Well, I don't see the need even for an "object" at this point. We have the subject, and the subject's relations to what is outside, or external, to it. The supposition of "objects" or "an object" appears to be a tool of the learning process, we individuate the outside, distinguishing objects which can be named and spoken about. The individuation is based in the temporal extension, continuity of sameness, which validates an object with an identity. — Metaphysician Undercover

Davidson distinguishes three kinds of knowledge: subjective, intersubjective, and objective, and he doesn’t reduce any of these to any of the others. Intersubjective knowledge is not just a subset of objective knowledge or subjectivity multiplied but is something else: knowledge of other minds. Objective knowledge is knowledge of the world that the subject shares with others (or rather, that the subjects share), which has a bunch of objects in it.

I’ll avoid your other thorny issues.

I like this image. I believe it is important to understand that the learning process, therefore knowledge in general, begins in our relationships with others, mother, father, and other authority figures. This knowledge is developed through the use of words, therefore the "outer experience" gains primacy in our knowledge. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yep. Wittgenstein and Davidson are much closer to your way of putting it than Kant is, since they emphasize other people, whereas Kant is thinking about the lonely subject perceiving objects. Davidson adds another element to make it a three-way relation, a "triangulation" ...

. . . that requires two creatures. Each interacts with an object, but what gives each the concept of the way things are objectively is the base line formed between the creatures by language. — Davidson, Rational Animals

So instead of subject and object you have an object plus at least two persons who share a language.

So I see Kant as pioneering this approach while being unable to escape his philosophical milieu entirely.

I'm afraid that far more scholarship would be required to carry the point in either direction. — Banno

Yep. Nevertheless, I can say a few things in support of the OP, even if they're far more vague and suggestive than is required to carry the point.

First, I'm not saying that Wittgenstein is a Kantian philosopher or that he is in a unique position in taking a transcendental approach. What I’m thinking is that there is a resemblance between Kant and (late) Wittgenstein, at least along a certain dimension. I think it’s something like a historical point. I'm saying that Kant prefigured Wittgenstein or laid the groundwork, in ways that might be under-appreciated. He was ahead of his time, and more than he knew; without the rationalist baggage, Kant is more contemporary than is often thought, not least because he was one of the first to push back against the Cartesian tradition (which is an important aspect of the transcendental in the hands of Kant).

This matters to me personally because I keep noticing that Kant and Wittgenstein, in similar ways, help me in thinking about things like appearance and reality, sceptical doubt, direct and indirect realism, perception, and related issues. I'm trying to identify why this is so.

I take the important and controversial question to be how Wittgenstein’s late philosophy can be transcendental given that it’s significantly anthropological and seemingly empirical, and given that he specifically cautions against the identification of, and the search for, necessity and universality (and by implication, the a priori).

I call transcendental all cognition that deals not so much with objects as rather with our way of cognizing objects in general insofar as that way of cognizing is to be possible a priori. — Kant, CPR, B 25

For Kant this is about synthetic a priori knowledge via concepts, but I think it can be about other things while remaining transcendental.

There are other ways to put it. A transcendental investigation investigates ...

• The a priori conditions of experience
• The most general conditions of experience
• The conditions of the possibility of experience (or of knowledge, practices, etc.)
• What it is that "stands fast" for us
• The limits of reason.

Crucially too, the transcendental is anti-sceptical, and not just as a pleasant side-effect. This is seen at various points in the CPR (the Transcendental Deduction of the categories, the Refutation of Idealism, and the fourth Paralogism in the first edition). Generally what we get is the idea that it doesn't make sense to say that objects as we perceive and know them are such apart from those conditions (there is a sense in which Kant's transcendental idealism is almost a tautology: you cannot experience something except in the way you must experience it). Since I'm more familiar with OC than PI, I wouldn't mind pursuing this angle ("Here we see that the idea of 'agreement with reality' does not have any clear application.").

There is debate over whether late Wittgenstein identifies a priori conditions. Here's one way of looking at it:

Rather than being denied, the concept of the a priori is placed firmly on its feet in the later works. This concrete a priori no longer centers about a Kantian transcendental subjectivity. Here it defines a concrete form of life in a particular world rather than a transcendental consciousness. One must envision the a priori as arising in experience rather than being imposed upon experience. — G. D. Conway, Wittgenstein on Foundations

Whether or not that works (how is it a priori if it arises in experience?) Wittgenstein has this in common with other twentieth century thinkers, e.g., Foucault with his historical a priori. Foucault himself is doing transcendental philosophy in that he is investigating intersubjective conditions of the possibility of our societal practices, even though these conditions are not to be seen as universal and fixed. But interestingly, he also argued that Kant had already done something similar. In his essay introducing Kant's Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Foucault argues (I think) that after the CPR Kant began to locate the transcendental in the empirical subject, thus bringing the two poles, empirical and transcendental, together. And the move to anthropology notably parallels the direction of Wittgenstein's thinking from the 1930s on.

So what is the transcendental argument Wittgenstein uses, Jamal? "Thus, from the fact that we are able to make such statements meaningfully, the existence of a community of others that ‘fix’ this rule can be inferred, as a necessary pre-condition for the former..."? — Banno

Sure. Or how about the following, which is Davidson's summary of the private language argument:

. . . unless a language is shared, there is no way to distinguish between using the language correctly and using it incorrectly; only communication with another can supply an objective check. — Davidson, Three Varieties of Knowledge

Which I take to be equivalent to: distinguishing between using the language correctly and using it incorrectly is possible if and only if language is shared.

And thus we reach our social practices and the form of life that language is embedded within. What are you asking for when you ask how form(s) of life "cashes out"?

Similar to Wittgenstein (and Davidson's "triangulation"), Kant transcendentally flipped inner and outer experience to give primacy to the latter, i.e., to the experience of the "external world" as opposed to self-knowledge and self-consciousness. Descartes and his followers, both rationalist and empiricist, assumed that...

. . . our self-awareness is a given, that our sensory states are exactly what they appear to us to be, and that the philosophical task is to see what else, if anything, we can know on this basis by logical deduction from this presumed evidence base. — K. R. Westphal, Kant, Wittgenstein, and Transcendental Chaos

Notice that this is the basic rationale for epistemology as first philosophy. But with self-awareness demoted, that's called into question.

I think Kant and Wittgenstein demonstrate an anthropological tendency while retaining a transcendental motivation. Whether it carries the point, I hope all this does something to support the view that late Wittgenstein is significantly transcendental, and that ...

the locus of his new kind of transcendental philosophy is ultimately taken out of the head and placed in social practices. — Jamal

(The unmentioned intermediary point being the Tractatus: the locus in language and/or logic.)

Of course, there's a lot of detail missing here.

:cool:

Let us know what it's like.

José Saramago — javi2541997

Yesterday I got a copy of Saramago's The Cave. I don't know when I'll get around to reading it.

All the Names — javi2541997

I'm intrigued by the premise.

Cool! :party: :death:

:up:

Fair enough. We shall see.

I may get around to replying to you down the line.

The proper response is “Oh! I get it now, thanks for clearing that up.”

No, you are tacking on that last bit yourself with seemingly no reason, is how it looks to me — flannel jesus

I take @Luke to be saying that indirect realists think perception would have to be “untainted by representation” for it to be direct.

More generally it seems that many of them think directness would require there to be no perceptual process at all. It’s a bit odd, but maybe just shows that indirect realism on the forum is often not thought through (not all of them think this way).

It’s also a species of the fallacy of judging our contact with the world as somehow inferior, distorted, filtered, etc., on the basis that we have a specific and finite way of contacting the world, which is to sneak in the view from nowhere as the model of perfect perception. Thus Luke is right on the mark in accusing some indirect realists of a failure to let go of the mythical view from nowhere.

Yeah, I know I’ve posted it at least five times already.

Excellent, thanks. So maybe @wonderer1’s mention of a “connotation of animism” was quite relevant.

I’d read that Barfield essay if I could find it.

do you think of me as a rat or something like that? — Metaphysician Undercover

Gerbil.

There is an issue I have found with German philosophers in general, and that is that they tend to have very idiosyncratic word usage. It appears to me like they actually choose unusual words, to intentionally hide the origins of their conceptions. So they'll read and learn prior philosophers and prior concepts, then present them in a new way with different words, hiding their sources, and creating the illusion of originality. — Metaphysician Undercover

Scurrilous accusations.

It isn’t true of the German philosophers I’ve read. Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, Husserl, and Adorno didn’t do it. Their novel terminologies were genuine. Heidegger too: as far as I can see he sincerely coined new terms to get away from certain modes of thinking in philosophy (the conscious subject, etc). Hegel? I don’t know. Obscurantist, let’s say maybe, for the sake of argument—but so as to seem more original than he really was? I don’t buy it. Leibniz? What was he trying to hide?

But yes, people do argue that Freud in particular tried to conceal his sources. Turns out he’d probably read more Nietzsche than he admitted. And if he did take sublimation from someone else it was likely Nietzsche, who used the word in Human, All Too Human.

But he recognizes that the structures of language games developed over time. — Paine

Yes, and the shifting of the river bed of certainties, which points to historical change, as opposed to Kant’s often ahistorical time—time as the form of inner sense, but not as social change. I think these are different topics: Hegel and Wittgenstein on history, Kant on time as such.

I dont know why you want to say that , but I can tell you that in Husserl’s phenomenology objects don’t just appear to a subject as what they are in themselves in all their assumed completeness, but are constituted by the subject through intentional acts. This means they present themselves to the subject within some mode of givenness. For instance, an object can be given in the mode of recollection, imagination or perception. Within spatial perception, we never see the whole object in front of us; the object gives, or presents, itself to us in only one perspectival aspect at a time. So what we understand as the object as a unitary whole is never given to us in its entirety. This abstract unity is transcendent to what we actually experience. — Joshs

Nice summary. I was—or @Banno was—hung up on the connoted attribution of agency to an object that “presents itself.” It wasn’t clear to me how we go from the object as “constituted by the subject through intentional acts” to the object as that which is doing the presenting. I’m not saying this doesn’t work, just that the locution is not clear to me.

It's a good question. I'm not convinced that speaking of things presenting themselves to us necessarily invokes agency on their part. Well at least not agency in the sense of intention to present themselves. In the context of chemistry agency is spoken about—we say there are chemical agents, defined as those compounds or admixtures which have toxic effects on humans.

While things don't have the intention to present themselves, they could be said to have the propensity to do so. Language is multivalent. We can speak of things presenting themselves or being presented or being or becoming present to us.

I don't know if I've answered the question adequately but that's all I've got right now. — Janus

:up:

Yes, that’s pretty much where I’m at.

I'd be curious as to what connotations "present" has in this context and how those connotations might contrast with a scientific view on the matter. — wonderer1

With science we force the object to present more of itself than it wants to. :wink:

Whatever the case, I think we might agree that I made a Freudian slip — Metaphysician Undercover

I deeply regret my failure to make this point myself.

snow, the solid form of H2O, evapourates directly to gas, without passing through the intermediary, liquid form, in the process of evapourating — Metaphysician Undercover

:ok: :razz:

Great stuff.

Whether you can coherently think of the object as autonomous in its capacities to affect us while placing the means by which its nature is revealed as an interaction involving an agent is an issue which clouds all that. Which is a question of whether objects transcendentally condition interaction with them based on their properties. — fdrake

There is no shame in hitting the wall of paralogisms and antinomies. Or maybe there is.

Are you confusing sublimation with Hegel’s sublation?

That said, I see from Googling around that there’s been some talk of sublimation as expressing some of the sense of Hegel’s Aufheben. And I quite like that sense in the context of the OP as well.

The back of the house presents itself to you — Jamal

...has intimations of intent on the part of the back of the house. — Banno

I like it for that reason, but I’m struggling to justify it. I think it’s to do with an ecological, relational, reciprocal sort of idea of perception. Or the idea that the back of the house is independent of you, which can be hinted at by metaphorically ascribing agency to it. Your mind doesn’t present it; it presents itself. It’s already there, waiting (to pounce on your eyeballs).

Maybe you can help @Janus? Why do you and I want to say, and why do some phenomenologists say, that the things we perceive present themselves to us? I feel I’m missing something obvious.

What even is that way of speaking? :chin:

Since it’s not the lack of evidence that leads me to believe that God is not, maybe I’d need more than evidence to persuade me that He is. What I mean is, I cannot bring myself to think of God in terms of evidence at all.

262. I can imagine a man who had grown up in quite special circumstances and been taught that the earth came into being 50 years ago, and therefore believed this. We might instruct him: the earth has long… etc.—We should be trying to give him our picture of the world.

This would happen through a kind of persuasion.

612. At the end of reasons comes persuasion. (Think what happens when missionaries convert natives.) — Wittgenstein, On Certainty

In a nutshell, I’ll believe in God when someone with enough charisma brainwashes me into it, but I can't really imagine that happening. And bearded men on clouds don't work on me either.

:up:

Very amusing, MU.

If your point is that according to Wittgenstein there are multiple forms of life, then of course I agree. My point—which was just an aside—was that in the interpretive debate over the granular level and the plurality or singularity of form(s) of life, I have a way of juggling the different interpretations, viz., that there is a plurality of forms of life among human beings, as well as an overarching singular form of life, and perhaps many levels in between. This is compatible with the presence of exclusive (and even incommensurable) forms.

It's probably worth pursuing it.

Yeah. Well sure, everyone from octopuses to planet-encompassing sentient oceans is welcome. I was throwing "human" around carelessly.

The aliens in the ocean seem to be speaking, though. — Moliere

Cthulhu?

Almost a good point, but I think it can be used in a non-passive sense. The back of the house presents itself to you when you go round and look. Your activities and desires elicit diverse presentings on the part of the thing, so to speak.

but there are bigger fish to fry — Banno

Like explaining for the thousandth time that we see cups, not light?

I mean, given the right circumstances, I and the hunter gatherer can work out how to live together and talk to each other. Could we do this if there were not some general but suprabiological human form of life?

Edit: cross-post. Yes, I think so, that’s kind of what I was thinking.

I feel like denying that “the only common form of life is the basic biological form”, but I’m not ready to pursue it right now. Anyway, you might be right.

I don't see any advantage in such obtuse phrasings — Banno

I like it. It encapsulates direct realism in a way that acknowledges the points made by these naive indirect realists about the physicality of perception, while also in that context showing the right way to use the word “see”.