Do you think the later Wittgenstein was in sympathy with the idea that reason can be self-reflective, or at any rate can reflect critically upon the forms of understanding? I’m not sure how to read Wittgenstein on this. In the Tractatus, I think LW is saying that such a critical project would be just "metaphysics". — J

Interesting question. They were both engaged in critical projects directed at exposing the emptiness of philosophy, especially metaphysics, but whereas Kant was an insider doing a salvage operation, Wittgenstein had no such commitment—he was an outsider who was not optimistic about philosophy, seeing it as mostly nonsense. What this meant was that Wittgenstein went much further, and thus had no real sympathy for the form that Kant's critical project took: as you say, the critical reflection upon the forms of understanding.

However, Wittgenstein's later philosophy is full of critical reflection; it's just that he chooses not to focus on the traditional topics of reason, the understanding, and so on. And crucially, this is largely because he believes that the misuse of language is responsible for the problems in the philosophy of mind and psychology. That is, philosophers literally do not know what they're talking about when they talk about concepts, reason, and the understanding—Kant included.

So there's only so far you can take the parallel I'm making.

I’m not religious but part of me wants to be either Catholic or Muslim. I’ve been in countries where most people come in one of those flavours of Abraham, and it feels strong and meaningful, like something that would give one a sense of belonging.

I also like Catholicism in science fiction, I like stories about monks or medieval theologians, and I feel comfortable in churches and mosques. I also find the early development of Christianity and Islam really interesting. To be part of that fascinating but chequered history would be quite something. Judaism has an attraction along those lines too, i.e., its history, but it’s more exclusive.

Sadly I’m a total modernist and regard God as having died with the death of pre-modern tradition; I find some of the philosophy of Christianity objectionable; and I cannot muster the requisite beliefs anyway (not because I need evidence, but because God seems an obvious anthropological artifact).

but aren't they only chimeras in reference to the external/empirical world? I think you can be a Humean skeptic while reserving a place for genuine analytic knowledge. For Hume, relations of ideas, which would include math and its proofs, are not problematic, because they can be known by reason alone, requiring no reliance on experience. — J

Agreed. My usage was imprecise. I was thinking of knowledge as knowledge about facts and what exists only. Synthetic knowledge.

To the Lounge with this rubbish.

Or maybe we can’t do (non-dogmatic) philosophy without Hume.

Indeed. So Hume’s scepticism can be viewed in two ways: (a) we don’t know anything about the world around us, or (b) proof and absolute certainty are chimeras in epistemology; philosophers are looking in the wrong place or doing it wrong. I’m sympathetic to (b), although I think there is more to it than habit and sentiment.

No worries. I assumed you’d assumed I was replying to your comment in the Shoutbox about Nietzsche.

I know, and nobody can blame the postmodernists for that.

The idea of 'truth-value realism, which is the view that mathematical statements have objective, non-vacuous truth values independently of the conventions or knowledge of the mathematicians' is I guess what I am am exploring too. — Tom Storm

Yes I see. First, distinguish between the truth and the realism issues, because they are, or can be, independent. Regarding truth, have a look at Fictionalism in the Philosophy of Mathematics.

But Hume and I will have to agree to disagree. Hehe — Patterner

Me too. I just had a look in the cupboard and the cup was right there!

Unless what you’re really interested in is postmodern philosophy itself, you’re probably better off looking at the foundations of mathematics and the regular philosophy of mathematics that isn’t usually labelled postmodern(ist).

When I was learning logic I had a look at Frege, Russell, Hilbert, etc., and found that, as @Count Timothy von Icarus has pointed out, doubts about the basis of mathematics are independent of (and preceded by half a century) what I think you mean by postmodernism in philosophy. One way of putting that is to say that some philosophers of mathematics and foundationally inclined mathematicians were becoming postmodern even before postmodernity. (Alternatively, perhaps these concerns are not postmodern at all but are quintessentially modernist)

So in the philosophy of mathematics you got formalism, intuitionism, and so on, alongside Platonism. Social constructivism too. Here’s an open access paper:

Social constructivism in mathematics? The promise and shortcomings of Julian Cole’s institutional account

This leads me to think that social constructivism/constructionism is not necessarily postmodern in the philosophical sense, even if these distinct approaches are lumped together in the popular imagination.

EDIT: And note that the theory discussed in that paper is based on the social construction theory of John Searle, not usually regarded as a postmodernist.

Perceived sometimes, other times unperceived. The cup in the cupboard and all that. Hume discusses continued existence and concludes we can’t justifiably infer it from having perceived it previously.

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.

:up:

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 wrong—and this just is how these judgements work. Something like that perhaps.

:grin:

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore — Jamal

Nice, javi — Baden

:cry:

:up:

:up:

To me it's like a parable of climate change, but maybe more likely connects with social conflict in Ireland. Great imagery anyway.

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)

he haw lantern, Seamus Heaney. This collection of poems is very Irish. It reminds me of the green plains, cloudy sky, the waves beneath me, and you, my Irish friend. — javi2541997

“Postscript” by Seamus Heaney

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

I did actually create a draft announcement but didn't follow through. Now that things seem to have calmed down, I'm not going to bother with the announcement—a decision I may regret when I have to repeat the response another 25 times.

Regarding objectivity in Kant, there is a way of putting it which is less apologetic, less embarrassed about its apparently subjective flavour. For Kant, sensible access to things is subjective, but the resulting understanding is not, because the understanding applies a priori principles.

The specifically novel element here is that objectivity itself, that is, the validity of knowledge as such, is created by passing through subjectivity — by reflecting on the mechanisms of knowledge, its possibilities and its limits. In this system the subject becomes if not the creator, then at least the guarantor of objectivity. — Adorno, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason

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?

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. — Sebastian Luft, From being to givenness and back: Some remarks on the meaning of transcendental idealism in Kant and Husserl (PDF)

However, this doesn't make the understanding finite and subjective:

For, the point of Kant’s entire critical project is precisely to justify the belief that despite our subjective perspective on things, we can have objective, a priori cognition. As a priori, it is a-perspectival. Cognition exists, as human cognition, but it is a priori cognition.

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".

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. — Jack Cummins

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.

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." — J

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:

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. — NDPR

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.

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? — Hanover

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. It’s debatable whether immanence is subjective or not. I think not necessarily, but in Kant it somewhat is. As @Fooloso4 said…

objectivity is universal subjectivity — Fooloso4

Which again looks Hegelian to me.

It was moved to the Lounge. I gave the reasons here:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/880144

You’re the best, prax!

"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…" — Cudworth, quoted by Manuel

Nice. I had a look at the epistemology section of the SEP page for Cudworth and he does seem remarkably Kantian.

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:

203. . . . What does this agreement consist in, if not in the fact that what is evidence in these language games speaks for our proposition?

214. What prevents me from supposing that this table either vanishes or alters its shape and colour when on one is observing it, and then when someone looks at it again changes back to its old condition? - "But who is going to suppose such a thing?" - one would feel like saying.

215. Here we see that the idea of 'agreement with reality' does not have any clear application. — Wittgenstein, On Certainty

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.

Assuming I got all that right . . . — Hanover

Seems reasonable.

. . . 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? — 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.

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. — 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.

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. — 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. — 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.

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. — 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.

Isn't this just a vacuous concept by definition then? — Pantagruel

The noumenon? It’s a critical concept: philosophers like Leibniz built systems around noumena, and Kant is diagnosing this disease. He also thinks he can’t just ignore it, because he regards it as an unavoidable product of the understanding.

Good, difficult questions.

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? — Hanover

I’m 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 perspective—a 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 don’t 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 I’m 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.

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. — 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:

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). — A 249

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.

* I’m not saying the object perceived is the noumenon, by the way.

:up:

Lately been listening to a lot of baroque music. There's something strange in it that I cannot explain. — Olento

Is it that it lies in an uncanny valley or a liminal space between the pre-modern and the modern? That it’s strange and familiar at the same time?

Do we infer the unperceived existence of what we perceive from the nature of our experience? If so, how? If not, why not? — OwenB

On second thoughts, I don’t think it is worded very well. At least, it’s not precise enough. It might be asking a general question about perception: does it work by inference? (Russell, following Hume, seemed to think so) Or, more precisely, is inference the way that we know things via perception?

If the answer to that is yes, then the questioner may also want to know if we thereby (by inference) know of the existence of things when we’re not perceiving them—but this isn’t explicit in the question, as @bert1 pointed out (it’s “do we infer,” not “do we correctly infer”). Personally I’d assume the question does have this meaning even though it’s ambiguous.

If the answer to the first question is no, then either we know of the continued existence of things unperceived by some other means than inference, or, agreeing with Hume, we don’t have any such knowledge at all.

Also, there is a major interpretative choice to be made in dealing with the question. Does “the unperceived existence of what we perceive” refer to the continued existence of things while we’re not perceiving them, or does it refer to the thing as it is in itself, roughly speaking the aspect of a thing that is not subject to the structures of human perception and cognition. I think it’s the former (how do you know the cup is still there when you close the cupboard door), because the wording used is similar to that found in Hume. (EDIT: it should also be noted that these are close to being merely two descriptions of the same thing, i.e., the thing as it is in itself is, from a certain point of view, synonymous with the thing as it is when you’re not perceiving it)

If you need to contact me privately, use private messages here on the website, not email. Go to my profile and click “send a message”.

Unperceived existence.....ask about this.... clear as mud?? — Mark Nyquist

I suggest you take a break from this particular thread, Mark. Maybe it’s just not for you, you know?

More off-topic responses will be deleted.

Is this about the British empiricists? Locke, Berkeley, Hume? — bert1

Looks like the person who formulated the question has that background in mind. Whether Owen’s daughter is expected to know that or has any such reading materials, I don’t know.

Still works. For “unperceived” you could think “continued, when we’re not perceiving it”. The question as asked is just very condensed and terse.

@OwenB

I have no idea if this is a good way to go for your daughter in her particular situation, but the way I’d look at it is to tackle David Hume’s argument against the inference of continued (unperceived) existence in the Treatise of Human Nature. He says that we infer continued existence—the existence of the cup in the cupboard when you can’t see it—from the constancy of our perceptions, but that this is unjustified.

When we believe any thing of external existence, or suppose an object to exist a moment after it is no longer perceived, this belief is nothing but a sentiment — David Hume

That quotation is from the “Abstract”, which is a summary of the Treatise. The argument itself is around 1.4.2 (that’s Book.Part.Section).

But there must be secondary sources that could make it more manageable.

Unlike others, I don’t see anything wrong with the wording of the question. It’s out of Hume.