Logically grounded theories in the metaphysical discipline necessarily justify, or validate if you’d rather, whatever is the case given by the course of the argument.

It never was that “metaphysics sets out the background against which the world is ordered”, but sets the background by which the subject orders himself, such that the science by which the world is ordered, by and for him, becomes possible.

But since we only have our possible world to go by, how do we know that the logical absolutes, for instance, transcend our world? — Tom Storm

By rational argument. That some fundamental logical principles must obtain in order for a world to exist in the first place.

Put another way, a metaphysic is a statement of what must be the case, in order for the world to be as it is. — Wayfarer

That’s a great description of the kind of metaphysics based on transcendental deduction, of which Kant was the master. I think it’s possible to invert it, though, and describe metaphysics as the investigation of whether basic structure can be discerned in Reality (substitute for this term whatever you think comprises the widest possible field of investigation). This is an inversion because it puts into question the term “the world as it is,” and asks whether a correct metaphysics might change our understanding of that world.

contemporary Aristotelian philosophers who make the case for a revisionist form of metaphysics in full awareness of the scientific worldview and of Kant's criticism of metaphysics. — Wayfarer

An excellent contemporary philosopher (not an Aristotelian, I don’t think) who does this is Theodore Sider. His Writing the Book of the World is a bravura performance and really shows what metaphysics can look like today.

By rational argument. That some fundamental logical principles must obtain in order for a world to exist in the first place. — Wayfarer

But you never leave the world of human cognition, which holds the scheme of understanding by which this makes sense and can be employed. The logical absolutes are not a view from nowhere.

Thanks! I'll look into that.

But you never leave the world of human cognition, which holds the scheme of understanding by which this makes sense and can be employed. The logical absolutes are not a view from nowhere. — Tom Storm

That's where the distinction between intelligible and sensible objects is relevant. To quote Einstein, 'I cannot prove scientifically that Truth must be conceived as a Truth that is valid independent of humanity; but I believe it firmly. I believe, for instance, that the Pythagorean theorem in geometry states something that is approximately true, independent of the existence of man.' But it is something that can only be grasped by a rational intellect. As Bertrand Russell remarks in his comments on universals, that 'universals are not thoughts, but they appear as thoughts.' Why? Because they're again only discernable by reason. Due to the empiricist prejudices of modern culture, I maintain we've lost sight of the significance of that.

This goes back a long, long way in philosophy. For the Greeks, nous (the rational intellect) was that faculty in us which allowed us to perceive the logic of the cosmos, the domain of universal truth. Now, of course, it's just the evolutionary adaptation of an advanced hominid, mainly considered for its usefulness. ;-)

Now, of course, it's just the evolutionary adaptation of an advanced hominid, mainly considered for its usefulness — Wayfarer

Not an unreasonable view, although everything sounds bad when reduced to a slogan like that.

In the end this comes under interpretation - your preferences suggest to you that the logical laws are instantiations of the transcendental. I don't see how we can make that claim since knowledge of such principles are predicated on human understanding and cognitive processes.

Cheers. Again, if you haven't understood the argument so far, there's not a lot of point in continuing.

This is what happens when you get your education from "TicTok". They think the world is flat, like a screen.

The new Plato's Cave?

I don't see how we can make that claim since knowledge of such principles are predicated on human understanding and cognitive processes. — Tom Storm

Does the law of identity, or the law of the excluded middle, begin to exist as a consequence of biological evolution? Or are they principles that are discovered by a being that is sufficiently evolved to grasp them?

The only form that genuine reasoning can take consists in seeing the validity of the arguments, in virtue of what they say. As soon as one tries to step outside of such thoughts, one loses contact with their true content. And one cannot be outside and inside them at the same time: If one thinks in logic, one cannot simultaneously regard those thoughts as mere psychological dispositions, however caused or however biologically grounded. If one decides that some of one's psychological dispositions are, as a contingent matter of fact, reliable methods of reaching the truth (as one may with perception, for example), then in doing so one must rely on other thoughts that one actually thinks, without regarding them as mere dispositions. One cannot embed all one's reasoning in a psychological theory, including the reasonings that have led to that psychological theory. The epistemological buck must stop somewhere. By this I mean not that there must be some premises that are forever unrevisable but, rather, that in any process of reasoning or argument there must be some thoughts that one simply thinks from the inside--rather than thinking of them as biologically programmed dispositions. — Thomas Nagel

metaphysics based on transcendental deduction — J

Indeed, but of course transcendental arguments are fragile. X is a necessary condition for Y; Y is the case; hence, X is the case. That first assumption is an easy target.

Does the law of identity, or the law of the excluded middle, begin to exist as a consequence of biological evolution? Or are they principles that are discovered by a being that is sufficiently evolved to grasp them? — Wayfarer

How would we demonstrate either?

Strange, to think of laws of logic as discoveries or the results of evolution.

What, then, to make of Paraconsistent Logic? Devolution?

How would we demonstrate either? — Tom Storm

I suggest you would have to deploy reason in support of an argument, and that it's a logical argument, not necessarily requiring empirical validation.

Strange, to think of laws of logic as discoveries or the results of evolution. — Banno

I didn't say they were. I asked the rhetorical question, can such principles be considered a consequence of evolutionary development. The reason being the claim of the role of 'human cognition' in deriving truth statements - that everything we know is dependent on our cognitive capacities. I'm trying to demonstrate that there are things we grasp - quite fundamental things - which are not dependent on our cognitive apparatus, which are grasped by reason.

At back of all this there is a distinction between the unconditioned and the contingent. I think that is a large part of what metaphysics was concerned with, and that it has mainly dropped out of the dialogue, nowadays.

I suggest you would have to deploy reason in support of an argument, and that it's a logical argument, not necessarily requiring empirical validation. — Wayfarer

Yes, I figured that. I think reason like empiricism has its limits. And using reason to justify reason's sovereignty is, naturally, circular.

...or is Wittgenstein correct
in his belief that we cannot think without language. He wrote in the Tractatus para 5.62: “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

Not being an expert in Wittgenstein, I wonder what he thought of people with aphasia, who lose the ability to understand and/or produce language? Surely they still think, right? But it's possible he wasn't aware of those issues. Or is he defining thought in such a way that it always includes language? (Seems odd).

In any event, it seems wrong to say that language would be the limit of our world. Languages can always be expanded, and often are. There is no real limit to what existing languages can convey if properly expanded.

Indeed, all computable functions can be detailed using mere binary code. And it's a strong, (if not super well founded) supposition on physics that the universe "is computable," or "describable in computable terms." This would seem to make our processing throughput, our bandwidth, in essence, our "concious awareness," the limits of our world. And that seems more obvious as the limit.

On the flip side, we also have experiences we lack the ability to put into words. But we can, through hard effort, gnaw around the edges of the ineffable, something you see in Merton, Pseudo Dionysus, Eriugena, etc. But this doesn't show so much a limit on our language itself, but our ability to wield it. It's a limit on languages ability to live up to our full capabilities.

Strange, to think of laws of logic as discoveries or the results of evolution. — Banno

It's not rule following. It's probably something innate.

I think reason like empiricism has its limits. And using reason to justify reason's sovereignty is, naturally, circular. — Tom Storm

But as Nagel says, the buck has to stop somewhere. Unless, that is, you take necessary statements as contingent! That's where the circularity enters the picture.

Does a language begin to exist as a consequence of biological evolution?

The Law of excluded middle is not a rule? I don't follow.

I think for now these matters are outside of our ability to answer. Having a set of axioms you base your values on is not the same thing as having direct access to reality.

The Law of excluded middle is not a rule? i don't follow. — Banno

It is. There's just no fact about whether you've ever followed it.

Oh, Kripke. Curious. It's what we do?

It's what we do? — Banno

Maybe it comes from an analysis of what we do. Where does the framework for that analysis come from? Not sure.

A dog following the sent of a hare along a path, which divides:

At Cambridge in 1615, the claim that dogs use logic was defended by John Preston (1587–1628) of Queens’ College. “He instanced in a hound who hath the major proposition in his mind, namely, The hare is gone either this way or that way; smells out the minor with his nose, namely, She is not gone this way; and follows the conclusion, Ergo this way, with open mouth.”1 The inference which the dog is purported to have followed is disjunctive syllogism, which we might abbreviate as “P or Q, not-P, therefore Q.” — ANDREW ABERDEIN

A good read.

Cool! Thanks.

You're treating a thought as if it's an object, a thing. I say a thought isn't a thing. You merely beg the question when you compare a thought with a building. Your analogy doesn't work. Now if you were to claim I must know what a building is to say a thought isn't a building, that seems clear, but I don't think that helps you much.

A Case for Transcendental Idealism :
By ‘transcendental idealism’, I just mean the original view, plus my interpretation of it, made by Immanuel Kant; which starts with the core idea that we cannot know what is ‘transcendent’ to us (viz., what may exist completely independently of our representative faculties) but, rather, only what is ‘transcendental’ (viz., the necessary preconditions for the possibility of experience) . . . .
Quote from OP
Note --- Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle says that we "we cannot know both the position and speed of a particle, such as a photon or electron, with perfect accuracy". But we don't have to fantasize those properties, we can interpolate them ("what may exist") from observational evidence. Physics is about what we can know via the physical senses. Metaphysics is about that which transcends the capabilities of our senses. The fact that our senses have limitations is not a fantasy. For example, invisible Oxygen is an interpretation of relevant evidence, not a perception --- yet it's essential for life. Likewise, electrons have never been seen or photographed, but they are essential for material properties. The orbit "image" below is calculated from mathematical data, not from visible light. — Gnomon

Caught my eye, this one. Consider: An alternative way to think about metaphysics would be this: it is not that our senses have limitations, nor about what we can know via the physical senses nor about transcending the capabilities of the physical senses. This kind of thinking suggests a kind of meta-science, as if science were on the cusp of metaphysical discovery, making speculative science the cutting edge of metaphysical disclosure. Of course, this kind of thing is miles from Kant, but Kant didn't understand metaphysics at all. He didn't understand that metaphysics is another order of thinking about everything.

Metaphysics makes its appearance not in the laboratory or on the white board of equations and their speculative "interpolation" where paradigms leave off, but in the simple relation between me and this cup on the table in the inquiry that brackets or suspends all superfluous and implicit assumptions that construct the knowledge relationship. The idea is that when I encounter the cup, the perceptual moment is a construct of mine, in which I already know cups and the like and this one here is, upon the familiar encounter, is already known---you know how Hegel made a huge deal out of this, justifying his "rational realism". How, after all, does one get OUT of the universal and TO the actual particular? (noting with some frustration that 'actual and 'particular' are both universal concepts themselves! No way out),or, how does one step out of language to affirm this cup which has a presence that is clearly not at all language? is how someone like Derrida would put it. Anyway, this "already" thickens, you might say, perception, defines and makes conditions for knowing something to be the case. Husserl thought that one could, through his method of suspending the vast bulk of knowledge that implicitly attends me seeing a cu--the cup as a body of coinditioned forethought, acknowledge the pure manifestation. This is existential metaphysics, it might be called.

There are those, including myself, who think that the direction of this Husserlian method takes perception to an impossible clarity of the world, which I want to call the threshold of metaphysics. Very personal, yet, not at all at odds with language and logic, as such. Its "impossibility" lies in its defiance of a shared culture of understanding. Get enough people practicing this method and talking about their experiences, and then a new language emerges. Tibetan Buddhists have a language of words only they can understand, I have read; and Heidegger talked a bit like this in his famous Der Speigal Interview referring to Buddhism.

Transcendental idealism? It is right before your eyes. Drop the term 'idealism'. Better: transcendental phenomenology.

Put another way, a metaphysic is a statement of what must be the case, in order for the world to be as it is. Most analytical philosophy deprecates such endeavours, on the grounds that the world is all that is the case. Hence

it pleases some of us to 'find' meaning, and others not to find meaning.
— Tom Storm — Wayfarer

That statement sounds Kantian, the extrapolation from phenomena to an impossible metaphysics. I don't really disagree, because it is right to say that there is more to what IS the case. I take the matter differently: When we observe the world and its phenomena, the metaphysics is not on the other side, so to speak, of what is witnessed, impossible to reach perceptually, but making for sound and necessary postulation. Rather, the radically "other" lies undisclosed, as if forgotten, IN what appears. Kant's "concepts without (sensory) intuitions and empty; intuitions without concepts are blind" rests on the assumption that normal, ordinary apprehensions of the world are all that can constitute experience, and the idea that the noumenal was identical to the phenomenal was entirely lost on him. Noumena entails phenomena, is a way to put it, for the term is supposed to be what really IS real, and therefore cannot have this exclusivity. But this leaves the matter in the hands of logic and speculation about what 'noumena' means, and this doesn't really make the most important point about metaphysics. This latter is IN the actuality of the encounter with phenomena. This is the idea. One has to step out of Heidegger's dasein, out of being. Literally leave this world, if the world is defined as he defines it; a suspension of all assumptions. We are in the mystics world.

Tom Storm is right. But why are we so different? Meaning is discovered in the openness of what Heidegger called gelassenheit, a term associated with the Amish and others, referring to a yielding and suspending of one's understandiing's insistence. He even refers to Meister Eckhart in his Discourse on Thinking. Some may be naturally inclined to take to continental thinking, like myself; but others certainly can be intellectually persuaded for the objective case is there. Husserl was no mystic. Nor was Heidegger. Kierkegaard? I don't think so. But their thinking is rich with metaphysics.

Tibetan Buddhists have a language of words only they can understand, — Astrophel

That would be 'Tibetan', would it not? Augmented by knowledge of the Tibetan canon and oral traditions.

When we observe the world and its phenomena, the metaphysics is not on the other side, so to speak, of what is witnessed, impossible to reach perceptually, but making for sound and necessary postulation. Rather, the radically "other" lies undisclosed, as if forgotten, IN what appears. Kant's "concepts without (sensory) intuitions and empty; intuitions without concepts are blind" rests on the assumption that normal, ordinary apprehensions of the world are all that can constitute experience, and the idea that the noumenal was identical to the phenomenal was entirely lost on him. — Astrophel

I can see we're going to go deep in the long grass here.

It wasn't that this distinction was lost on him, but that in his philosophy, the terms signify different aspects of the world. He uses pheomena in the standard sense as 'what appears'. Noumena is a different matter and a source of both controversy and confusion. First, etymology - 'noumenal' means 'an object of nous', which is usually translated as 'intellect' albeit with different connotations to the modern equivalent. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy says "Platonic Ideas and Forms are noumena, and phenomena are things displaying themselves to the senses... This dichotomy is the most characteristic feature of Plato's dualism; that noumena and the noumenal world are objects of the highest knowledge, truths, and values is Plato's principal legacy to philosophy."

But Schopenhauer pointed out that Kant's use of 'noumenal' was completely different to the previous usage:

The difference between abstract and intuitive cognition, which Kant entirely overlooks, was the very one that ancient philosophers indicated as φαινόμενα [phainomena] and νοούμενα [nooumena]; the opposition and incommensurability between these terms proved very productive in the philosophemes of the Eleatics, in Plato's doctrine of Ideas, in the dialectic of the Megarics, and later in the scholastics, in the conflict between nominalism and realism. This latter conflict was the late development of a seed already present in the opposed tendencies of Plato and Aristotle. But Kant, who completely and irresponsibly neglected the issue for which the terms φαινομένα and νοούμενα were already in use, then took possession of the terms as if they were stray and ownerless, and used them as designations of things in themselves and their appearances. — WWR p556

That introduces the further complication of the 'ding an sich' (thing in itself) and the vexed question of whether that is the same as, or different to, the noumenal. And one last confusion, that of the conflation between the noumenal and the numinous, which sound similar, but which come from entirely different roots and have very different meanings, albeit with a kind of overlap (in that the noumenal is sometimes conflated with the numinous, which means 'the holy'.)

That said, I'm *kind of* getting what you mean by this question:

how does one step out of language to affirm this cup which has a presence that is clearly not at all language? — Astrophel

That is what I tried to previously compare with the Buddhist 'suchness' or 'tathata' and also the scholastic 'quiddity'. There are some similarities, although also great divergences, in that both seek to articulate the 'true nature' (Buddhist) or 'essence' (scholasticism) of things. (I checked it against ChatGPT, you can review it here.)

I agree with this depiction of the 'thing in itself' from an online primer on Kant:

Kant's introduced the concept of the “thing in itself” to refer to reality as it is independent of our experience of it and unstructured by our cognitive constitution. The concept was harshly criticized in his own time and has been lambasted by generations of critics since. A standard objection to the notion is that Kant has no business positing it given his insistence that we can only know what lies within the limits of possible experience. But a more sympathetic reading is to see the concept of the “thing in itself” as a sort of placeholder in Kant's system; it both marks the limits of what we can know and expresses a sense of mystery that cannot be dissolved, the sense of mystery that underlies our unanswerable questions. Through both of these functions it serves to keep us humble.

So all that said, I think I see where you're going with this line, but there are other issues (which I'll leave aside for now.)

I looked into this further, and it seems to me Kant's Category of Cause is a concept to be applied to the external world events as cause and effect.  It is not to do with perceptions or the mental principles of reasoning. I still think the process of reasoning coming to judgements activated by intuitions, perceptions or thoughts is operated by Logic. — Corvus

I am making use of Daniel Bonevac's Video Kant's Categories.

Reason doesn't create logic, rather, what we reason has been determined by the prior logical structure of the brain

The brain must have a physical structure that is logically ordered in order to make logical sense of its experiences of the world. IE, the innate ability of the brain to process such logical functions as quantity, quality, relation and modality. In other words, Kant's Categories, aka The Pure Concepts of the Understanding.

For example, in our terms, Relation includes causality, and Quantity includes the Universal Quantifier ∀ and the Existential Quantifier ∃.

In Kant's terms, there are certain a priori synthetic principles necessary in order to make logical sense of experiences of the world . These innate a priori synthetic principles are prior to Reasoning about the phenomena of experiences through the Sensibilities. It is not the case that our reasoning is logical, rather it is the case that our reasoning has been determined by an innate a priori structure that is inherently logical, one possible consequence of the principle of Enactivism.

Our understanding of the world must be limited by what we are able to know of the world and what we can know of the world is limited by the innate structure of the brain. Taking vision as typifying the five senses, the human eye can detect wavelengths from 380 to 700 nm, which is only about 0.0035% of the total electromagnetic spectrum . In addition, understanding is also limited by the physical structure of the brain. As no amount of patient explanation by a scientist to a cat will enable the cat to understand the nature of quantum mechanics, by analogy, no amount of patient explanation by a super-intelligent alien to a human will enable the human to understand the true nature of quantum mechanics.

Kant is in effect saying that Chomsky's Innatism is a more sensible approach than Skinner's Behaviourism.