However, there has been a long standing claim in philosophy, notably popularized by Kant, but perhaps going back to Protagoras, that we can't escape our conceptual schemas. — Marchesk

I think that is a very simplistic and problematical gloss of what Kant said. To actually explain what is called 'Kant's Copernican revolution in philosophy', would take a very long and detailed exposition, like for example one of the several lengthy articles devoted to that subject on SEP or IETP.

However, all that said, I think the 'conceptual schemas' you refer to here are very much more like Thomas Kuhn's 'paradigms' than the Kantian 'categories of the understanding' (which are derived from Aristotle). A paradigm is much more like a worldview of the kind presented by your graphic. And Kuhn's book is very much concerned with what it takes to force the adoption of a new paradigm (a paradigmatic example being the rejection of the Ptolmaic for the Copernican system.)

I don't think Kant's Critiques really require, or depend on, a worldview, as such, as they're aimed at (as it says on the label) being "critiques" - of reason itself, what are the constitutive rules and laws of thought and reason. Whatever they might be, we cannot stand outside them. You can't lay aside thought, and then proceed to think about something. So in that sense, you certainly can't step outside the 'laws of thought', not at least if you want to make sense of anything.

Man being 'the measure of all things' is the theme the Protagoras, and is the subject of trenchant criticism by Plato on the grounds of it being sophistry. So saying that Kant represents that kind of relativism is, I think, a reckless portrayal, of one who was exceedingly meticulous and cautious in his reasoning about such matters. (Some Kant scholar, which I am certainly not, might know if Kant commented on the Protagoras.)

Our modern cosmology... — Marchesk

I think it can be disputed that there is 'a modern cosmology' at this point (bearing in mind that the word 'cosmos' means 'an ordered whole'.) While all of the many disputes about parallel and multiple universes remained unsettled, anyway, and they don't look like being resolved anytime soon.

a mature neuroscience will eliminate propositional content as an explanation for human cognition — Marchesk

That obviously means that a 'mature neuroscience' will have no propositional content, which, I would think, is solid grounds for ignoring it (unless, of course, you are engaged in actual science, rather than pop philosophy).

Yes and no?

When I eat an apple I eat the apple -- I do not eat the concept of the apple.

But I know what the apple is by means of conceptualization.

But eating is not the same sort of thing as knowing. Acting is not the same sort of thing as believing. And what I know about is not the same sort of thing as how I come to know about it.

I'd posit that the question is a bit ambiguous -- in the sense that we can understand 'conceptual schemes' to entail either conclusion.

In one sense we could think of 'conceptual schemes' as nothing more than the set of beliefs that cohere together rationally. In which case, of course we have contact with things outside of our conceptual schemes, and thereby there is no need for us to ask of escape.

In another sense, we could say that in order for us to make sense of the 'manifold of experience' -- or for there to be a 'manifold' in the first place, more properly speaking -- there has to be some kind of conceptual structures in place for speech, or knowledge, to even take place. In which case there wouldn't be an escape, but there wouldn't even be the question of escape -- there would just be a limit upon what we could say, from a rational point of view.



To use your example of the ancient Hebrew's cosmology: Did anyone, then, come to believe differently? Probably not. And when different ideas have come to the fore it wasn't a matter of escape, I'd say, either -- but discovery, invention, and oftentimes politics.

Which, I guess, I'd just ask after this 'escape' word, really. I don't think that conceptual schemes are things we escape from. Rather, they are liberating in that they bring sense to the world. Also, I'd say that conceptual schemes are not permanent -- so there is nothing to escape from. Rather, there is a sort of play between conceptual schemes, and then there is the world we live in which is surely both mediated by our concepts and is also something which we compare our concepts to.

It's just a matter of not taking them too seriously, and not too lightly too.

... does that make sense? I'm sort of exploring at the same time as saying what I think...

I think that is a very simplistic and problematical gloss of what Kant said. — Wayfarer

What if what Kant said was simplistic and problematical? Of course we don't want to believe that because we sunk a lot of time into reading him. But what if he just had no idea what he was talking about, and believed something stupid?

But what if he just had no idea what he was talking about, and believed something stupid? — The Great Whatever

I can't reply to that without appearing discourteous, but suffice to say, I don't believe there's anything to discuss.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one can escape by pulling up the ladder of language in silence.

"We can't escape our conceptual schemas."

Looks vacuous to me. If you can recognize that a conceptual scheme is different from your own, then you are ipso facto not trapped in your own scheme. Think of Caesar assuming that the Germanic tribes to the north worshipped "Mars" because of his assumption that their gods were the same as his.

I think the sense of the question is whether we can get outside of conceptual schemas per se. I would say the obvious answer to that is 'no'.

If you mean "Can I have a pure unmediated experience of Being?" then the answer is either "no" or "Drop some acid/Meditate for ten years/go on a vision quest and see for yourself."

That being said, the question of whether there is a reality external to our conceptual schema is a horriffic tangle. "On Certainty" is the best attempt I've seen.

Thus "man is the measure of all things", Kant's fundamental categories of thought and the unknowable noumena beyond it, and the resulting correlationism, as Meillassoux puts it,

Kant maintains that our conceptual access to the world structures the world as we perceive it. "Kant claimed that in traditional forms of epistemology the mind was conceived as a mirror that reflects being as it is in-itself, independent of us. He argues that mind does not merely reflect reality, but rather actively structures reality." * Consequently we can never know the world as it is in-itself and the correlation between subject & object cannot be broken, and we have no independent access to either subject or object.

Correlationism rests on an argument as simple as it is powerful, and which can be formulated in the following way: No X without givenness of X, and no theory about X without a positing of X. If you speak about something, you speak about something that is given to you, and posited by you. Consequently, the sentence: ‘X is’, means: ‘X is the correlate of thinking’ in a Cartesian sense. That is: X is the correlate of an affection, or a perception, or a conception, or of any subjective act. To be is to be a correlate, a term of a correlation . . . That is why it is impossible to conceive an absolute X, i.e., an X which would be essentially separate from a subject. We can’t know what the reality of the object in itself is because we can’t distinguish between properties which are supposed to belong to the object and properties belonging to the subjective access to the object.

Meillassoux attempts to develop a view which enables knowledge of the objects independent of the subject. While his method of access (going back to the conception of primary and secondary properties of things, where primary properties can be described mathematically thereby providing independent access) may have it's own problems.

*see https://euppublishingblog.com/2014/12/12/correlationism-an-extract-from-the-meillassoux-dictionary/

It would seem then that conceptual schemas are fluid, and subject to revision or replacement after checking the world. — Marchesk

"Fluid" is probably too strong a term, since conceptual schemas tend to be relatively stable, especially for any given person. It seems to me that each such schema is a set of retroductive hypotheses that we have deductively explicated and inductively corroborated to a degree sufficient to warrant embracing them as provisional beliefs. Any experiences that are inconsistent with the expectations generated by one's conceptual schema will be unpleasant surprises that prompt the irritation of doubt, which motivates a process of inquiry, which may result in revising one or several of the hypotheses.

Someone should send for Banno and ask him to argue for Davidson's view: Here is Davidson's paper: On the very idea of a conceptual scheme.

His argument - that the very idea of a conceptual scheme is found wanting - is founded on translatability. His analysis seeks to show that as soon as we communicate, with any success, the very idea of a separate conceptual scheme fails.

Is the question as to whether we can "get outside" our conceptual schemes meant in the sense of 'outside all possible conceptual schemes' or 'outside one conceptual scheme and into another'?

Also, is this question understood by you to be equivalent to the question as to whether we can get outside our "faculties"?



Is Davidson treating the idea of a conceptual scheme as the idea of something absolutely hermetically sealed from all other conceptual schemes? Why should conceptual schemes not be isomorphic to varying degrees, as different languages seem to be? I cannot see how translation should then be thought to be problematic for the idea of conceptual schemes.

(It's a long time since I read that paper, and I don't remember being too impressed with it when I did, so I would be reluctant to spend time on it again).

Is the question as to whether we can "get outside" our conceptual schemes meant in the sense of 'outside all possible conceptual schemes' or 'outside one conceptual scheme and into another'? — John

My understanding in critiquing it is that there are fundamental categories of thought we can't escape, or check the world against to see whether the world is different than how we think about it.

So time would be one that Kant mentioned, and yet, modern physics, philosophy and science fiction have all played with different notions of time, even to the point of denying that time is fundamental. That it could be an illusion.

Also, is this question understood by you to be equivalent to the question as to whether we can get outside our "faculties"? — John

Good question. Someone like Meillassoux would say we do with math. We are able to model things black holes and the inside of atoms without being able to experience them. We're also able to create imaginary worlds different from our own, or ask what it's like to be a bat.

And yet, strangely, and in counterpoint to what you are suggesting, Kant, in claiming that our notion of time cannot be applicable to the noumenal or the in-itself, would also seem to be denying that it is fundamental.

Yet I wonder whether our ability to model things mathematically is not one of our faculties and an integral part of our experience.

Can humans get outside their conceptual schemas?

Is 'the self' part of a 'conceptual schema'? I think I am self, which comprises all of me in various media (meat, ideas, memories, perceptions...). I think I am one self among many other selves, but the only self I know is me, and I can not escape me. I can't step away from my self to think about who I am. I cannot get outside this schema.

Maybe I am not a self; maybe I am part of a larger schema which 'projects' nonexistent selves on a wall. If the projector went dark, then those selves would cease existentng. I can not get out of this schema either.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one can escape by pulling up the ladder of language in silence.
20 hours ago ReplyShareFlag — unenlightened

O:)

The notion of "conceptual schema" is incoherent. See Davidson.

propositional content — Marchesk

Shouldn't this be intensional content?

How so? I'd rather read what Banno has to say than "see Davidson".

"On Certainty" is the best attempt I've seen. — Pneumenon

I should read that again. It's been a very long time.

I'd rather read what Banno has to say — John

Others might disagree, since I have ranted on, on this topic, at great length.

In "One the very idea of a conceptual scheme" Davidson shows (to my satisfaction, at least) that the notion of an uninterpreted reality, which is then interpreted into a conceptual scheme, is incoherent; after all, how is one to make sense of an uninterpreted reality which is itself interpreted as an uninterpreted reality? One way to think of this is that Kant did not go far enough; even labelling the noumena was an error. Davidson can also be seen as providing a footnote to Wittgenstein, to which Unenlightened alludes.

There's no sense in which we can get outside of them to check whether the world is different from how we think of it. — Marchesk

Isn't this, in the least, an attempt to do just that - to step outside one's conceptual schema?

The mind has evolved over time and despite some hiccups here and there, it's still has the power to self-reflect and even if this doesn't amount to a ''stepping outside a conceptual schema'' it still has seed of it.

That makes sense to me; and I agree with the point about Kant. The upshot then would seem to be that there is nothing but reality as interpreted; which would seem to be synonymous with reality as conceptual schema, or Wittgenstein's 'world as the totality of facts'.

We ought not to forget the significance of the unconditioned.

If mental constructs are socially-conditioned aggregations of ideas and attitudes, then one way out of them is through analytical self-awareness of our own social conditioning.

Question: if you wanted to enroll in a course that taught this approach, which department would it be in?

Yes, although I've read where the Churchlands have said there aren't any propositions in the brain, excepting the ability of the brain to produce propositional statements. Anyway, it was just an extreme example of potentially changing how we think about something considered fundamental.

There's no sense in which we can get outside of them... — Marchesk

Then there is no sense in which we are inside them...

Then there is no sense in which we are inside them... — Banno

Maybe so. Now that you've put it that way, inside is a spatial metaphor. It gives the idea that we're trapped inside some space, and can't get out to the much larger space called the world.

We invariably interpret experience and sensory perception in terms of what we know already. How could it be otherwise? If we see something we don't understand, how do we 'make sense' of it? Either we explain in terms of what we know already, or we change our views to accomodate it.

Yeah, there are many reasons not to take Davidson's line on this point. For fun:

On the one hand, we might follow philosophers like Haim Gaifman and Xinli Wang by pointing out that the notion whose coherence Davidson attacks is not a generic conception of conceptual scheme, but rather the particular conception of conceptual scheme developed by Quine (as recognized by the latter in his "On the Very Idea of a Third Dogma," where he traces his own concept of conceptual scheme to Lawrence Henderson's 1935 monograph Pareto's General Sociology).

Alternatives have been developed by Gaifman and Wang, but also (and especially) by Wilfrid Sellars. Sellars's alternative is notable for allowing comparison between frameworks while still avoiding one of the main targets of Davidson's critique (which critique was inspired by Davidson's reading of Sellars): the crude reductionist conception of an uninterpreted element common between frameworks.

On the other hand, we might argue that, much like Quine's attack (in terms of the analytic/synthetic distinction), Davidson's attack on the possibility of a coherent notion of frameworkhood (in terms of the impossibility of establishing untranslateability) supposes that frameworks must be individuated formally, in terms of internal semantic or syntactic criteria, rather than (say) externally, in terms of differing systems of (non-linguistic) practical norms or uniformities of behavior, through which conformity with particular frameworks (or conceptual schemes) is realized.

That is, we may recognize, following Quine and Davidson, that framework-internal, formal criteria of framework-individuation are not forthcoming, while still distinguishing between frameworks in terms of their conditions of realization in the world. To block the latter move, Davidson would have to persuade us that his radical interpretation account of belief-ascription precludes my recognizing any behavior as conforming to a rule which I do not myself follow -- and to do so would be to render his own account even less adequate to explaining language-acquisition.