said the phenomenologists. For them experience was primary. Colors may be said to be in the mind but everything is. Color is "there" just as much as primary qualities. I think this is what they meant.
Well then, there is some sense in calling it realism, but generally this is not the way the term is used, which is not the affirmation of the reality of the totality of phenomena, but rather an affirmation of science's physicalism, of some sort or another. To the things themselves! This is Husserl, of course. if there is a single way to find favor of a view like this, which entirely rejects the popular metaphysics of science, it lies here: the can be witnessed only phenomena. Period. Any references to something that is not a phenomenon is a reference to something it is impossible to know, and thus, the existence of which is impossible to conceive, the very definition of bad metaphysics.
This of course runs counter to our education, which puts science in the privileged position of authority not to be second guessed. Philosophy is not, however, science.
Dangling pronouns cause problems
The problem is the word "itself". We can replace the expression "reason can reflect on itself" by the expression "reason can reflect on reason". The question then becomes, what does the first use of the word "reason" refer to and what does the second use of the word "reason" refer to.
There is no problem if the first use refers to reason as a thought in the mind, and the second use refers to reason as a definition, such as "a logical thought about something".
However, there is a problem if both the first and second use refer to a thought in the mind. Reason cannot reflect on itself because of the problem of infinite regression. If I reflect it must be about something and if I reason it must be about something. "To reflect" can mean to think about something. I can reflect on something in the world such as a table. "To reason" means to think about something logically. I can reason about something I observe in the world such as a table, such as, why does it have four legs rather than two. The question is, can I reason about the something that is reasoning about something. The problem is, that if reason could reflect on itself, then if I reason about something, and this something is reasoning about something, then one ends up with an infinite loop.
IE, reason as a thought can reflect on reason as a definition, but reason as a thought cannot reflect on reason as the same thought.
The whole part of CPR is about reason reflecting on itself via critical thinking. :roll:
Impossible.
Reason can reflect on objects of reason. An object of reason can include the definition of reason as "a logical thought about something", but an object of reason cannot include what is doing the reasoning, which would be a logical impossibility.
The object of reason can also include such things as God, the soul, freedom, immortality, virtue, happiness, causality and morality.
As Kant was a Rationalist, he held the epistemological view that "regards reason as the chief source and test of knowledge". It is not the case that reason in itself is able to provide new knowledge, but rather, reason enables new knowledge to be discovered.
Reason is an a priori structure within the mind, and together with the Categories, give logical structure to objects of empirical experience and thereby plays a Discursive role in making sense of phenomenal experiences.
Reason in the CPR looks outwards to objects of reason not inwards to itself, which would be a logical impossibility.
The answer appears to have emanated from the situation of someone who misread, or haven't read CPR at all.
Quoting RussellA
CPR is the critic on Pure Reason, explaining how it works with all those objects, and its limitations too. The only way that can be done is by Reason reflecting on itself.
How?
Of its 785 pages, can you narrow it down a bit?
I am afraid not. But here is a hint. Reason's main capability is reflection. Reason deals with objects and propositions which entered your perception. Never on the external objects direct.
When reason is trying to find out on the nature of reason, the only way is by reflecting itself. There is no other way.
A. OF REASON IN GENERAL. , A299/B355.
B. OF THE LOGICAL USE OF REASON.
C. OF THE PURE USE OF REASON.
For science the world is contingent while for philosophy the thing in itself is necessary, only by being in-itself can it make the contingent share in its necessity by application of universal laws. Fitche comes to mind
And let us be clear about this. The whole point of CPR was to explicate how human reason works, and what limitations it has. It is not about God, the soul, freedom, immortality, virtue, happiness, causality and morality, although they were recruited to assist the exegesis.
Share in its necessity. But this which is shared is, for Kant, found in logical necessity, not in the full reality of what we experience. One problem with Kant is the same for Descartes who gave a privileged place to thought with the cogito, I think, but inferred from this being, I am. Rationalism always ends up making an abstraction out of being, Kant's TUA being no more than a formal definition of a unifying synthesis. It is patently absurd, as if our existence were reducible to this.
Are you a reductionalist? What Kant said is similar Malebranche, Rosmini, and many others. The world is yet is not. It's contingent. But the nous in our minds is in the structure of matter and how it interacts with itself. The source of reason is experienced in our knowledge of the world we live in. The world becomes necessary by our interactions with it. If I jump or fall from the Eiffel Tower, it's at that moment necessary that I fall and die if there is nothing to caught me. Yet it's contingent because the tower could have never been made and myself not there to die by it. Contingency and necessity are dualities that stand as thesis/antithesis. Experience is their sum. The universe is Nature and we are in its unity
But you can't really take something like Kant's pure reason as a basis for understanding what our existence is about. Reason doesn't give one knowledge as it is the mere form of knowing, and in itself has no value at all. Nor does sensory intuition, as Kant calls it. The intuition of the color red or a tone in middle C played by a clarinet does not as such carry one to understand the our world. Because these do not, conceived as such, have any meaning. Kant failed to understand the basis for meaning in the world. It is not definitional meaning, but affective meaning that is first philosophy.
As to contingency and necessity, Kant's apriority had only to do with logic's pure form. Consider what this is: a complete abstraction, devoid of the palpable content of experience, the ooo's and ahhh's and ughs and yuks, you know, the blisses and miseries we experience. Herein lies the theme for analysis that can reveal the essence of what is meaningful. Other matters are important only to the extent that they are useful to this end.
Kant's pure reason is attached to its practical reason, being the servant of it. So you can learn from Kant about life. His -Critique of Judgment- has us playing purpose into the world of experience. This is proto-existentialism. The thing in itself is him doing the Buddhist thing where you empty everything of mental constructions and try for a moment to see things as they are to themselves. But he places essence back into quanity, which for him has substance. The moon has substance for Kant. There is just something deeper going on
What an interesting thing to say. Where does he say this?
Compare the Critique of Pure Reason with his Critique of Judgment. The first takes objective reality of immediate perception to be false. It's not the thing in itself. This I see as his Buddhist method. With faith in God and total admiration for the teleological argument he retain his Christian side but realizes he left the world *empty*. This is why inn paragraph 57 of COJ he mentons the "indeterminate concept of the supersensible substrate of the appearances" and of "purposiveness without purpose". And also the picture Kant paints in The Critique of Practical Reason is that of spontaneity of applying moral action to ourselves. Is his philosophy too man centered for you? The perennial philosophy of man has always been that thought and will are prior to matter, instead of the other way around (matter being the substrate of consciousness). Was Hermes an existentialist?
I would pull back form invoking Buddhism, a method, really, that leads to enlightenment and liberation that has little to do with an analysis of the structure of rational judgments. But then, the Buddhists do claim, along with Kant, that desire for things in this world stand outside of ethics and higher meaning. Finally though, Kant's "method" of reducing the pursuit philosophical truth is a turning toward an anaysis reason as such and applying this across the board, while the Buddhist terminates all processes of engagement. This make their endeavor more like phenomenology's reduction, that is, the Husserlian reduction BUT as this is played out in post Husserliam thinking (Husserl himself being too much like Kant's detailed analyses. See Fink's Sixth Cartesian Meditation where he explicitly brings the Copernican Revolution up as the beginning for further investigation.
I wil have to look into COJ.
Hermes? There is a book by John Caputo that places Hermes, the messenger of the gods, as the cord of connectivity between our philosophical endeavors and the revelatory possibilities in the world. And he invokes Derrida, first Heidegger, Kierkegaard and Husserl, but Derrida as the radical interpretation that is at the end of where hermeneutics can actually go, which is to the "radical" confrontation with the world's "presence". A long story in this, continued by Michel Henry and others. But Hermes: Derrida wrote a paper on Levinas on the Metaphysics of Violence, and he explores, here and evlsewhere, this impossible interface with the world where "totalities" (Heidegger's term lifted from Husserl) are mitigated to yield, what Heidegger called in his Discourse on Thinking gelassenheit, a familiar term among the Amish, meaning a kind of yielding, a withdrawing of interpretative imposition to allow the world to "speak" if you will.
What does Hermes deliver from the gods? a true encounter? But Heidegger's position is one of a radical finitude, so Hermes is more like a single shaft of light issuing from a source that is beyond reach. But note, we have left Kant's rationalism altogether, have we not? Kant seems like he does well understand what Wittgenstein said about logic and value, that these are only shown to us, but one can never speak of their nature and logic, value and world to understand what they are would require a perspective beyond them, which makes talk like this impossible and nonsensical. But the reduction! Where does this actually take us? To the things themselves, says Husserl. This si a movement that suggests a mysticism, something of the order of Meister Eckhart, who Heidegger briefly allows into the conversation in Discourse.