A supplementary question to that option is this. If it is not in fact possible to do that, or not possible for a while, would you rather have likes as they are now or get rid of post likes and accrual entirely?

That is very cool.

70s Iranian funk. I'm guessing 1979 put a stop to this sort of thing.

Looks like it's a Bing thing. The same search here, without quotes, returns TPF in second place behind you know who. Pretty cool.

this is only the opening part of The Lord of the Flies, where everyone is still nice to each other. Man's primeval nature will emerge eventually, leaving you mods plenty to do. :D — Arkady

By "Man's primeval nature" I take Arkady to be referring to Kwalish Kid, but he's yet to find his way here.

You're welcome to submit it darth.

You click on the first link that goes to another article.

Amateur!

(Though it happened to me too)

Almost, but the first link in consciousness is 'quality'.

@shmik's in the lead so far.

The object of the game, I suppose, is to find the least philosophical thing on wikipedia. Note: when any links go to a wiktionary entry I go back and click on the next link.

It was quite remarkable that in each case the last several steps were the same, beginning at natural science, even in the case of Bieber.

I don't believe the sun will rise in the east. I know the sun MUST rise in the east — Bittercrank

If you do know that the sun will rise in the east, we'll grant you all the rest.

But do you?

But "I don't believe X: I know X" means "I don't just believe X: I know X", and this is often how the colloquial use is put. It's very much in line with the JTB definition. When "just" is not used, I think it's implied. On the other hand the JTB definition looks like a clumsy attempt to encapsulate this colloquial use; in the latter, a belief that is true and justified is transformed into something more than a belief--not just a belief that happens to be true and justified but attaining another epistemic state entirely--and a literal understanding of JTB can lose sight of this.

It seemed like BC was actually making another distinction, one that epistemologists would complain about, between a subjective belief and an objective physical necessity. But this really boils down to an assurance of knowledge too, because it's an attempt at guaranteeing the truth component of a JTB, with a mention of celestial mechanics in lieu of justification.

I meant to suggest that if the view is contrary to the empirical evidence then there are more reasons to reject it than endorse it. — Michael

What empirical evidence?

Cool.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/color/

It's very controversial in philosophy, which is what we're doing here (saying that "I don't think it's a philosophical issue" is a philosophical point, of course). But I was referring to your verificationist argument anyway.

Don't force me to get into this debate. ;)

I and a great many philosophers (it's not a minority view as far as I can see) totally disagree. But I'm not here to argue the case; I intervened to expose the fallacy of presenting a controversial thesis as obvious. And then you attempt to likewise present extremely controversial support for this obviousness.

If colours were objective then, like other objective things, they should be susceptible to experimental verification (even by the blind). The fact that there doesn't seem to be any experimental verification, despite the advancement of modern science, shows problems with the view. So in a way it was a rhetorical question to highlight the fact that even though it's a popular view it's obviously false – as our best observations observations undermine it. — Michael

This really will not do. You are asking us to take your verificationist argument to be unassailable. I was inviting you to engage with the actual philosophy about it.

Good point. Done.

I wasn't trying to change your mind. I was showing that it was incumbent on you not to present a controversial thesis as if it were obvious. And if you were in a philosophical discussion that involved a dispute about whether Yahweh existed, you would likewise have to do more than appeal to your prejudices (personally I don't get involved in those debates because like you I think it's bloody obvious).

I thought that his use of analytic/synthetic to describe the different methods of the Prolegomena and the CPR respectively was mostly unrelated to his use of it to describe judgements. Isn't it more about analytic as in breaking down a complex whole, and synthetic meaning building up from basic elements? But I'm not really sure how that applies to the books, unless he's simply saying that in the CPR he had to start from scratch and build the edifice brick by brick, and that in the Prolegomena he is taking this already built thing and breaking it down to reveal its core truths.

So, my apologies to jamalrob for my part in de-railing his thread. — John

It's not a problem, John. The more discussion the better. :)

1) I can tell the difference between veridical and non-veridical experience.

2) I cannot tell the difference between veridical and non-veridical experience.

You cannot claim both of these. The skeptic has nothing to do with it; you can't blame him. — The Great Whatever

But that's just an uncharitable reformulation of what I said. It is this interpretation that I'm blaming the sceptic for.

Can one experimentally show that there are objective colours? — Michael

I'm not sure why you are asking this in response to my posting of a link to an authoritative article that shows colour realism/objectivism to be a popular philosophical position. I posted it because you seem to think you can say that colour is obviously mind-dependent.

Only subscribers get to upload files as things stand.

Right, I wrote this too so I'll post it. Then I'll hold off for a while. And if anyone thinks these walls of text aren't suitable for the thread, let me know. I've written so much because I've been enjoying it.

Preamble

The Preamble covers the central distinction covered in the introduction to the CPR, between analytic and synthetic judgements. He begins in section 1 by looking at the sources of metaphysical knowledge, and states that they are a priori by definition.

A few words about a priori and a posteriori. These are about justification, i.e., how we come to know things, so they are epistemological concepts. In the CPR Kant says that “There can be no doubt that all knowledge begins with experience”, but that “although our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.” What this means is that it is experience that calls forth knowledge, not that it is the source. For example, it is in experience that we come to know about cause and effect in the first place, but only because events must be experienced in terms of a prior, independent (pure) concept of the understanding.

The crucial thing to know about the a priori is that it is characterized by necessity and universality. In contrast to empirical knowledge, which is always contingent--it only happens to be the case that the sun rose this morning--and applies only as far as we know to the cases we can observe, a priori knowledge is what is always applied to everything that is relevant to it, everywhere and for all time. Thus we generalize from observation into laws, e.g., every event has a cause, the total mass-energy of a closed system remains constant, and E=mc^2.

All necessary truths must be known a priori, because experience and induction can only give us contingency as Hume showed. E=mc^2, for example, might at first sight look like it's a posteriori, because it's confirmed by experiment. But all that's really discovered in such an experiment is that E=mc^2 happened to be true on that occasion; the necessity and universality of the equation, it's law-like character, cannot be confirmed by experience.

But is all a priori knowledge necessary? Historically most philosophers have thought so--it’s hard to think of anything a priori that doesn’t apply across the board necessarily. But Kripke argued that there is such a thing as contingent a priori knowledge. However I’ll leave that aside, because it’s is not the kind of a priori that Kant is interested in.

It’s often said that Kant found a way between rationalism and empiricism, or a way to reconcile them, and it can be seen here. The rationalists had their innate ideas, like the ideas that God is omnipotent or that time has no beginning and no end, which are thought to be necessary and universal. But Kant's a priori knowledge is different: it consists of concepts or principles that are used to form judgements about the objects of experience, whereas the innate ideas are whole judgements already present in the mind and complete without any experience at all. Thus Kant accepts that experience is essential for knowledge (empiricism), but also accepts that necessary and universal truths can be known by the understanding (rationalism).

Briefly on this point, I think it's wrong to think of rationalism and empiricism here as equal, competing philosophies. Kant was in the rationalist tradition and, in a way, wanted to save it from scepticism by reforming it. Adorno puts it nicely in his lectures on the CPR:

...the synthetic a priori, in short, the incontrovertibly true and valid modes of knowledge that far surpass mere logic, may be described as the roast, the Leibnizian or Cartesian roast, while Hume and English scepticism provide the dialectical salt. — Theodor Adorno

Section 2 is about the types of knowledge that can be called metaphysical. Whereas the a priori-a posteriori distinction concerns how we know things, this is about what we know. In other words, a priori-a posteriori is about the justification of propositions and analytic-synthetic is about the character of the propositions themselves, or about the sort of truths they are, or more precisely what makes them true or false. Whereas a priori-a posteriori is epistemological, analytic-synthetic is semantic.

So Kant makes a distinction between judgements (we can think of judgements as propositions held to be true in human understanding), and this distinction applies to all judgements, whether they contribute a priori or a posteriori knowledge:

• Analytic: explicative judgements, ones that don’t tell us anything new but just bring out what’s already there.
• Synthetic: ampliative judgements, ones that are informative, i.e., they add something new.

Analytic judgments. Kant uses something like the containment metaphor he used in the CPR to define these. This is the idea that the subject of a proposition contains the predicate already, e.g., in “All bachelors are unmarried”, being unmarried is contained in the concept of a bachelor. In contrast, “Some bachelors are Mexican” is not analytic because the concept of bachelors has nothing to do with being Mexican.

Incidentally, the example he actually uses, of bodies being extended (analytic) and heavy (synthetic), is much less useful to us now. At the time, extension was a part of the concept of a material body (meaning a physical thing), both in physics and metaphysics, whereas weight was not. He was just using a familiar and uncontroversial concept.

He goes on to elaborate on his containment definition: an analytic judgement is one whose negation is a contradiction. Thus it is contradictory to deny that all bachelors are unmarried.

It’s easy to get a sense of what “analytic” means from this, but it’s a bit vague, and later philosophers--who had better logical tools than Kant, who was working with Aristotle’s logic--pointed out that his definitions are not general enough. For example, he has only really covered subject-predicate propositions, but he means analyticity to apply to more complex judgements, like those involving conditionals.

There are other logical problems, but it turns out that analyticity can be satisfactorily generalized:

A judgement and its negation are both analytic if and only if one of the pair is self-contradictory, or false by virtue of the definitions of words or its logical form. — Jill Vance Buroker

In any case, I find true by definition or true by virtue of the meanings of the constituent terms to be close enough approximations much of the time.

As Kant points out at the end of 2(b), all such judgements must also be a priori, because it is logical form and the definitions of the terms involved that determine whether they’re true or false--not experience.

Synthetic judgments. These can be defined as simply the contrary of analytic judgements, i.e., they are judgements that are not true by virtue of the meanings of the constituent terms. So it’s clear enough that a posteriori judgements, i.e., judgements of experience, are all synthetic. But Kant says there are synthetic a priori judgements too.

He classifies synthetic judgements like this:

1. Judgements of experience
2. Mathematical judgements
3. Properly metaphysical judgements

I’ve said enough about 1. And like @Sapientia I don’t feel like covering the mathematics, whether 7 + 5 = 12 is synthetic or not, etc. My feeling has always been that mathematics is entirely analytic and that Kant was wrong on this. I don’t know how badly that damages Kant’s project--I suspect it doesn’t.

So that leaves metaphysics. Here he argues that although there are analytic judgements in metaphysics--I think of these like steps in solving a mathematical equation--the important ones are synthetic. Just like physics, with its propositions such as “air is an elastic fluid”, the whole point of metaphysics is to tell us something about reality, something that is not true only by definition. He gives the example that “all that is substance persists”, which is a conservation principle that serves as a foundation for physics (the quantity of matter remains constant in physical interactions). Other more controversial synthetic judgements of metaphysics are that reality is fundamentally made up of monads, that reality is fundamentally made up of matter, and that reality is divided between two substances, mind and matter. These aim at positive knowledge, not mere explication.

And of course they are also a priori, so we can see that the synthetic a priori will be Kant’s main concern.

So we can make a table of knowledge like this:


There is no such thing as analytic a posteriori, because what can be known based on experience cannot be true merely by definition or logically.

That’s enough for now. The next bit, the “General Question”, is where Kant introduces the central question: How are synthetic a priori propositions possible?

Nice post @Moliere. One thing I avoided when writing my own summary was this:

Something that piqued my interest later is when Kant distinguishes between methods to draw the distinction between the Prolegomena and the Critique -- namely, the Prolegomena follows the analytic method, and the Critique follows the synthetic method. Kant insists that the synthetic method is necessary to present all the articulations, whereas the analytic method is good enough -- after accepting the deduction (which, back then, was more akin to legal justification than dedeuctive logical inference) -- for giving the plan in broad strokes. — Moliere

Can you say more about what he means by this? I was never quite sure.

To think that when we see red or taste sweetness that this redness and sweetness are inherent properties of these mind-independent causes is evidently false. — Michael

Note that colour realism and objectivism are popular views among philosophers.

One of the most prominent views of color is Color Objectivism, i.e., the view that color is an objective, i.e., mind-independent, intrinsic property, one possessed by many material objects (of different kinds) and light sources. — SEP

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/color/

You're right, I'm not very interested, but I'm smarting from the charge of internal incoherence, so let me try again.

Between making use of the distinction and saying that I can't tell the difference at any particular time there is a tension from a sceptical standpoint, but not an inconsistency, for making use of the distinction does not depend on my being able to tell the difference during any particular instance of experience.

Here’s my bit about the preface.

Preface or Introduction

First, I like that it's well-written, which is not something Kant is famous for. But he could do it if he tried, and he thought it especially important to boost the rhetoric and drama for this particular book. The Prolegomena was written a couple of years after the publication of the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, and was intended as a forceful summary of that work. Kant is on a mission to reform metaphysics, and this book is meant to serve as the starting point for all future attempts at doing it. What this really means is that he is attacking traditional rationalist metaphysics.

Metaphysics was, or was felt to be, in crisis. In contrast to physics, which had been making great strides of discovery for a couple of hundred years and which had recently been revolutionized by Newton, metaphysics “cannot, as other sciences, attain universal and lasting acclaim”, and “perpetually turns round on the same spot without coming a step further”. Back then, in the midst of the Enlightenment, any endeavour aiming at knowledge of the world was expected to make progress. But there was no such progress in metaphysics, nor even any substantial agreement. Kant is saying, “if you think you can do metaphysics, read this first before embarrassing us all.”

The particularly philosophical source of the crisis of metaphysics was David Hume’s scepticism, and Kant makes it explicit here that the construction of the CPR was based on the need to respond to him. Kant nicely summarizes Hume’s position on the connection of cause and effect:

He indisputably proved that it is wholly impossible for reason to think such a connection a priori and from concepts, because this connection contains necessity; and it is simply not to be seen how it could be, that because something is, something else necessarily must also be, and therefore how the concept of such a connection could be introduced a priori. From this he concluded that reason completely and fully deceives herself with this concept, falsely taking it for her own child, when it is really nothing but a bastard of the imagination, which, impregnated by experience, and having brought certain representations under the law of association, passes off the resulting subjective necessity (i.e., habit) for an objective necessity (from insight). From which he concluded that reason has no power at all to think such connections, not even merely in general, because its concepts would then be bare fictions, and all of its cognitions allegedly established a priori would be nothing but falsely marked ordinary experiences; which is so much as to say that there is no metaphysics at all, and cannot be any.

This is a threat in two specific ways. It questions the possibility of metaphysics as an independent science (a rigorous, rational and progressive discipline), and it also threatens the status of physics insofar as physics is based on principles and laws that are meant to apply without fail, necessarily and throughout the universe, e.g., Newton's Laws or Einstein's equation of general relativity; or based on more basic metaphysical principles such as that every event is caused. Reason (the a priori) is independent of the empirical, but it often concerns itself with the empirical. So in a nutshell, Hume had threatened humanity’s claim to rational objective knowledge.

Kant, unlike Hume, is going to defend reason’s ability to apply a priori concepts of necessity and universality; he will say that this is much more than just a habit to get us through life. But to do this he will drastically restrict the domain over which this can be done. Basically [SPOILER ALERT!] the answer will be that informative objective a priori knowledge is possible, but only when it concerns the objects of experience, i.e., speculative metaphysics is impossible. These are the positive and negative aspects of Kant’s project, respectively: in support of our ability to know the world objectively through physics and natural science more generally, but against the attempt to get beyond experience.

A word about metaphysics to clarify what I’ve just been saying, and this might also help to solve @Sapientia's worry about the separation of metaphysics and the empirical. For Kant there are basically two kinds: immanent metaphysics or the metaphysics of experience and transcendent or speculative metaphysics. (Note it’s transcendent and not transcendental). Immanent metaphysics is a priori reasoning concerning the objects of experience and thus the objects of physics; it’s basically about the “principles and laws” I mentioned, on which natural science is based. Speculative metaphysics, on the other hand, is a priori reasoning about what is beyond experience. It’s about what the world is really made of beyond any evidence we could possibly adduce. Examples are Leibniz’s monads and Plato's theory of forms. Speculative metaphysics is pretty much what we mean by metaphysics today.

However, although it's not quite clear at this stage there is really another kind of metaphysics: that which Kant himself is going to be doing, which is transcendental metaphysics, which explores the relationship of human reason and experience with the world. On the other hand it's debatable if this is metaphysics or in fact just epistemology. Anyway, I expect there will be more about that in later posts.

Metaphysics is often summed up, as it has been on this site, as asking "big questions", regarding things like truth and reality, and including questions such as "What exists?" and "Are objects constituted by the way we see and describe the world?".

If such questions are appropriate in metaphysics, then it seems completely wrong to exclude empiricism, that which is known through the senses, that which is taken from experience, and that which is physical. We can still question whether anything exists beyond the aforementioned, and if so, how much we can know about it - without making such an exclusion. — Sapientia

I think we can now see that Kant is not excluding the empirical. Metaphysics can be about empirical objects--it is just that they cannot be the source of metaphysical knowledge, just as Hume showed.

I don't have any comments on what he got right and wrong, because I think it's too early for that.

Next I’ll cover the Preamble, which is mainly about the analytic-synthetic distinction. A priori-a posteriori should probably be sketched out too.

My position doesn't demand that I address such a possibility, because I have been fairly explicitly presuming all along that it is not the case. That is, although I accept for the sake of argument that "every instance of an experience is one that is in principle indistinguishable between the two types you've mentioned", I take it for granted (as I've said) that such instances as are hallucinations are rare interruptions in perception.

This would be a problem only if I were trying to establish the distinction, to prove against the sceptic that it was real.

No, like I said, "what I accepted was that there are times when I can't tell whether or not what seems to be there is there", but in the wider context of my life hallucination is meaningful as an anomalous, disruptive event. This is just a tedious disagreement about what "cannot tell" means. Perhaps I was unclear.

But the problem for TGW's argument is the direct realist has never argued there is no difference between the real and virtual world. They have NEVER take the position we can't tell the difference. We can, in fact, tell the difference all the time. We have experiences of "real" and "virtual" events. We know about them. Though it may be true there is no difference, in immediate sensation, between a "real" world event and a "virtual" world event, it is NOT true when is comes to our wider experience (and so our knowledge). — TheWillowOfDarkness

TGW is ignorant of this because he isn't considering experiences other than the immediate sensation of an object.

Indeed, I tried to make that point in various ways, but it doesn't satisfy TG.

And if you believe the dreaming argument is absurd, then it reflects poorly on your position, since your position is exactly what makes it cogent. — The Great Whatever

The dream argument works against anyone who takes what is evident in experience to warrant belief in anything at all. It is cogent insofar as one thinks experience is intrinsically precarious and uncertain. But I don't want to argue against the dream argument or any of that stuff, and I don't know what position of mine you keep referring to that you think demands that I do.

Now surely you agree that if every instance of an experience is one that is in principle indistinguishable between the two types you've mentioned, there is a problem? — The Great Whatever

No, I don't agree. I was hallucinating then, and now I'm not. But wait, I can't know that I'm not now hallucinating either: what if it's all hallucination? I really don't think the problem you've uncovered amounts to anything more than this.

But I never said that I can't make that distinction. What I accepted was that there are times when I can't tell whether or not what seems to be there is there. Which is of the nature of hallucination, of course (and illusion).

When you say "your theory", do you mean the following claims taken together?

Subjectively, I can't tell the difference between a hallucination and a genuine perception.
Hallucination and perception are distinct.

I'm not playing games. I actually don't see the problem. So how can I possibly respond?

Like I say, subjective indistinguishability does not entail that I cannot successfully make the distinction based on what I know hallucination to be, what I know about it from experience, learning, and so on. There seems to be something very wrong about the question "how did you figure out that such a distinction exists?" I'm not prepared to start telling stories about how I once recovered from a hallucination and thereby "figured out" that hallucinations really are different from perception.

What if there really is no such metaphysical distinction? That is a worry for a certain kind of sceptic or his victims, but not for me. Again, I don't mean to be too blasé, because you're a serious interlocutor, but I just don't see the problem.

I don't know why my answers haven't been enough. Maybe I just don't know what you're getting at.

And I've already said I had no interest in defending realism as such.

Is that because he's a well-known masochist. ;)

If we agree there's a difference, then I don't know what the problem is. Knowing there's a difference between hallucination and perception doesn't depend on my being able to tell the difference when I'm hallucinating. I can be fooled. But such episodes occur in the context of my life, in which most of the time I have no reason to suspect that what I see is merely the result of neurological disruption. Because that is what hallucination is, and I take it for granted. I've enjoyed our exchange so far, but this doesn't seem like a fruitful way to go. Am I missing something?

you, the realist — The Great Whatever

I don't want to be "the realist".