Kant and the unattainable goal of empirical investigation
Its been quite common in interpretations of Kant to identify the thing in itself or the noumenon with the reality that lies behind appearances, that which is hidden from us by the veil of perception, and the ultimate but unattainable goal of scientific investigation. In showing that this is not Kants view, Kant scholar Stephen Palmquist disapprovingly quotes the author of a mid-twentieth-century Introduction to Kants Critique of Pure Reason:
The cornerstone of Kants philosophy is the concept of the transcendental. To think about objects transcendentally is to think about our thinking about them, to investigate the conditions of our knowledge. But it is not thereby a more profound investigation of reality so much as a shift or turn with the goal of putting knowledge in ordersimultaneously criticizing rationalists by rejecting most metaphysics (we cannot know anything except in reference to objects of experience) and defending knowledge against empiricist sceptics by establishing a solid foundation for science (we can know things objectively).
What this is not trying to do is reveal that the stuff of science and the things of experience are mere shadows, illusions, or pale imitations, or that science cannot reach reality. The transcendental perspective does not mean the true perspective, such that the empirical perspective is false, illusory, defective or distorted, since in science we have no interest in noumenamere objects of thoughtanyway. For science, phenomena are more than enough, and they are by no means inferior to the noumena (on the contrary).
S. R. Palmquist, Six Perspectives on the Object in Kants Theory of Knowledge:. . . Nothing could be more damaging to an interpreters understanding of Kants theory than Weldons predication of the thing in itself as the necessarily unattainable goal of empirical investigation; for Kant not only maintains that the goal of empirical investigation is always and only the phenomenon, but also that this goal is, at least in principle, adequately attainable in experience.
The cornerstone of Kants philosophy is the concept of the transcendental. To think about objects transcendentally is to think about our thinking about them, to investigate the conditions of our knowledge. But it is not thereby a more profound investigation of reality so much as a shift or turn with the goal of putting knowledge in ordersimultaneously criticizing rationalists by rejecting most metaphysics (we cannot know anything except in reference to objects of experience) and defending knowledge against empiricist sceptics by establishing a solid foundation for science (we can know things objectively).
What this is not trying to do is reveal that the stuff of science and the things of experience are mere shadows, illusions, or pale imitations, or that science cannot reach reality. The transcendental perspective does not mean the true perspective, such that the empirical perspective is false, illusory, defective or distorted, since in science we have no interest in noumenamere objects of thoughtanyway. For science, phenomena are more than enough, and they are by no means inferior to the noumena (on the contrary).
Comments (122)
Quite true, science investigates phenomena, not noumena (in a negative or positive sense). But this does not at all reduce the value of scientific theories, nor importantly, as you say, render them an less "real", which turns out to be a very problematic term.
Quoting Jamal
Yes, I agree that it more than anything an emphasis on the shift in perspective, more so that a entirely new mode of investigation. Funnily enough, I am re-reading the CPR for the third time, and although it has many merits, I do have one problem with Kant:
I do not think the way he presents his thought, as being "Copernican" or so radically new, to be, neither as new as he presents, nor as radical as he claims it to be. One clearly sees very strong anticipations of the noumena in Locke's discussion on "substance".
Cudworth, virtually entirely unknown explains Kant's philosophy 100 years before Kant published the CPR, when he says (among many other quotes):
"The essences of light and colours (said Scaliger) are as dark to the understanding, as they themselves are open to the sight. Nay, undoubtedly so long as we consider these things no otherwise than sense represents them, that is, as really existing in the objects without us, they are and must needs be eternally unintelligible. Now when all men naturally inquire what these things are, what is light, and what are colours, the meaning hereof is nothing else but this, that men would fain know or comprehend them by something of their own which is native and domestic, not foreign to them, some active exertion or anticipation of their own minds "
And much else which is richer in ideas, but not in theory, to Kant.
Plotinus too, is also a massive anticipation, also very rich on his own. (End rant.)
Regardless, the emphasis on the form of the investigation is very useful and impressive, because we still are unable to get out of our heads, the "common sense" picture of the world, no matter how hard we try.
Noumena are interesting to explore conceptually, but science won't reveal them, even if must postulate something like them to make sense of the world.
Quoting Jamal
What does "objectively" mean as you use it?
If we concede there are conditions for our knowledge and our knowledge is subject to those conditions and if those conditions are peculiar to the perceiver, how is our knowledge of anything objective?
Quoting Jamal
If upon transcendental contemplation we determine X,Y, and Z are the conditions for our knowledge, doesn't X,Y and Z become the lens upon which we view the noumenal and what we then actually perceive we refer to as the phenomenal?
I get that science will only concern itself with the phenomenal, but I don't see how you reject the suggestion that the phenomenal is a distortion of the noumenal. Isn't the phenomenal just the noumenal filtered through X,Y, and Z as you described it?
Your description of the transcendental was most helpful, but with Kant I'm always stuck with the meaning, purpose, and relevance of the noumenal and the difficulty in saving him from idealism.
I'm slightly and politely disagreeing here. Locke's theory is representational in traditional way: there's an objective world out there, and the contents of consciousness reflect this with its representations. This is pretty much what Aristotle and scholastics would say. Kant, on the other hand, completely cut this connection. The representations we have are the ultimate, objective, concrete world, and there's nothing else we can ever know about. Noumena is the non-sensitive cause of the world, and as such, one just wonders what's the use of it. This is precisely what people like Hegel, Peirce and other people made out of it. For sure we can do science and live our life without ever paying any attention to noumena, or any other sort of "hinterworld".
Politeness is almost always a most excellent virtue, for there can be disagreement without animosity, which, in the best case, leads to mutual learning.
I think the image is somewhat more complex than what you ascribe to Locke. While one can say, in some sense, that he is a "realist", that is, yes, he does think there is an "objective world" out there, he only thinks that some of its properties come about due to sensations, caused by primary qualities, secondary qualities do not belong to "external object", and primary qualities do not render them intelligible.
But when we examine objects in more depth, and consider what "substance" these objects are made of, Locke says:
"So that if any one will examine himself concerning his notion of pure substance in general, he will find he has no other idea of it at all, but only a supposition of he knows not what support of such qualities which are capable of producing simple ideas in us; which qualities are commonly called accidents. If any one should be asked, what is the subject wherein colour or weight inheres, he would have nothing to say, but the solid extended parts; and if he were demanded, what is it that solidity and extension adhere in, he would not be in a much better case than the Indian before mentioned who, saying that the world was supported by a great elephant, was asked what the elephant rested on; to which his answer was- a great tortoise: but being again pressed to know what gave support to the broad-backed tortoise, replied- something, he knew not what... [we] pretend to know, and talk of, is what... [we] ... have no distinct idea of at all, and so are perfectly ignorant of it, and in the dark. "
There is just a pure Gold mine in Locke's discussion On Our Complex Ideas of Substances.
Apologies for the length of the quote, but brevity is not his strong suite, and cutting these sentences down is difficult, because they are so good.
I can see very clear connections with the noumenon here, only that this concept encompasses primary qualities to. So, it is a difference of degrees, not of kind.
I have to confess that I haven't read Locke outside of basic text books, so I always thought the distinction between primary and secondary qualities a bit differently. To my understanding Locke thought that we cannot represent the corpuscular microstructure of objects, but there's at least some sort of correspondence to the perceived secondary qualities. Nothing prevents us in principle to penetrate deeper and deeper to corpuscular microstructures, and thus learn about the reality with scientific method. So yes, in a way the ultimate structure is unreachable and "noumenon", but it is conceptually different kind of noumena from Kant's, in my interpretation. And yes, my knowledge of Locke is thin and based on entry level text books.
Kant actually acknowledges this feature of Locke's work in CPR, but also maintains that Locke didn't go far enough. So in my interpretation Kant says that also the corpuscular microstructure (if there's such a thing for Kant - this is not clear in CPR) is also part of phenomenal world. We don't know if we ever reach the ultimate atomic structure of substances, and we don't even know if there is such a thing in the first place. Noumena for Kant is something totally outside all of this. (So I'm here following the metaphysical interpretation, I guess). Outside our representations, which include both primary and secondary qualities, there's nothing for us. For God, maybe.
It was mine too, until I read pre-Kantians, from Descartes to Hume, they are significantly richer than as they are usually presented. Part of the reason I have a slight "push-back" feeling to Kant, despite genuinely admiring him, is that once I did read the classics, I found them to be supremely rich.
Even though a case can be made that Kant was "superior" to them in overall specific argument structure, such claims are very much exaggerated. I find certain discussions in Descartes, Locke and Hume, more substantial than in Kant, in certain areas, not in others.
Cudworth, who was pointed out to me by Chomsky, says the same things Kant says, without the sophisticated theoretical construction, and his ideas on innateness, are profound, unsurpassed even, so far as classics go.
In fact, Locke says that no matter how deep we go into micro-structures, we will never discover how secondary qualities arise, he very explicit on this. I could give some quotes, I have my Essay heavily annotated and highlighted, but alas, it is in paperback, and it would take too long, unless you specifically request it, I'll put it aside.
Quoting Olento
Yes, I think that interpretation of Kant is correct, and his argument about this is very sound, our scientific knowledge is of phenomena.
As for us not knowing if we reach these ultimate structures in the phenomenal world, here we have to look at current physics, and I think we discover that we cannot reach this, because our theories on what is (phenomenally) ultimate, is not settled.
As I understand him, Kant, influenced by Allais' interpretation, says that things in themselves, are the grounds of appearance, but we don't know how this grounding relation works, it will remain incomprehensible for us. In this sense, things in themselves are a step removed from Locke's "substance", because for Kant, even primary qualities are phenomena, and Kant is right to say so.
We need to take into account how general relativity would modify Kant, because Kant was a Newtonian, and this is not pointed out enough. Sure, he gives very good arguments as to why space and time are the a priori conditions of our sensibilities, but it is no coincidence that he chose these specific notions, because Newton thought space and time were absolute. Kant doesn't mention Newton (or barely mentions him from what I can recall) because by that time, virtually everybody took Newton for granted.
Now we know that Newton is not exactly right. And this has to modify Kant to a limited extent.
In any case, the idea of "things in themselves" remains very valuable regardless of our current theory in physics, I think it is a necessary postulate them, to make sense of the world. So, in that respect, his emphasis on the distinction between phenomenon and noumenon is extraordinarily important.
I also enjoy pre-Kantians very much! At the moment I'm especially interested in Leibniz, who is definitely one of the "bad guys" in CPR and a huge influence. There seems to be some connection between Cudworth (which I haven't read at all) and Leibniz, so it is going to be very interesting to find out something about this as well. These people worked as little in vacuum as we do, but the literary practices were much more liberate, at least compared to academic philosophy of today.
This is kind of the problem that I am wrestling with too. Maybe Kant just lacked an awareness of the scope of application of scientific knowledge as it has subsequently ensconced itself in our world.
Good, difficult questions.
Quoting Hanover
Im trying to use it as Kant did, to refer to universally valid judgements about the objects of experience. By universal he means it holds for all rational creatures, and it's based on a priori structures of knowledge that are independent of experience (though they only produce knowledge when applied to experience).
The two need not be in conflict: you and I have objective knowledge that cats have whiskers and that fire burns human flesh, even though we know it in our own special human way. This is pretty much the way I use the word myself. You, in contrast, imply that you understand objectivity to require an absolute perspectivea view from nowhere. I think this is a more recent sense of the term. Kant describes such attempted judgements not as objective but as transcendent, and as applying to the unconditioned.
Something can be known objectively without being known independently of experience, since in fact it is only to the given content of experience that knowledge applies. Knowing is a process that happens in a certain way to specially constituted knowers, but it is not thereby subjective. Objectivity is not transcendent, but immanent. The basic idea is similar to Hegel, of a unity between subject and object, even though the object is an object for us, not in itself.
I dont want to pretend there are no difficulties. It might be fair to interpret Kant as establishing objectivity only by downgrading it to a feature of the subjective. What Im doing is trying to get at what Kant was doing and what he meant; I'm not claiming that his arguments were entirely consistent and valid or that they didn't lead to unforseen conclusions.
Quoting Hanover
Maybe we have to get into the differences between the thing in itself, the positive noumenon, the negative noumenon, and the transcendental object. But here is a first attempt...
The first appearance of noumenon in the first edition is here:
[quote=A 249]If . . . I suppose there to be things that are merely objects of the understanding and that, nevertheless, can be given to an intuition, although not to sensible intuition . . . then such things would be called noumena (intelligibilia).[/quote]
From the beginning, Kant uses the term to refer to objects of thought: as unavoidable results of the operation of the understanding, which attempt to refer to something beyond possible experience. Real objects, objects we can know, are objects in space that are given to us in perception; these phenomena are beings of sense, whereas noumena are beings merely of understanding.
I posted a long response to you on the old forum, attacking your notion of distortion and attempting to show that it was incoherent. Looking back, it might have been badly written--you never did reply--but I'd still want to make the same point. Only a signal can be distorted. That is, only one's perception is subject to distortion. The object perceived cannot itself be distorted by its perception.* The noumenon is the concept of a purported thing beyond possible experience, and as such cannot be distorted.
That is to say, there is nothing there to be filtered or distorted. Simply to be an object of knowledge is for a thing to be known via the senses and understanding. If there is no possible disembodied, unperspectival way of apprehending a thing, then the idea of distortion has no meaning.
* Im not saying the object perceived is the noumenon, by the way.
Isn't this just a vacuous concept by definition then?
The noumenon? Its a critical concept: philosophers like Leibniz built systems around noumena, and Kant is diagnosing this disease. He also thinks he cant just ignore it, because he regards it as an unavoidable product of the understanding.
I guess my problem is I see this from the perspective of Fichte and self-founding conscious understanding - it looks like a fiat to declare an unknowable objectivity.
However, if it functions as a demand or a constraint, is this just the constraint of trying to attain a perspective of (per impossibile) pure objectivity? Then it is still a subjective act.
Correct. But Kant relegates noumena to the human faculty of understanding alone, and for that reason they are necessarily unattainable goals of science. For an intelligence other than discursive, or for which sensible intuition conditioned by space and time is not necessary, it cannot be known as impossible that noumena function in such system.
Thats the rub, innit? How would we as humans comprehend any intelligence, other than the one by which humans comprehend anything? Which is why it cannot be said noumena are impossible, insofar as some intellect other than ours might actually use them. How could we possibly be justified in saying there is no such thing? But at the same time, how could we say there is, if we could never comprehend an intelligence that fails to meet the functional criteria of our own?
What do you take to be the a priori structures of knowledge?
This paper (https://philarchive.org/archive/MARIKT-2#:~:text=With%20epistemic%20conditions%20of%20understanding,such%2C%20bring%20about%20experiential%20knowledge.) in reference to a paper by Strawson, states it is two things: (1) the receptive faculty and (2) the active faculty. The first references space and time (which is how we receive information) and the second references how we understand the information through concepts.
So, (1) we must receive all knowledge under the constraints of space and time in order for it to be at all intelligible to us, and (2) we must then do something in our minds to create concepts from the information we receive.
#1 are the basic intututions and #2 is the transcendental unity of apperception that holds our thoughts together as thoughts.
Assuming I got all that right, my next question is whether your comment that "By 'universal' he means it holds for all rational creatures," is itself a priori true or a posteriori true, meaning must #1 and #2 logically exist for a creature to be rational or does it just happen to be the case that rational creatures on planet earth have #1 and #2 and that makes them rational, but one could be rational with other a priori structures?
I ask this because if Kant can say that these faculties we have are the only faculties that can yield rational results, then he could possibly escape idealism because he'd be saying we have that which we must have in order to have true knowledge.
I don't like that solution. It feels like Descartes' injection of God into the mix by just declaring that there's no way we'd see things in a wrong way and that the way we see things must be right.Quoting Jamal
Saying "objectivity is immanent" is tantamount to saying it is subjective isn't it? Doesn't immanent mean to be something that comes from within the perceiver?Quoting Jamal
I don't follow this. What would be an example of a noumenal being of the understanding? It would not be something we could sense for sure, but what is something just in my understanding? This almost sound like Plato's forms.
Quoting Jamal I'd like to think you've been checking back daily for a response for the past decade like a spurned lover only to feel the relief now of a reply.
Quoting Jamal
Going back to the article I cited above, where it describes the information (and I don't know a better term for this because I think I'm describing the noumena) brought in through the senses that is then registered as being in space and time and then it is formed into a concept of my understanding and then I have what we call "phenomena."
Is it not correct to describe the phenomenal state as a modification of whatever that primordial mass was that that preceded the formation of the phenomena? I use modification and distortion interchangably here, unless you think that's not a fair move for some reason.
My understanding of Kant is that he saw epistemological basis of knowledge as being a complex interplay of both the empirical and the nature of reason. Here, he definitely saw the 'noumenon' and the transcendent as being beyond the scope of comprehension. In this respect, he saw the limits of espistemology; with a sense of a possible 'transcendent' beyond comprehension. The idea and scope of reason was a way of approaching this territory of thought.
The particular dichotomy between the 'known' or 'unknown' according to reason or the empirical is of particular significance in epistemological and empirical understanding. The two dichotomies may be opposed and how they are understood or juxtaposed may be of critical importance. In other words, to what extent is the basis of empirical knowledge important as a foundation of knowledge? To what extent may it be contrasted by a priori reason, or ideas of 'the noumenon'; which go beyond the physical basis of understanding of ideas.
Quoting Jamal
In my view, Hegel has very convincingly criticised Kantian criticism, thereby answering the question posed in this thread.
In particular, he explains:
- that we cannot draw a limit between what we can know and what we cannot know because, in order to draw this limit and know where to place it, we would already have to know what there is beyond this limit (a limit must know what it delimits).
(that answers: Quoting Jack Cummins )
- that, to talk about the thing-in-itself, Kant keeps using (human) categories: the thing-in-itself "is not" a phenomenon (= use of the category of negation), etc.
- that there is nothing fundamentally new about the idea of the transcendental, because "knowledge of the conditions of knowledge" is... knowledge.
(Source: Hegel, beginning of The Phenomenology of Spirit and beginning of Science of Logic)
To sum it up, Kant is a metaphysician without knowing it (and therefore is an incomplete metaphysician).
As for the existence of an object that would come "only" from human intelligence, "only" from understanding:
It is true that all knowledge is humanly shaped.
BUT it doesn't lead to a pure subjectivism or even a transcendental idealism. Here is the condensed proof. If we can not have any knowledge about the external world, then we can't even say that this "external world" exists. So there would only be an "internal" world. But how could there be an "internal world" without an external one? So it means that our so-called "internal world" is not "just internal", "sadly internal"... It is the world itself.
(Source: Brief Solutions to Philosophical Problems Using a Hegelian Method, Solution 2)
Seems reasonable.
Quoting Hanover
A rational being for Kant is one with that active faculty, your number (2), i.e., the understanding, which is the spontaneity of the mind. And we're the only ones we know about. But Kant does admit that he is not able to rule out the possibility that there are kinds of intuition other than sensible, and (I think) other kinds of understanding, i.e., maybe there's some kind of perception that does not depend on the senses in the way ours does but which also provides knowledge, conditioned by a different kind of understanding.
Quoting Hanover
He does show (or claim to show) that these faculties are the ones that happen to yield results for us, which is the same as to say they are the only ones that work for us. I don't know if you think he thereby escapes idealism or not. Personally I'm discovering that to preserve what is best and most revolutionary in Kant I might have to drop my insistence that he was not idealist, and admit that the second edition of the CPR, in trying to defend against that accusation, just introduced inconsistencies which disappear if you just admit that everything we know is known for us, and that there are no things in themselves. This way lies Hegel, a very worldly kind of idealist.
Quoting Jamal
Quoting Hanover
The noumenon is the concept of an unconditioned thing, a correlate of experience that is independent of experience. But the noumenon is not such a thing itself, but is the concept of it, an artifact of the understanding. It has no known correlate, so there is nothing but a detached thought in the head, no Platonic form or anything.
Quoting Hanover
I think you can reasonably say that the stuff of perception--light, sound, etc--is physically modified, such as when light is refracted by the cornea. But I don't think it's correct to say that phenomena are modifications of noumena, in Kant's terms. I will have to say more some time.
I'm quite open to the Hegelian criticism/solution, but I just haven't got around to reading him yet. I'm a bit more familiar with Wittgenstein's angle: everything is open to view, and truth or knowledge as "agreement with reality" is an unclear concept except in familiar everyday situations:
The idea of agreement is unclear in this case because nothing could speak for our proposition, and yet by design, nothing could speak against it either, so nothing could agree or disagree with it.
I take this to be a simpler way of putting Kant's point that asking about agreement with reality for such cases is to reach beyond possible experience for an impossible transcendence.
Excellent! :)
Kant has a very interesting take on Leibniz metaphysics in the Amphiboly appendix in the Critique.
Yes, Leibniz mentions Cudworth to Locke near the beginning of the latters New Essays, because Cudworth's daughter was very close to Locke - they had a brotherly/sisterly relation.
Sure, I tend to find - with notable exceptions - that the classics offer just so much more value than contemporary stuff, which has become so academic, abstract and technical that is loses virtually any "popular appeal".
Most people can read Descartes or Berkley.
Collingwood concurs with this. In Kant's identification of a reality we can "think but not know" he sees "the very essence of scientific dogmatism" - which is to say, in his terms, an un-self-critical metaphysics.
Nice. I had a look at the epistemology section of the SEP page for Cudworth and he does seem remarkably Kantian.
Ah, good to see they have added a bit of his epistemology in the SEP. I will continue to propagandize him.
The notion of things-themselves is particularly interesting. Is it the One (the simplest possible thing, beyond thought), as Plotinus says? Is it mere dust and atoms, as Cudworth intimates? Are we in contact with it through the will, as Schopenhauer insists?
It's not clear it's even an object, in any traditional reading of that word. I suspect the best we can do here is to find a conception which is the simplest and attempt to proceed from that.
The idea that science cannot study something elemental or basic, can be counterintuitive or nonsense for some.
Good to know. Thanks.
In the Critique of Judgment Kant uses the term 'objective' to mean 'disinterested'. A valid judgment of taste is subjective, universal, and not based on concepts. To put it somewhat paradoxically, objectivity is universal subjectivity.
This isn't addressed by the quote that comes after. The quote seems to merely reduce hte benchmark of "empirical investigation" to that of phenomena, which is in some sense, correct and obviously what "scientific investigation" boils down to.
But Kant maintains the world as it is in itself cannot be investigated. Unsure this is being dealt with through this particular distinction.
I think Kant is saying we would like to answer that question, but we are suffering from a transcendental illusion which will always prevent us from doing so:
Quoting Critique of Pure Reason, Kant, B355, A298
This "passing off as objective" is related to the Analogies of Experience discussed starting from page A176. Kant establishes that the three modi of time are persistence, succession, and simultaneity (page 177). The mode that permits a causal explanation of phenomena is said to be that of simultaneity. The footnote to that section says:
Though Im not sure how to parse this in Kantian terms, awareness per se is in no way phenomenal: it has no look, no smell, no sound, etc. But then nor is it strictly or primarily an aspect of thought as noumena are here primarily described. Contingent on metaphysical construct, it could however be deemed a thing-in-itself (here being very liberal with the term thing, this by contrast to the notion of nothing).
That mentioned, the OP seems to express the following gist:
The indirect realism* which the empirical sciences confirmand of which Kantianism is one version ofin no way undermines the validity of scientific knowledge.
Yes: true.
-------
* For general reference:
Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_and_indirect_realism
If no one had ever thought to consider the problem as he describes, wouldnt an investigation into it be a new mode of investigation?
.It is extremely advantageous to be able to bring a number of investigations under the formula of a single problem. For in this manner, we not only facilitate our own labour, inasmuch as we define it clearly to ourselves, but also render it more easy for others to decide whether we have done justice to our undertaking. The proper problem of pure reason, then, is contained in the question: How are synthetical judgements à priori possible? That metaphysical science has hitherto remained in so vacillating a state of uncertainty and contradiction, is only to be attributed to the fact that this great problem, and perhaps even the difference between analytical and synthetical judgements, did not sooner suggest itself to philosophers. Upon the solution of this problem, or upon sufficient proof of the impossibility of synthetical knowledge à priori, depends the existence or downfall of the science of metaphysics.
I agree there was a shift in perspectives, in an effort to connect the empirical with the rational rather than keep them separate, but it would have been impossible to connect them into a useful system without a new mode of investigation.
Kant points out that aspects of the phenomenon are known to us prior to experience with the world. He lays out clear and persuasive arguments for this. What you do next with that information is up to you.
The idea that science can be purely empirical is still around. It's this vision of science that Kant and others killed, for philosophers anyway.
I once watched a discussion between Dennett and Krause in which Krause announces that he's an empiricist. Dennett tries to explain that he's not really, and Krause gets this quizzical look on his face. Krause is a scientist who thinks he's discovering the noumena. In other words, once you understand the concept of the noumena, then you can ignore it. Not before.
It depends on how you think about the systems of other figures, for Kant his system was radically new, for Cudworth, it was quite old (going back to Protagoras, Parmenides, and others).
Attempting to be concrete, Plotinus seems to me to be doing a (in some respects) rudimentary analysis based on a very similar idea, though his specific formulation includes different "categories".
Or Locke, he was already creating a basis within which we can think about nature differently, say primary qualities as opposed to secondary ones, one of them belonging to objects, the other not.
Kant's formulation, as quoted by you, applies more (it seems to me) to, say, certain aspects of systems of metaphysics, such as Leibniz, or Plato. Hume didn't really have an explicit metaphysics, which Kant said led him to crash on the shores of skepticism. To an extent, but Hume was not as radically skeptic as he is assumed to be.
Kant's explicit formulation of "synthetic a priori" judgements is probably his most novel formulation. And also making things in themselves different from phenomena, but in this latter respect, that idea was not entirely new, but arguably better articulated by him. His repeated emphasis on the range of human knowledge is excellent, but, found in Locke in a different formulation.
Quoting frank
As does Descartes, Leibniz and Cudworth. What Kant added with more clearness, it seems to me, was his clarity in identifying things in themselves and contrasting these with phenomena, and specifically his mentioning of synthetic a-priori judgements, how we can expand innate knowledge absent experience.
I've never thought of Descartes as proving that some of our knowledge of the world is a priori. Nor Leibniz. Could you expand on that?
Do you think his predecessors constructed systems as complete as the three Citiques entail?
Yeah, give me a minute, I have my damn quotations in paperback, makes it very hard to give quotes without typing too much.
"Hence you will have reasons to conclude that there is no need to suppose that something material passes from objects to our eyes to make us see colors and light, or even that there is something in the objects, which resembles the ideas or sensations that we have of them. In just the same way, when a blind man feels bodies, nothing has to issue from the bodies and pass along his stick to his hand: and the resistance or movement of the bodies, which is the sole cause of the sensations he has of them, is nothing like the idea he forms of them."
In this case, objects stimulate an innate mechanism which leads us to form an idea of the world. Notice that the objects just stimulated the blind man with the stick, but his ideas were inside the whole time. Similar observations apply when Descartes mentions the following:
"But then if I look out of the window and see men crossing the square, as I just happen to have done, I normally say that I see the men themselves, just as I say that I see the wax. Yet do I see any more than hats and coats which could conceal automatons? I judge that they are men. And so something which I thought I was seeing with my eyes is in fact grasped solely by the faculty of judgement which is in my mind."
Leibniz, on the other hand, replying to Locke, points out:
"The reason why there is no name for the murder of an old man is that such a name would be of little use... ideas do not depend upon names [words with definitions, in this context] ... If a... writer did invent a name for that crime and devoted a chapter to 'Gerontophony', showing what we owe to the old and how monstrous it is to treat them ungently, he would not thereby be giving us a new idea."
We already know the meanings of words, prior to definitions.
Incidentally, I believe that Kant's ideas on a priori judgments is somewhat like this. He says that we can gain knowledge without an empirical component just by thinking something out, but I believe in all cases, some minimal external stimulus is needed to get the mind going, otherwise, not much will arise.
Quoting Mww
Not at all.
He is one the great figures in philosophy no doubt, all I question is his own evaluation of his total uniqueness.
His completeness and exactitude in trying to build a systematic philosophical system has no parallels that I can think of.
And I am refusing to read Hegel. :)
Oh! I see what you're saying. This is the difference I'm seeing between Descartes and Kant: Descartes is sort of saying that our ideas of the world supervene on our experiences. It's the argument from anatomy. Descartes knew that there are "strings" that flow through the body back to the brain. He thought the world "plucks" these strings and the brain subsequently does something with those pluckings.
Kant points out in the Transcendental Aesthetic that we can't imagine an object that doesn't have spacial or temporal extension. He's borrowing the form of Hume's Bundle Theory argument. If you can't conceive of objects without spacial extension, this shows that you don't learn about space through experience. Knowledge of space and time are a priori. That actually is Copernican! To me, anyway.
Cool.
Quoting Manuel
Way cool. I did Science of Logic, but my persuasions had already been set.
Close. External objects stimulate something in us that cause an idea to arise, but the idea has no resemblance to the external object at all, only a kind of causal connection. That's pretty radical, I think.
Yes, what Kant says about objects being spatial and temporal is unique to his formulation and very profound.
Hume's conclusions about causality are also pretty Copernican, I think. And Locke formulated the "hard problem" 400 years ago, so...
There are several Copernican ideas, some people have a larger amount of them (Kant has more than Descartes, in general) than others.
Basically, new additions and unique formulations of similar ideas. But that's merely how I see it.
Is this true though? I feel like I have a pretty easy time imagining abstract objects without having to attribute extension to them. I don't know if I buy theories that involve propositions as abstract, eternal objects, but I've never really had a problem of conceptualizing them.
The idea of an abstract object didn't exist back then. He was talking about things like cups and trees.
To imagine something perceptually--such as by visualization--there is needed both duration (time) and distance (space) to that thus imagined. Abstractions per se are by their very nature not perceptual but purely conceptual.
I'd be interested in counterexamples, but I so far greatly doubt that such can occur.
Quoting frank
Weren't they termed "concepts", also sometimes termed "ideas"?
I don't think they distinguished between mental objects (what you're thinking about now) and abstract objects (things like numbers and propositions.) I guess the basic idea was around, but not analyzed out?
Interesting. Its been a while sine I've read the likes of Lock, Hume, and Kant. Still, I so far take a visualized unicorn, for example, to be a "mental object" of one's awareness which is in some way perceptually concrete (i.e., has a specific shape, size, color, etc. when visualized), whereas abstract objects (quantities included) I take to be those mental objects of one's awareness whose delimitations are abstracted from - but do not include - concrete particulars. The concept of "animal" or "world" being two possible examples of the latter, among innumerable others.
Quoting frank
Without now doing research on the matter, that seems to be about right.
"Abstract object" has a specific meaning in philosophy of math. It's not a physical object, but it's still something that transcends the individual. So an abstract object (in this sense) is not a kind of mental object.
In terms of the question of what Kant's view of the limits of empirical knowledge were, it seems to me to be a mistake to see that aligned to any theory of physics. How does one traverse the gap between space and time being posited as intuitions and having those concepts build a model of the world as it "truly" is?
Not at all surprising. Although, as a personal pet peeve, I do dislike the way mathematics-specific concepts sometimes overtake more mainstream philosophical concepts. Mistaking the purposive, hence teleological, notion of function for the mathematical notion of function comes to mind as one example of this. But be that as it may.
To your knowledge, does the history of this particular mathematical concept of "abstract object" extend beyond this:
Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_object_theory
At any rate, I agree that such a formalized metaphysical notion was not around in Kant's time (other than maybe via basic Platonism, which I'm sure Kant was familiar with.)
Gotcha. If imagine = visualize, it makes sense. Although I think it might make it sort of trivial in that it would seem to hold for the essential elements of all the senses. Can one imagine a sound without any volume or pitch? Can we imagine a smell without odor? It would seem not. But does this mean we don't learn about pitch through experience? And do smells necessarily have extension in space?
It seems to me like our imagining being unable to transcend the essential qualities of each sense could as well be taken as evidence that we must only learn about these things through experience, since we seem unable to fathom our way around the essential elements of each sense. Having never seen without our eyes or heard without our ears, we are stuck imagining only permutations of what has come before, bound by their limitations.
The question of time being a necessary component of imagining is very interesting though. It gets to the inherently processual nature of experience, which, as a fan of process metaphysics, I find underappreciated. Aristotle actually gets at this in the Posterior Analytics and De Anima, but he doesn't do too much with it.
I have considered before if an even more process-centered approach might dissolve some of the issues that crop up in Kant. If the noumenal causes the phenomenal, and the phenomenal causes us to act in certain ways (thus affecting the noumenal), then it would seem like we really don't have two distinct processes at all. The two would be continually bleeding into one another. But if we begin with "things," then it does seem like we cannot have one sort of thing "turning into" another. Granted, this wouldn't really apply to readings of Kant as a full subjective idealist.
In fact, as I write this, I realize this is part of Hegel and Houlgate's critique of Kant. There is, on the one hand, the charge that the presupposition that experiences are of objects is dogmatic. But there also seems to also be an undercurrent of critique that the "things" presupposed are essentially things, as opposed to process as well.
Another way to think about this, using terminology I don't believe was available to Kant: Objectivity would be universal intersubjectivity. We can theoretically have universal agreement on phenomenal facts, like the cat's whiskers. This avoids the charge that my belief in my cat's whiskers is "merely subjective," while not going so far as to claim that I've achieved the "view from nowhere."
Kant showed that we're bound to think along certain lines. I call it the contours of the mind. We feel our way to those contours by logic and conceivability. When we discover the indubitable, we've found it.
But what does the way we're bound to think have to do with the way the world actually is? My answer is that Wittgenstein explains that in the Tractatus. What's your answer?
:grin: :up:
Quoting javra
I think the concept of an abstract object comes from Frege.
:up:
I've struggled with this. I've no decisive answer to give. But I think it noteworthy that lesser animals (or even humans) with a heightened sense of smell can - or at least seem able to - discern direction by it. If so, this would entail notions of space. Come to think of it, its what a snake's forked tongue is there for: directionality of smell. But any such spatial aspect of smell would seem to simultaneously require temporality.
I'm mainly antagonistic to the Cartesian take on "res extensa" being utterly severed from mind stuff due to the former having extension in space but not the latter.
To be honest, I toy seriously enough with the idea that noumenal thought - which I take to be in no way perceptual (hence, phenomenal in the Kantian sense) - holds spatial relations: For example, we all know that a paradigm is larger than any one idea it is composed of. This to me then signifying the very real possibility of non-perceptual spatial relations. Or, more difficultly, the concept of "dog" is closer to that of "cat" than to that of "rock". Here again, there to me seems to be all indications of non-perceptual spatial relations.
If so, then even non-perceptual thoughts would require some conceptual notions of space and spatial relations.
Critiques are of course welcomed.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I can very much relate to that.
Thanks. I'll look into it. :up:
How do you see that idea expressed in Kant's project?
Quoting frank
I hear the Tractatus as an anti-explanation. We want what we will never get. Sort of a weird parallel with Kant. But definitely not the same.
This is a key point. Immanence is within the limits of possible experience. It is opposed to transcendence, which would denote contact with something beyond, like God or monads or Forms or noumena. Its debatable whether immanence is subjective or not. I think not necessarily, but in Kant it somewhat is. As @Fooloso4 said
Quoting Fooloso4
Which again looks Hegelian to me.
Yes indeed, that's the way I think about it, and I'm a bit puzzled why this point is not often made. I guess it's because in Husserl's scheme, there is no thing-in-itself, and the intersubjective is all there is. That seems to be the way I'm reading Kant, taking him in the direction of Husserl (even at the risk of reading too much back into Kant).
Talking of Husserl, in my Googling I noticed the following in a review of one of Dan Zahavi's books:
[quote=NDPR;https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/husserls-legacy-phenomenology-metaphysics-and-transcendental-philosophy/]Husserl's transcendental idealism, according to Zahavi, then accounts for the fact that we never have access to the world except through the mediation of some sort of meaning, but does not thereby assume that meanings are a distortion of the mind-independent world, but rather our modes of access to it through which being itself, including spatio-temporal objects within the world, can appear to us. Beings just are those things that appear to us when knowledge is successful, not something behind the appearances. To recognize that all objects appear to us through the lens of some meaning (i.e., are, as Husserl calls them, intentional objects) does not mean that the further course of experience cannot confirm that they are indeed genuinely real objects. Conversely, it makes no sense to talk of consciousness or mind except as a way of relating to the world that appears to it. Mind is not a self-enclosed realm but the field of experiencing in which the world is there for us.[/quote]
I think that might go some way to answering @Hanover's questions too. It's a description of Husserl's account but there's nothing in it that isn't also in Kant, though in the context of a different system and using different terminology. It's pretty much how I've been reading Kant, or trying to.
Yes, and the interesting thing is that even though the field of possible experience and cognition is immanent--lying within the bounds of sense and understanding--even so, within these bounds human knowledge always reaches towards the unknown, as if it is immanent but transcendently-inclined.
I also find this a promising direction. Has anyone ever written a piece called "Kant: The First Phenomenologist"? :smile: At any rate, it's proved impossible to do phenomenology without more or less constant reference back to Kant.
The question about the status of noumena is hard to resolve. Kant tells us, "Doubtless, indeed, there are intelligible entities [these would be the noumena] corresponding to the sensible entities; there may also be intelligible entities to which our sensible faculty of intuition has no relation whatsoever; but our concepts of understanding, being mere forms of thought for our sensible intuition, could not in the least apply to them" [B308-9]
In a way, you could argue that the whole history of Kantian interpretation turns on what he means by "corresponding." (I don't know German, so I don't know whether understanding the German word would help.) Does he mean "corresponding" in the way that a map corresponds to the territory -- a kind of picture? Does he mean "corresponding" in the sense of cause and effect -- the cause (noumenon) might not resemble the effect in the slightest, but still correspond one-to-one as cause and effect? Or is it the correspondence between "concept of understanding" and "Husserlian intentional object"? This latter type of correspondence is itself difficult to articulate, even if we imagine Husserl admitting noumena to his philosophy. But I mean something like the way a theorem creates reasons for assent to its truth, rather than "causing" us, ineluctably, to believe it.
Sorry, this may be shedding more shade than light. But the questions are endlessly interesting, and important. And your original point about not denigrating scientific or phenomenal knowledge on supposedly Kantian grounds is surely right.
I think this from Zahavi does not fit Kant's view:
"To recognize that all objects appear to us through the lens of some meaning (i.e., are, as Husserl calls them, intentional objects) does not mean that the further course of experience cannot confirm that they are indeed genuinely real objects."
When Kant argues against the 'idealism' of Berkeley and Descartes, the contact with 'real' objects is the immediacy of our outer sense:
Quoting Critique of Pure Reason, B276
Trying to gain insight into "the possibility of this consciousness" is going to run afoul of the transcendental illusion discussed at A298 if that is going to require confirming "genuinely real objects." The objectivity of our experience is given. The conditions that make experience possible are beyond us. If reason is to be investigated in a different way, something in Kant's model has to go.
Edit to Add:
Reading the whole review, I see that a distinction is made between Husserl's and Kant's views:
Quoting Thomas Neenan
I think this is precisely what Kant was saying, in his terms. Objectivity as we understand it, is universal for humans. This is something Kant keeps on repeating in CPR. But of course it is a bit strange thing to say because it is obvious, that the same forms of perception and categories apply to non-human animals as well.
I don't know what to make out of this. It seems like there's heavy Leibnizian influence in the underlying metaphysics that Kant cannot spell out because of his goals in CPR. So it is all about interplay of subjects that all have the universal form of consciousness, but what kind of subjects? Any type of consciousness? Humans, animals, even non-animate "subjects"?
I'd like to get my hands on Opus Postunum. There's just so many open questions in CPR!
Objectivity is reached by passing through subjectivity, but is not thereby tainted by it. Unless we're clinging to the promise of God's perspectiveless perspective, this almost seems like common sense to me: knowing is something creatures do, and creatures have points of view. What's the problem?
[quote=Sebastian Luft, From being to givenness and back: Some remarks on the meaning of transcendental idealism in Kant and Husserl (PDF);http://tinyurl.com/4x6xzcke]In this move to an anthropocentric model of cognition, Kant proposes to investigate the world as it is given from a perspective, and this perspective is, for us, the human standpoint, the only one we know of (though we can conceive that other creatures have theirs). Hence, Kant introduces a radically finite perspective to human cognition . . . insofar as a standpoint puts limitations on experience: I cannot simultaneously see an object from the front and from the back.[/quote]
However, this doesn't make the understanding finite and subjective:
I think the upshot is that I was wrong to respond to @Hanover by saying that according to Kant, the human understanding, like human perception, is not the only one possible: human understanding is the only knowledge-generating mechanism possible (although it might not be only human; rational extra-terrestrials could have the same understanding), but it could apply to different kinds of perception.
The picture we're left with is something like this: whatever kind of subjective perspective rational creatures might have on things, their understanding allows them to achieve the same knowledge of those things, which are thereby the very same things, even though they are "for us".
Much of what you say is agreeable. On the connections and differences between K and H, I got a lot from that paper I linked to in my last post:
Sebastian Luft, "From being to givenness and back: Some remarks on the meaning of transcendental idealism in Kant and Husserl" (PDF)
In Kant's Critique of Judgment the judgment that something is beautiful or sublime is independent of concepts. That is, it is universal but not based on the a priori structures of knowledge that are independent of experience.
Quoting Fooloso4
.
Kant explains why objectivity as we know it has a framework that appears to be a priori. Locke was wrong that we're blank slates that nature writes upon. Whatever is happening, it's not that.
That leaves us with a secondary kind of objectivity: the story of the thing-in-itself. We don't have access to that kind of objectivity. What we have access to is our own map-making.
Exactly.
That's interesting, thanks. I have not read the Critique of Judgment and was not aware of any non-conceptually grounded universality. I am guessing that, roughly speaking, this has something to do with the form of an aesthetic judgement: it's not "I like this," which would be subjective but not universal, but "this is beautiful," which has the same form as "this is triangular," judgements that demand assent or denial. Others may disagree that it is beautiful, but the point is that the judgement would, if true, have the consequence that these people are wrongand this just is how these judgements work. Something like that perhaps.
The idea that aesthetic judgments are subjective is often taken to mean "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". In which case whatever someone believes is beautiful is beautiful for that person. But Kant rejects this. A judgment of taste is for Kant not the same as, say, a preference for chocolate over vanilla ice cream.
This leads to consideration of the connection between:
1) judgments of beauty or the sublime and judgments of science or nature
2) judgments of beauty and moral judgments
If I understand him correctly these are not separate areas of inquiry but interconnected and interrelated parts of the whole.
:up:
The thing I'd highlight that differentiates the critique of judgment from the critique of pure reason is that it's universal, but not scientific knowledge -- instead it's the relationships between the cognitive faculties which give rise to the sublime or the beautiful. It's that interaction between the faculties(powers) which justifies these inferences, though they are certainly different from both scientific and moral inferences or knowledge.
The third critique, in my crib sheet sort of way, is what differentiates analytic from continental philosophy from the historical perspective: do you emphasize scientific knowledge, or do you emphasize aesthetic judgment?
Kant, as is his philosophical perogative, would have it both ways -- and so I agree with the interpretation that the critiques form a unity. (though, I'm a Pluhar reader so that would be the way I read it)
EDIT: Also worth noting that as much as I love Kant I still believe he's basically wrong -- but in an important way. So before I can say how I still have to understand that last half of the Critique of Judgment....
Do they? It seems to me like intentionality theory was developed precisely because indirect realism makes naturalists uncomfortable. That is, it's a modification to help exorcise the specter of the Cartesian theater that indirect realism often finds haunting it.
In any event, might Aristotle or Aquinas not hew closer to the modern cognitive sciences, given the dominance of computational theories of mind and information theory? In Aristotle's telling, it is the form of objects that is communicated to us, e.g. the patterns in light waves corresponding to the image a tree (Aquinas' conception of "intentions in the media," is probably the better analogy here). This synchs up pretty well with information theoretic explanations of communications and data processing re sensory systems.
These explanations might also be worked into an indirect realist account, but in their original form I don't think they'd fall under that definition. For Aristotle, we experience the form of the objects experienced, the matter is not communicated, but it is precisely the form that makes an object what it is. It is the intelligibility of the object, whereas the matter is grounding potential. Re essence, form trumps matter, and experiencing objects' intelligibility, even if incompletely, is to experience the object.
But I suppose the bigger difference would be in framing: "we experience representations" versus "representation of communicated form is how things are experienced." I am not sure how much help the empirical sciences will be in resolving this distinction. Likewise, phenominalism or subjective idealism, while certainly not being popular with practicing scientists (or more generally) seem like they could still be formulated such that they are empirically identical with realism or indirect realism.
I can't be of much help, but can suggest a possible way forward.
Sections V through VIII of Kant's introduction are entitled:
This is not an account of an object, nature, by a subject, Kant. The principle of the purposiveness of nature is a transcendental principle.
Here's why I so far uphold the statement which you've quoted (any and all metaphysical implications of such perspective being to me irrelevant to the science involved):
Humans are known to be highly visual animals, so Ill address our awareness of objects via sight. Birds, bees, and other lesser animals are know by science to visually perceive the world in drastically different ways relative to the average human. We see a flower as uniform yellow. A bee will see it as having different shades and shapes of ultraviolet. What the bee sees is no more (in)correct or (in)accurate than what we see. Yet the two species will see different things, that nevertheless yet hold the same spatiotemporal properties.
The spatiotemporal properties of objects, of the world in general (as difficult as this subject matter is), will nevertheless be commonly apprehended by all animate, hence sentient, beingsfrom bacteria to humanswhich in any way causally interact. All else which is apprehended of objects and the world is indicated by scientific findings to be relative to, by in large, the species of sentient being concerned.
It should be noted that whatever we perceptually know of ultraviolet and infrared is, for us, yet perceived via neither (we view technologically interpreted ultraviolet and infrared only via what is relative to the human species visible light; we however have no clue of what a bee or snake experiences other than that whatever they experience holds the same spatiotemporal properties as what we experience).
We infer there being gravitational fields, but we do not perceive them via magnetoception as objects of awareness in the world. We infer there being electric fields, but we do not perceive them via electroreception as being objects of awareness in the world. The list is by my account expansive.
Heres an overview of non-human senses currently known to science. And I deem it very presumptuous to uphold that we have via science now discovered all the physiological senses that can possibly occur.
In short, science confirms what whatever that objective object we term a yellow flower is, it is neither in fact of a strictly uniform hew that is thereby devoid of patterns within petals nor are its petals it in fact of a complex pattern of hew. The flower is not perceptually both at the same time and in the same respect (although it is both at the same time in terms of its spatiotemporal properties which allows for both human-relative visible light and ultraviolet light to reflected from it). It is of uniform hew to one species of life and comprised of patterns of hew to another. This, again, because what the flower is as objective (fully impartial) object in the world will be interpreted differently by the different physiological senses of different species of life.
As to objects being mediated via concepts, consider the following scenario: one sees all the colors, shapes, angles, and lines which would otherwise constitute a house but, maybe because one holds no conception of what a house is, one then nevertheless does not see a house. Then there is the scientifically known disorder of agnosia, whereinas in the example just providedone sees all the specific concrete attributes of an object without being able to recognize the object. Taken together, these two examples serve to illustrate how the objects we all (typically) recognize in the world are all mediated via conceptsand science does evidence that perception via physiological senses can well occur in the absence of object recognition.
So that yellow flower that is actually out there in the world as a yellow flower would in fact not be were it not for the mind-dependent concept(s) of yellow flower.
Although all of this is a summery of sorts, I do take it to evidence that our scientific knowledge confirms that, for one example, the yellow flower which all of us humans can effortlessly agree occurs out there in the world independently of our senses and concepts is, in fact, fully contingent on our senses and conceptsthis in all, or at least nearly all, respects other than its spatiotemporal properties (neither of which are phenomena in Kantian terms). To some other species of life, the very same spatiotemporal object which can be apprehended by all coexistent sentience will then be neither yellow nor a flower.
And this outlook I've just addressed which is confirmed by our current scientific knowledge I further take to be a variant of indirect, rather than direct, realism.
I'm of course open to being corrected, though.
A tentative comment i'd make, at risk of upsetting some of the more stringently critical here, is that its entirely possible we in fact do have an electrical sense of some kind, and that this would support the view you outline.
People "intuiting" that they are immediately to receive a phone call or text message on their cell phone may be understood by the body 'receiving' the signal ahead of the device (for some, as-yet unknown reason), and subsequently giving a certain sensation(not-yet-articulable) that tells the brain to act as if that is about to occur. I have nothing but anecdote to support this (though, seems widespread - not mine alone) and some Sheldrake work (lol) so, ignore if appropriate. But i find it very interesting, and think it would expand Kantian terms interestingly.
Cool. :smile:
Quoting AmadeusD
I can respect the hypothesis. Since it concerns a possible human physiological sense, it is then open in principle to scientific investigation via which validation or falsification could be obtained.
But, for the record, this is often not as easily done as it is said. Take the possibility of human pheromones for example. At least some scientific experiments seem to indicate that humans might have such a physiological sense (below is provided one example of such (1) and a general history or the research (2) which also addresses the complications involved with it). But, if we do in fact have this sense in any capacity, it would obviously be largely, if not entirely, subliminalthis in contrast to how it appears to be in many a lesser animal (e.g., their Flehmen response, which by all accounts appears to be a consciously enacted behavior aimed at a greater pheromone perception).
Still, there so far are a number of problems with such studies on human pheromone perception; (3) provides a succinct abstract of them. So, to date, neither are human pheromones confirmed by science nor are they falsified by science. This despite the scientific investigation that has gone into the matter.
----------
1) Pheromones and their effect on womens mood and sexuality
2) Chapter 19: Human Pheromones - Do They Exist?
3) Reproducible research into human chemical communication by cues and pheromones: learning from psychology's renaissance
-----------
It's one subject of interest to me that in some ways relates to your post, so I thought I'd share.
This is the way out of subjectivity, but I don't know that it works. If you claim there are all sorts of ways to perceive that are ideosyncratic to the organism, but all these variations are rectified by the human mind's ability to assimilate and assess the information received, then you are eliminating the subjectivity with this divine power we have. That is, we all understand that the dog we see is a mere shadow of a dog, but since we can transcend that simple experience (and, as you say, think about our thinking about the phenomenal state of the dog) and realize its limitations and thereby understand the dog in a real way, we are no longer in a state of subjective knowledge.
If our perceptions are ideosyncratic to our human composition and do not necessarily provide consistent representations of the noumena, as in a bat might see things differently from us, but we clear up the evil genius' deceptions with the clarity of our reasoning, then we're neither deceived about reality nor are our subjective limitations ultimately limiting.
This seems fraught with the problem that sometimes my reasoning does in fact prove invalid and that it does in fact vary from other people's. This is the same reason I don't accept that human perception is an exact representation of the noumena. If we just want to posit accuracy in final understanding of an object, why the whole rigamarole distinguishing between reasoning and perception and why not just say WYSIWYG, what you see is what you get, and our perceptions are somehow magically and divinely true facsimiles of reality?
Science doesn't confirm that there's a flower independent of our senses and concepts. It starts with that assumption.
Spaciotemporal properties are aspects of the phenomena for Kant, or aspects of what we intuit. You're thinking of Locke when you say those properties are independent of us. Kant showed that whatever those properties are, we somehow know about them a priori. We don't learn about them.
You can take the above and create a picture of humans projecting a framework of space and time for the things they encounter, but I think this is going a step further than the insights actually warrant. All we can really take confidently from Kant is that we aren't blank slates.
I don't disagree with anything you wrote. However, contemporary versions of direct realism, intentionality theories, and phenomenological theories all explain the same phenomena. Each of these have their own problems, but it doesn't seem readily apparent that some have significantly worse problems than others. The result is that I would tend to say that "indirect realism can be made consistent with the empirical sciences," rather than "the empirical sciences confirm indirect realism," which would seem to imply that we can eliminate competing theories based on the empirical sciences.
Obviously, not all formulations of indirect realism are consistent with the empirical sciences. Older versions tend to work on the assumption of substance dualism, fall into Ryle's regress, and involve Cartesian humonculi or Cartesian theaters. The formulations of indirect realism that are consistent with the sciences are just those that have been tweaked and edited until they conform to the empirical sciences, which is the same thing that can be said for direct realism and other theories.
Unfortunately, a great deal of the literature on the objects of perception spends its time attacking the strawman of "naive realism." Yet showing that this naive realism cannot be the case doesn't really show that one's favored theory is more plausible than any other contemporary competing theory. Plus, it's unclear if such "naive realism," was ever embraced. The pre-Socratics already have formulations akin to indirect realism, direct realism, and phenominalism in key respects, so the "naive" position seems to be more a phantasm than something that must be torn down.
It still seems to me that significant critiques can be leveled at indirect realism as well. There are the adverbial critiques. There are the accusations of falling into a form of (crypto)-substance dualism with "mental representations" acting as ontological entities and "agents," only being able to view mental representations.
Here are the big problems:
[B]Concepts - [/b] The notion of a "concept" is notoriously muddy. It not obvious that my conceptual understanding of a concept like "Hegelian dialectical," or "Marxism," is the same sort of thing as the way in which my visual cortex organizes sensory input into the experience of "seeing a flower." The first exists (only?) in recursive self-awareness and can be articulated to other people via words. The second seems impossible to even get into recursive self-awareness, let alone communicate. Neuroscience cannot proceed by my describing how it is I use these unconscious processes to turn visual input into the image of a flower, nor can I communicate how I achieve it. I am unaware of these "concepts." Further, the second sort of concept seems "necessary," for the cognitive acts that give rise to the first. I cannot come up with an articulation of what flowers are if my sensory system cannot distinguish them. Lower animals certainly have the second type of concept, but it seems doubtful they have the first.
Indeed, I am only really aware that I am using the second type of concepts when I begin to suffer from agnosia or have a stroke, etc. And even then, the experiences that people who suffer from these ailments describe is one of absence, they are not able to diagnose themselves. Whereas if I forget what "Hegelian dialectical," is, I am aware of this inability to recall or the fuzzyness of the concept. Nor does it seem like I have a "concept" of every particular shade of green, yellow, and brown I see when I look at my lawn in the same way that I have a concept of "the United States." So, to the extent that [I]some[/I] forms of indirect realism make their claims about anthropology and perception by conflating these two notions of the word "concept," they seem to be open to attack. And note that the brain areas that appear to be involved in both notions of the term "concept," appear to be quite different as well.
[B] Phenomenological Inseparability - [/b] This leads into another problem, that of the defining feature of indirect realism, the claim that "we experience mental representations." The problem here is well summarized in the Routledge Contemporary Introduction to Phenomenology, which comes up with a comical list of excerpts of philosophers and scientists trying to describe phenomenal awareness [I]without[/I] reference to the things being experienced. These invariably degenerate into just describing the things being experienced, "the taste of coffee," or "the red of a balloon floating in my room," or else become unintelligible nonsense like "I am perceiving hotly," and "I am smelling bitterly."
The point intentionalists (and some direct realists) make here is that there seems to be absolutely no daylight between the perception and the objects perceived. We seem perfectly able to communicate our experiences to one another in some ways, but it becomes impossible to do so if we focus on the perception side of "perceiving representations," by themselves. It leads to incoherence. And, so they argue, this shows that there is no distinct ontological entity that might be called a "mental representation," that is experienced by a "perceiver who perceives them." Nor is there really good empirical reasons to divorce the two. Where does neuroscience say representation occurs versus the perception of representation? It doesn't say anything about this. It has yet to articulate how this works, but tends to conclude there is no Cartesian theater and that perception and representation are at least not distinct at the level of neuroanatomy (fine grained analysis is indeterminate on this issue).
(This seems like a good argument in favor of intentionalists)
[B] Superveniance Relations - [/b] Finally, we can consider direct realists' objection, which I think might be the best one. This relies on notions in superveniance. Superveniance cannot just be defined as "no difference in A (mental phenomena) without a difference in B (physical phenomena)." This turns out to be a wholly inadequate way to frame superveniance.
Such a definition allows, in global superveniance, that a world where Mars has one more molecule of dust can have completely different mental properties from the world without the extra molecule of dust. There is a physical difference between the worlds, so there can be as much mental difference as we like. The same is true for local superveniance. If Sally 2 has one more magnesium atom in her body than Sally 1, she can now have totally different mental properties (we can place the atom in the brain and the same problem remains)
People have tried to fix this with the idea of P-regions and B-minimal properties. P-regions are just those regions of space time that are absolutely essential to the mental phenomena being considered. B-minimal properties are just those physical properties needed to ensure the mental phenomena in question.
If might be thought that these concepts wouldn't cause problems for indirect realism. After all, for any freeze frame microsecond of perception, we can assume that the relevant P Region is entirely in the brain. Does this not support the assertion that perception must just be "of" things in the brain, representations?
The problem comes when you want to analyze any perception that actually takes a meaningful amount of time. All of the sudden, things outside the body become part of the P Region. If we would not have seen the apple but for the apple being on the table, then the apple, or at least part of it or something with similar B-minimal properties, is required to explain the mental state.
So now the direct realist (along with all the externalists) will say: "hey, the superveniance relationship for perception [I]has[/I] to involve the object, it is a [I] necessary[/I] physical constituent of perception." Which, while not proving their point, still seems to make it more plausible. If the B-minimal properties of the object perceived cannot be changed one iota without changing the mental experience, then it seems like there is a very "direct" connection between the object and the perception. There is, in this case, no change in the mental representation without a change in the B-minimal properties of the object, and it seems that the "directness" of this relationship is exactly the sort of thing the direct realist is talking about.
Recall, Aristotle (and Aquinas) don't have us perceiving the entire form of an object. Nor do they have us perceiving the form "as it is in itself." This would require our heads turning into apples or something when we see an apple. Rather, a part of the substantial form is directly communicated to sensation. And here, the B-minimal properties of the object that precisely specify the part of subjective experience corresponding to that object, seems like a very good candidate for the parts of the object's "form/intelligibility" that are directly communicated. This relation is direct in that there can be no change in A without a change in B, and because B is B-minimal, no change in B without a change in A. This is a one to one relationship between part of sensation and an external object what Aristotle wants to communicate even though he is certainly no naive realist. A lot of Catholic philosophers work with this sort of realism, and have enhanced it with semiotic explanations but unfortunately they reside in a bit of a bubble.
(Note, I would think this was a KILLER argument for direct realism BUT for the fact that P Regions and B-minimal properties actually seem to destroy superveniance by making what is considered a relevant physical element [I]dependant[/I] on the qualities of mental experience - but that's a whole different thread lol)
Of course, there are similar problems with the other theories. I just wanted to illustrate that theories all have significant problems AND can be made consistent enough with empirical evidence that none of particularly "confirmed" above others
There is a chasm between us and I don't know how to bridge it, but if I work out a way I'll get back to you.
If you look at the part of my post above under the heading "Supervenience Relations," perhaps that might be helpful in elucidating such a "bridge." It shows how a "direct relationship," i.e. one to one correspondence, might be said to exist between objects and [I]elements[/I] of our perception of them.
Contemporary formulations of direct realism do not argue that we see things "as they are." Indeed, pace mentions of "naive realism," I would maintain that even neolithic farmers must have had some sort of understanding of how it is that they could look at something that seems solid, pick it up, and discover that it was hollow. No theory of perception would seem to entail that when we experience an object we experience [I]all[/I] of its properties.
Nor does it seem like any theory actually posits that experiences of objects are equivalent with objects. What distinguishes the direct realist's claims is simply the claim that some elements of perception have a direct correspondence to the objects perceived such that variance in one cannot exist without variance in the other. This does not entail that we necessarily know which elements of perception correspond to which elements of the world. This is clearly something that must be discovered.
But the upshot of such a correspondence is that we do not need to rely solely on "divine reason," to have access to external objects, as their intelligibility directly corresponds to elements of experience. This is in part the difference between saying that "we experience ideas of objects," and that we "experience objects using ideas." It is saying that the sign in the semiotic object/sign/interpretant relation is a bridge between objects and interpretant, not a barrier, because there is something, namely the intelligibility/form corresponding to the Kim's B-minimal superveniance properties, that comes to be in/a part of the object, sign, and interpretant during the transmission process.
[quote]and do not necessarily provide consistent representations of the noumena, as in a bat might see things differently from us, but we clear up the evil genius' deceptions with the clarity of our reasoning, then we're neither deceived about reality nor are our subjective limitations ultimately limiting. [/Quote]
What constitutes a "consistent representation of the noumenal?" If it needs to be that all entities experience objects in the same way at all times, then yes, we seem to have a problem. If consistent "representation," (I would use the term "experience" here) merely requires that some elements of experience are consistently in a one to one correspondence relationship with the object being perceived, then I do not see a problem. That bats and humans might experience a rock differently does not entail that no part of their experience might be tied to the properties of the rock in a direct manner.
We might still have a problem if our ability to access these intelligibilities is extremely constrained or varies completely from individual to individual. For example, if the elements of experience produced in one person's looking at a rock that conform to properties of that rock are "entirely different," from that of another person who looks at the same rock from the same vantage. But I'd argue that we have no grounds for claiming this is the case, that each instance of human experience is completely sui generis in how it corresponds to objects either moment to moment or between different people.
Consistency does not require absolute consistency or one to one correspondence, it merely requires an intelligible pattern.
Edit: a way of summarizing this might be that we experience B-minimal properties located in external objects in a direct way, and that this represents the Thomistic intelligibility of the object. This does not entail that all experience of an object corresponds to B-minimal properties located in that object. The relevant B-minimal properties of the physical system resulting in an experience will reside in the brain as well. This, for any experience of an object, only elements of that experience will correspond to B-minimal properties located in the object itself.
Of course, you can keep everything in the brain, but only if you chop experience up into picosecond blocks. Any experience extending over seconds will start to require an accounting parts of the world outside the body. But of course, we experience "over time."
Kant isn't a simple indirect realist where there's some supervenience relation between the noumenon and the phenomenon. What's revolutionary in his insights is that the whole spaciotemporal framework is a priori.
Right, but my point is that multiple entities experiences don't need to be identical or even particularly similar to share a direct relationship with the objects being perceived.
As to the second part, I think advances in developmental biology seriously call into question prior understandings of the nature of essences and "a priori," capabilities.
A human body thrown into a vacuum produces no consciousness. An embryo only develops into a human being under an extremely precise and shockingly rare range of environmental conditions. Tweak an animal embryo's gestational enviornment and the same genes will produce nothing but liver tissue, nothing but heart tissue, etc. This is where I think a process philosophy understanding is helpful. The notion of a priori capabilities seems wed to concepts of discrete "things" existing to possess such capabilities. But if we have strong evidence to suggest the world is the result of one universal process, then we have a reason to doubt these metaphysical assumptions.
A human being cut off from all sensory inputs doesn't develop a sense of space because they will be dead. What is physically required to stop an embryo from receiving any sensory input is also going to kill it, and even just drastically reducing sensory input (but by no means eliminating it) leads to death or severe mental retardation after birth. The divorcing of elements of the human person from their enviornment just seems wrong to me. We can speak of commonalities in cetaris parabus scenarios, for sure, and this might even give us a modified conception of "essence," but it won't lead to any thought that exists without reference to the environment.
So, Kant's analysis might very well be relevant to some "essential nature," of human experience, provided we narrowly defined what constitutes the actualization of such an essence. However, it can't be prior to sensory perception. If anything, developmental biology would suggest that such regularities only come to exist provided a narrow range of environmental inputs. Sensory system inputs play a crucial role in the developing body long before we would think a fetus might be concious. I'd imagine that blocking all inputs from these organs through some physical means would almost certainly kill the developing human.
This is very unclear to me.
What I expressed in relation to Kant's take on space and time is simply that neither space nor time are of themselves phenomena for Kant. They are instead for him "pure (rather than empirical) intuitions". Here's an excerpt from IEP:
Quoting https://iep.utm.edu/kantview/#SH2c
Phenomena for Kant are appearances - which I so far take to always be in one way or another empirical. And, hence, I so far take it that for Kant space and time - both being a priori representations that are then in no way empirical - are not phenomenal in and of themselves.
Which is not to then say that either pure or empirical intuitions are not representations for Kant.
If you find this interpretation mistaken, can you please back up your disagreement with references.
This seems to me to hinge one what one means by "direct" and "indirect" realism, and I acknowledge that opinions can vary greatly. It's a bit lengthy, but here is an excerpt from SEP on the matter:
Quoting https://plato.stanford.edu/Entries/perception-episprob/#DireReal
I then take the highlighted portion of this text to imply that the yellow flower's uniformity of hew as seen by humans is (for emphasis) the one true reality of the object - this such that a bee's experience of the flower as having a pattern of different hews is then incorrect / bad / illusory ... if not also somehow hallucinatory.
If what I experience is a direct access (one that is hence "not mediated by or analyzable in terms of further, inner states of the agent") to reality as it truly, objectively is, then the just mentioned conclusion so far seems to me entailed. If so, this then contradicts our scientific knowledge of reality/the world.
In which way would you find the just expressed to be inaccurate?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
There's plenty of scientific evidence that some of them do. As one example I quickly found online:
Can Dogs Learn Concepts the Same Way We Do? Concept Formation in a German Shepherd
This not to even start discussing studies on the great apes.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
My use of the term "confirmed" was likely inappropriate. I meant in the sense of "strengthened" rather than of of "having an assured accuracy". That mentioned, contingent on the issue of what "direct realism" entails, as previously expressed, our scientific knowledge does contradict our human perceptions being the be-all and end-all to what the objective world consists of (edit: to be clear, this perceptually). In this sense, I then yet find our scientific knowledge to evidence, hence support, the view that direct realism as just described in this post is erroneous. Be it "quasi-" or otherwise, this then results in science supporting an indirect realism.
But maybe I've got my definitions wrong.
I would agree that this would be a very difficult problem if this is what is being implied in the bolded text, but I don't see how that is the case. It would be bizarre for a professional philosopher to advance such a claim, given how much of our daily experience and work in the empirical sciences would appear to falsify it.
The point the text mentions seems to be that perceptions are not decomposable. They exist as relations between the perceiver and perceived. They cannot be further decomposed without losing something. This does not entail that we cannot refer to the eye or visual cortex in giving an account of vision, it just means that we cannot build up an accurate account of perception with [I]just[/I] a combination of these parts. In this way, it might be appropriate to think of experiences as "strongly emergent," although that term has difficulties as well, and it doesn't totally fit here because what is being said does not preclude a reductionist account of perception, but rather a reductionist account of perception that excludes the objects being perceived.
The part above about how adverbial and intentional theories are actually just indirect realism seems to simply read these theories through and indirect realist lens and in so doing beg the question.
This seems to fall into the trap of thinking "direct realism," = "naive realism."
Perhaps I should have been more precise. It seems unlikely that [I]all[/I] animals that experience sense perception would have concepts of the first sort. The one can exist without the other. Flies perceive, but I don't think they have "concepts" in the way we have a concept of "communism," etc. But if the two notions of the term can exist separately from one another, differ dramatically in traits and how they are experienced, and seem to require quite different neurological explanations, then I still think there is a risk when conflating them. This of course, only effects some theories, and some of their claims at any rate.
That makes sense. But like I said, the literature on this topic tends to make a bad habit of taking evidence that "naive realism is wrong," as providing strong support for "my particular theory is right." This is done by direct realists too. "Look, naive realism is nonsense, so my account is preferable." IMO, the comparison case for all these theories should be the best/most popular theories in other camps, not naive realism, which is more a strawman than a real position.
I can get that, but then can you clarify what you make out of this statement - or else whether you find it erroneous - with emphasis on the highlighted portion:
Quoting https://plato.stanford.edu/Entries/perception-episprob/#DireReal
I so far interpret it as expressing that our perceptions are in no way mediated by or else analyzable in terms of the agent's specific (even if this is only a perfect representation of the its species-specific) relations of "physiological senses - CNS capacities - resulting states of awareness" - these relations of themselves constituting the "inner states of the agent". I'll try to decompress this if needed, but I'm currently hoping it will make general sense to you as is. At any rate, how do you interpret the quoted statement?
I haven't read Brewer's paper so I cannot speak to it. If that's how the phrase is intended, then it seems like a silly position to advance, and I would not agree with a sentence that seems to claim that this position is held by "direct realists," generally.
However, I would take "unmediated" to refer to only "the relation that exists between perception and perceived object," not between say light waves and neurons firing in the optical nerve. That is, the relationship is not decomposable, it is a property of the whole that cannot be built up from the parts.
I think what you're missing is that there's an aspect of the underlying framework of developmental biology that is a priori. You're putting the scientific cart before the logical horse.
You're right. I thought you were saying that space and time are mind independent. Kant shows that they can't be.
No, I'm aware of that. I think there are good issues to raise there. For example, Donald Hoffman does a good job bringing these issues to the fore in his "The Case Against Reality." However, his elucidation of these issues would seem to cast greater doubt on Kant's suppositions.
Our cognitive architecture might lie posterior to our sciences, but then, as Hoffman shows, there is good reason to doubt if our cognitive architecture represents truth as opposed to biological fitness. One of his key points is on the evidence that "3D space" is simply a "hallucination" of sorts. Of course, Hoffman thinks these problems are more acute than I do, and he ultimately uses them as a springboard for a sort of idealism with phenominalist flavors.
I don't think foundationalism works. If anything, the greatest mistake of modern philosophy has been to put the epistemological cart before the horse. Kant wants us to buy his demonstration before any other considerations and I just don't think this is a good way to vet theories (and even if I did, I'd tend to agree with Hegel on Kant having his own dogmatic presuppositions, and the whole "oh look, I just happen to have discovered Aristotle's exact categories," thing).
Which suppositions?
I guess my point was that we should take a second to understand Kant's thought experiments before we poo poo him.
For Hoffman, the core mistake would be the presupposition that experiences must necessarily be of objects "out there," which in turn leads to the concept of the noumenal and thus the significant problems understanding the world around us that follow from this being being posited axiomatically. And this would probably be the biggest problem more direct theories of perception have as well. The relationship between man and "external objects," flows from axioms that might be questioned on grounds of their validity (or on charges of dogmatism). Plus, if you think there now exist better answers to Hume's challenges and you are unhappy with where Kant ends up (or different readings on Kant), going back to the drawing board for a new paradigm only makes sense.
But aside from that, there seems plenty to pick over in Kant's cognitive anthropology even if we agree with some of his core intuitions. Might it be valid to say that what is often labeled in Kant as "a priori" might be better described using modern concepts of "unconscious" processes, a concept unavailable to Kant? There is an important distinction between "unrelated to the experience/environment" and "prior to recursive self-awareness," that didn't really exist prior to a better understanding of biology, and this distinction seems to have follow-on implications. It's sort of like how you might be sympathetic to Aristotle but think that our current understanding of the world requires that the foundational definition of essence needs to be reworked, and this will change a lot of things because much follows from/is built upon the foundational concept.
.a blind but indispensable function of the soul, without which we should have no cognition whatever, but of the working of which we are seldom even conscious .
.For they pass, unconsciously, from the world of sense to the insecure ground of pure transcendental conception .
.whether they be conscious or unconscious, be it of the manifold in intuition, sensuous or non-sensuous, or of several conceptions, is an act of the understanding .
He had a conception of the unconscious, and for unconscious processes nothing could be said anyway, so .
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Even if it is valid to say, it remains whether the newly described terms are as sufficient in their support of the theory in which they originated, as the terms described under the original conditions are necessary for it. Modern conceptions grounding modern descriptions of formerly defined terms tend to refute, or at least obfuscate, the original theories. Might be called re-structuring though, in order to assuage conscience, which is tacit acknowledgement the original should have just been left alone. (yeah, Im talkin to YOU, Arthur!!!).
So, sure, to describe Kantian terms in modern understandings is just to have a newer theory. People been doing that since forever, right?
Certainly.
Yes, but I don't think it's exactly the same. We can, in a roundabout, absential way, observe these processes. If you look at how people describe their experiences of agnosia, having major strokes, etc. they point to an absence of "innate" features of consciousness, but it's like trying to "see your own blind spot."
The careful studies of different sorts of brain injuries and neurological disorders that has occurred since Kant's time has led to a different sort of conception of how these "innate" faculties are in some ways conditional on proper development and function. That doesn't negate the crucial insight that these lie posterior to any theorizing, but I don't actually think the whole modern focus on "beginning at the beginning" is actually helpful, which means an analysis of them shouldn't attempt to be totally presuppositionless or critical the way the German Idealists tended to go about things. This seems like a Cartesian foundationalist hangover.
What would you replace that paradigm with?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I don't think there is a better solution to the problem of induction. Searle resorted to repeating Hume. What better answer did you have in mind?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Innateness is pretty modern since Chomsky. Remember that Kant is part of the trunk of the western philosophy tree. Every philosopher since Kant has been influenced by him in some way, even if he was seen as something to defeat.
I still think you're just sort of ignoring what's central about his epistemology. But good discussion! Thanks
:angry:
Yes, but such are the exceptions to the rule, rather then a metaphysical, albeit speculative, establishment of it.
-
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Not helpful .in what context? I guess it depends on where beginning actually is, relative to whatever follows.
HA!!! Yeah, sorry, bud. Just calls em as I sees em, donchaknow.
I thought your Main Man was Chomsky anyway, so gimme credit for not throwing him under the transcendental bus, maybe?
:shade:
It's all good. More flavor the merrier! :victory:
As for the question about mistaken or invalid reasoning, this seems to me an argument in favor of intersubjectivity. Its precisely by engaging in rational discussion with others that were able to correct our mistakes. Could we all be simultaneously mistaken? Sure, but only more rational investigation will tell. And same point as above: None of this back-and-forth around possible mistakes has any bearing on a reality that would put us in direct contact with Kants noumena.
So here's the best I've got:
You've got a dog running about in the noumena but he does so outside of space and time because space and time are human constructs. So this dog is no where at no time, which might lead some to think he doesn't exist because existence requires that you be somewhere at some time.
But such is my human error. The fact that I think the noumenal dog doesn't exist is because I'm a person and people can't comprehend without space and time, and so I can't say existence is dependent upon space and time. I can just say comprehension is dependent upon space and time.
What this means is that there is a dog in the spaceless timeless but I have no earthly (literally) idea what that dog is. I might say that the noumenal dog "out there" caused the phenomenal dog "in here" once doggy dog gets a heaping helping of space and time in my head, but that would assume the noumenal dog is a causative agent of phenomenal dogs.
If we can say that the noumenal dog is the causative agent of the phenomenal dog, that would be phenomenal (as in wonderful), but can we say that? If that be true, then maybe the dog is just an impluse, like what zippedy zaps throgh the computer to put a blip or blap on my screen. This is to suggest that the reduction of phenomena to predecessor noumenal impulses means the dog might just be my brain waves that precede my internal perception. If such be that, then how isn't that idealism, pray tell?
To your initial point, I need know none of this to feed my dog, pet my dog, and remind my dog that he is such a good boy, but I do need to know what a dog is when he's in the woods and he falls and no one sees him.
I just named my dog Phenomenomenomenomana. The word is best said sung. He used to be called Fred.
Of course the Kantian analysis can be played for laughs. The question, if we want to be serious, remains whether some kind of intersubjective agreement is a sensible way of describing human "objective" knowledge.
I slogged my way though a lot of Kant asking this question. So I found it amusing to find out that there are a significant number of Kantians who say "he was a subjective idealists, mystery solved" although some add to that "he just didn't know it/want to be one."
But I don't feel like I have the expertise to say how credible these claims are.
What I find neat is where 19th century phenominalist take this. They claim there is only phenomena. But what about the external world? Well this is just potential phenomena that may or may not be actualized. Historically, this view was very influenced by Kant, but the idea of external "matter" as potential informing the actualities that we perceived actually comes back around to start sounding a lot like Aristotle. Full circle I guess.
Amongst other objectives, Kant wanted to squelch Hume's depiction of cause as only consisting of accidents and coincidence. David and Immanuel both accepted that Fred is real and not a figment of imagination. Immanuel says that the conditions of experience do not rule out asking how Fred appeared by necessity since Fred does not flicker in and out of immediate presence. But the ways we explore that idea is rimmed by a horizon we will never surpass.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
The question raised here is an interesting one, and I also take trouble with the split of res extensa and res cogitans. Here is my take on it from another thread if you are interested:
Quoting Lionino
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
In the topic of Descartes and thus Scholastics, volume and pitch would be attributes of the substance sound (and I might be abusing the term substance here), through which the mind can come to know sound, without which it cannot know sound. Odor however is synonymous with smell.
Apropos to directional smell, turns out research does evidence directional, else stereo, smell in humans. Given that most other mammals have a keener sense of smell than we do, I by this then infer that smell is generally directional, and, hence, spatial, in most lifeforms that are equipped with this physiological sense.
I was also thinking about smell and sound being directional. But I think that touch goes even beyond. When we hear something at our left or our right, we simply hear it, and that sound invokes the idea of left or right, the experience does feel like it is happening within your brain; but when it comes to touch, we can tell the actual experience is not in our brain but all over our body. Maybe that makes sense.
Quoting Lionino
I think it makes a lot of sense. Ill complement what youve written by adding that via vision, for example, our body is other relative to us as first-person points of view (i.e., as conscious minds) that seem to be affixed to this perceptual other via the location of our eyes. It is only via touch that we as first-person points of viewi.e. as consciously aware beingspermeate throughout and are, as such, fully unified with our own bodies in an indisputable manner: such that we are here defined as that awareness which touches and anything we touch becomes other relative to us, thereby delimitating us as bodies (yes, this does get complicated by the touching of ones own body, but the relation between subject of awareness being that which touches and its objects of awareness being that which is touched remains unchanged).
Point being, only via touch do we hold immediate awareness of us conscious minds being unified with our physiological bodies via which we then experience otherness; in all other exteroceptive sensessight, smell, and sound, includedwe as conscious minds experience our own bodies as an object of awareness, i.e. as other, that then is automatically inferred to be perceptual experiences of one own physiological self.
Im not certain we could isolate sight, smell, sound, as occurring within a 0D mind as I interpret you describing (e.g., if sight is deemed to be a strictly mental occurrence, then the mind cannot be of zero dimensions, for it consists of sight which itself cannot be of zero dimensions ... or so it seems to me). That said, I too find touch to be a unique and highly underrated physiological sensethis, at the very least, in philosophies addressing the subject of perception.
Good elaboration.
Quoting javra
I would imagine that here the skin serves as both the object and the subject. Insofar as it, as a solid physical thing, can exert pressure into other objects and, as the tool of the sense of touch, can provide an experience, it is not troublesome when two parts that connect to the same (awake) thinking being the experiencer come in contact.
Quoting javra
In the sense that these senses can be the mental operations of an immaterial mind with no extension.
Let's say our mind is indeed immaterial, being immaterial, it does not extend in space, so we can metaphorically say it has 0 dimensions. As soon as we reflect upon the experience of touch, it seems that experience is spatially extended. Being experience an attribute of the substance we call mind, it would be reasonable to conclude the initial assumption is wrong, and that the mind does extend in space (even if it is still immaterial perhaps).
While writing this post I was touching my body in order to stimulate not in a weird way thoughts about the topic.
:grin: Yes, OK. Understandable.
BTW. not that Im saying this is what you were getting at but, I had a hunch this topic might inadvertently awaken thoughts of touching oneself in sexually sensual manners for some out there just want to mention that, in itself, theres nothing weird about it :razz: its been evidenced healthy even.
Quoting Lionino
As to mind and perception, I find myself agreeing with the latter sentence. Youre focusing on physiological perceptions via the physiological senses; still, the same issue of spatial extensions will also be found in imaginations which incorporate imagined senses of perception: imagined sights via the minds eyes, imagined sounds via the minds ears, imagined tactile feels via the minds skin, if not all other senses as well. I get that not everyone can easily imagine things, but some are quite apt at it. All these imaginings will require spatial distances of delimitation to that which is being imagined. And since imaginings are purely mental, this then points to mind necessarily being extensional when in any way engaging in, at the very least, willful imaginings.
So, from where I stand, yes, the Cartesian notion of res cogitans can often be, if it is not always also, res extensa. This to my mind makes the Cartesian distinction between mind and matter fruitless, to say the least.
That addressed, I would however express that I nevertheless find it reasonable to affirm that consciousness (the first-person point of awareness which we all are and which apprehends givens: understandings, concepts, physiological percepts, and imaginings, among other things) could be of itself construed as zero-dimensional. This though the mind (of which it is consciously aware of and also those portions which remain unconscious relative to itself) by which consciousness can be said to be enveloped can at times be extensional, if not always so being.
So if an argument is to be made for 0D, I so far don't find it possible that it is the mind which is 0D (the mind again consisting of things such as percepts, concepts, etc.; in short, of cogitations one is aware of) but I do find it possible to interpret the consciousness/awareness which is aware of both its own mind/cogitations and of the external world as being, of itself, zero dimensional.
At least from the Cartesian perspective and this is where I was getting at by saying "the mind has the idea of extension within it and that some interaction with our organs causes some idea of spatial localisation" , in the Third Meditation it is said that the res cogitans can still have an idea of extension because (as he says and it is a convoluted argument) it is also a substance like the res extensa, extension exists in the mind not formally (in actuality) but representatively (as an idea). The question then becomes, are we experiencing extension when we hear stereo like we do when we touch something? If yes, perhaps the idea of the mind having extension is dependent on what semantics or pressuppositions we choose; if not, perhaps there is a solid ground to affirm the mind is extended it would be a second cogito of sorts, I feel therefore I permeate.
We do, but through a series of inferences and regularities and inductions we equate {the hands and feet and belly we experience} and {things we see in the mirror with our eyes} as unified with our subjective experience.
Surely a baby does not do that explicitly, but at least at a subconscious level it does.
Yes, I think so, which means that primally we experience ourselves as extended, even though in that primordial state, we are not consciously aware of doing so in any reflective sense.
As substance in Kant's system is one of the categories, there is no connection whatsoever to the noumenon. Please refer to the paragraph on The Amphiboly of the Conceptions of Reflection especially the parts regarding the Internal and External (...the internal determinations of a substantia phaenomenon in space are nothing but relations) and Matter and Form (...Leibnitz intellectualized phenomena, just as Locke, in his system of noogony sensualized the conceptions of the understanding).
Kant's choice of the term Ding an sich or thing-in-itself is utterly deceptive and has led to many futile discussions about what a mysterious thing this might be. Careful study of the CPR reveals: if we leave the thought-process aside, there is no thing (no object) left. Objects exist only in thinking although Conceptions without intuition are empty and intuition without conception blind. So both of it is needed and therefore the mere thinking of an object does not make it objectively real.
The German language has only one expression for Nichts, whereas in English we find two of them: nothing and naught. Ding an sich might therefore be translated best as nothing or no thing. To call phaenomena Erscheinung (appearance) does not in the least diminish their objective reality. On the contrary, it is all there is for knowledge.
Phaenomenon and noumenon are like two sides of the same coin. But there is a fundamental difference between the two and considering objects in space as phaenomena implies as well, that there is some(thing?) other we could call noumenon. But far from being associated to Locke's substance it is devoid of any attributes or qualities whatsoever. To ask if the noumenon is the cause for our perceiving this phaenomenal world is the wrong question again as causality is one of categories. It just denotes a limit similar to Wittgenstein's limit of our world as the limit of our language.
So we have a necessary but entirely void concept and it seems, that Kant's philosophy is incomplete. But consider his Critique of Practical Reason, where he maintains to provide a possibility to fill this void though not with knowledge but with something we would call ethics nowadays.
interesting....but i dont know why now
Because in his outmoded language he calls it "morality".