I am more of the idea that we do not find the 'out there', we create it, and that when we create it it becomes real, to us. — leo

How do you deal with the claim that this is simply relativism, that the only truth we can know is the truth 'for us'?

That if we insist in believing that scientific laws are the truth, are objective, are eternal, and we silence those who disagree, and we dismiss any experience that doesn't follow these laws as hallucination, or delusion, or imagination, then we will create such a world where nothing can transcend these laws, because in a profound sense we will stop experiencing anything that transcends these laws. — leo

There's two things here - the notion of laws, but also a sense of dogmatic authority. That there is a privileged perspective which is the correct perspective, opposing other perspectives. In some sense, you can see how the Enlightenment attitude drew on the preceding tradition of religious dogma. Actually you see that very distinctly in so-called 'new atheism', which oddly mimics the kind of fundamentalism which it criticises. It is dogmatically certain of the fact that 'all that can be known can be known by means of science'.

But it's also said that science accepts no authority but evidence. Scientists will always assure you that, should the evidence warrant it, they will change their hypotheses. The problem is, that you can then argue about what constitutes 'evidence'. There are some subject areas, or ideas, which are not amenable to the kind of analysis that will yield the kind of empirical evidence that is considered scientific, so questions about those kinds of topics aren't considered legitimate at all by scientific standards. I think one of those surely must be the argument about orthogenesis, whether evolution is governed by any overall direction or unfolding purpose. It seems to me that this is something which the kind of evidence that scientists would consider can't actually address.

But then, finally, I also refer back to this post and the traditional virtues of sagacity and detachment whereby the sage 'sees things as they truly are'. That is what science aspires to do, it is the very impulse that science arose from.

For whatever it is worth, I find all except the first (“only one winner”) interesting and worth exploring... — 0 thru 9

:up:

There were quite a few German scientists of that period who opposed atomism on philosophical grounds. I seem to remember this attitude was one of the things that drove Ludwig Boltzmann to suicide. — Wayfarer

Yes that's how I remember it also. It reminds me of Cantor being given hell, especially by Kronecker. Cantor irrationally hated infinitesimals, which eventually were made respectable. While both atoms and set theory have been useful and illuminating, I still think both Mach and Kronecker had a point.

Atoms are a useful way of looking at things. My mother isn't 'really' atoms. She is atoms and many other things. And then subitizing ('God created the integers') and metaphor ('and all the rest is the work of man.') look like a truer foundation of math than today's set theory (impressive though it be.)

But then again they had in common that they did philosophy and not just physics. When you do physics only, you are stuck thinking within the mainstream theories of the era, seeing the assumptions at the root of the theories as truth rather than as assumptions. — leo

I think we can meet in our appreciation of scientists that are also philosophers. There are indeed philosophically naive scientists who don't realize they are caught up in primitive systems. They add on lots of junk philosophy to a living core of utility.

I started the sentence with "If", "If there are only minds", "If there are only minds, then there is no mind-independent 'here' or 'world' that our minds are in". If you disagree with that sentence, I would be interested to hear what makes you disagree, because in my reality I don't see how it could be wrong. — leo

The word 'mind' loses its traditional meaning along with the 'here.' I think overlapping minds is a plausible theory. It gets something right.

Now if there is repeated consistency and agreements between how we name our experiences, then we can say there is a common ground between our realities. Does it imply there is one single reality? Are we going to agree on everything? What of people who don't see that tree? Is there something wrong with them, are they delusional because they don't see the single reality that you assumed exists? — leo

I value the anti-realist points that you make. For me anti-realism + naive-realism = sophisticated realism. We would call people who hear voices we can't hear 'delusional.' We would call people who couldn't see the tree 'blind.'

Let me put your point in another way. We shine a certain frequency of light into many people's eyes. They all say that it is 'red.' Are they therefore seeing the same color? No. Or we can't know. So I agree that we are caught 'outside' of the 'direct experience' of others.

https://aeon.co/videos/does-the-meaning-of-words-rest-in-our-private-minds-or-in-our-shared-experience

That's a nice video. Not saying I agree 100%, but it's a good point.

And I talk of "we" because we have a common ground, our realities partially intersect. — leo

Fair enough. But don't we naturally think and talk in terms of a single 'ideal' intersection? I don't think we are good at exactly specifying it, but I think our talk is constantly aimed at it.

If there is a single reality, then in principle they could find an explanation, such as your brain being different in some way to theirs. — leo

For me explanation has limits. So single reality != explainable reality. Brute fact rules as we climb up the ladder of why-why-why. We get either an infinite chain of 'whys' or some first principle that just is.

Today many people agree on the idea of a single physical reality, but they can't explain how is it that they can experience anything at all in such a reality. At that point there is only faith holding that single reality together. Minds believing in it. — leo

I hear you, but aren't you aiming this insight at the same single reality? True, you see as I do the problem with framing it as 'physical.' The anti-realist points do indeed devastate scientism. But to do so they still have to aim at something that grounds their statements.

BTW, I do enjoy your posts and am glad to discuss this you.

question the legitimacy of extending it to include the origin of science, or of the intellect, or of rationality as a faculty or capacity, because it implicitly or even explicitly reduces these capacities to those which can directly be understood for the advantage for reproduction that they obviously might provide. — Wayfarer

Well I do relate to the sense that anti-realism has its problems. I argue against the strong reading of Nietzsche, Rorty, and others.

Dennett does not believe in reason. He will be outraged to hear this, since he regards himself as a giant of rationalism. But the reason he imputes to the human creatures depicted in his book is merely a creaturely reason. Dennett's natural history does not deny reason, it animalizes reason. It portrays reason in service to natural selection, and as a product of natural selection. But if reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational argument for natural selection? The power of reason is owed to the independence of reason, and to nothing else. (In this respect, rationalism is closer to mysticism than it is to materialism.) Evolutionary biology cannot invoke the power of reason even as it destroys it.

This actually is a really deep conundrum in modern philosophy, we can't just brush it off. — Wayfarer

I agree with you here. This is one of the sore spots of that view. And I am moved by Husserl's arguments against psychologism. I'm not saying that I reject the theory of evolution, but I do see the problem. I haven't studied biology closely. That said, I do think it's possible that currently unnoticed factors are involved. And it's logically possible that those factors won't ever be detected in traditional ways.

Science, or at least its general methodology is definitely the best known tool by which we, as a whole, can obtain a high degree of objective knowledge. But this in no way suggests that objective knowledge is superior to non-objective knowledge, and by that measure, neither can science be declared as the superior method for obtaining knowledge. Knowledge of my self, my life, who I am and where I stand is something that science cannot touch, at least not at the purest levels of subjectivity, and something that I would suspect has been on every true philosopher's mind at one time or another. For me, such subjective knowledge is infinitely important. Nevertheless, science shows excellent results. — Merkwurdichliebe

I agree with all of this, and I look forward to you returning when you have time to other issues we've touched on. I think we share a cosmic sense of humor.

I also refer back to this post and the traditional virtues of sagacity and detachment whereby the sage 'sees things as they truly are'. That is what science aspires to do, it is the very impulse that science arose from. — Wayfarer

To me scientism is an awkward attempt to be detached and objective. I think good philosophy and bad philosophy chase the same ideal, and we call that philosophy 'good' that does a better job of it from our perspective.

But whilst he might be opposed to materialism, like all positivists he is completely opposed to the idea of there being a metaphysics. — Wayfarer

What is his monism but a metaphysics? He was powerfully influenced by Kant.

So Mach was opposed to materialism, not from the same perspective as idealist philosophers, but because if only sensation is real then the positing of real external existents is unwarranted. — Wayfarer

The way I understand Mach, there are 'elements.' If the ego is a useful fiction, then 'sensation' cannot have the same meaning. It's like me writing 'experience. '

If one assumes as I do that something like naive realism is our pre-philosophical starting point, then post-ego views have to be expressed awkwardly in ordinary language to be intelligible.

'Thoughts' and 'things' are names for two sorts of object, which common sense will always find contrasted and will always practically oppose to each other. Philosophy, reflecting on the contrast, has varied in the past in her explanations of it, and may be expected to vary in the future.
...
To deny plumply that 'consciousness' exists seems so absurd on the face of it -- for undeniably 'thoughts' do exist -- that I fear some readers will follow me no farther. Let me then immediately explain that I mean only to deny that the word stands for an entity, but to insist most emphatically that it does stand for a function. There is, I mean, no aboriginal stuff or quality of being, contrasted with that of which material objects are made, out of which our thoughts of them are made; but there is a function in experience which thoughts perform, and for the performance of which this quality of being is invoked. That function is knowing. 'Consciousness' is supposed necessary to explain the fact that things not only are, but get reported, are known. Whoever blots out the notion of consciousness from his list of first principles must still provide in some way for that function's being carried on.

My thesis is that if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff 'pure experience,' the knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter. The relation itself is a part of pure experience; one if its 'terms' becomes the subject or bearer of the knowledge, the knower,[2] the other becomes the object known. — James

https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/consciousness.htm

This goes back to Hegel & Fichte. We get a system of intelligible unities, since the meaning of 'cat' is entangled with the meaning of 'mouse,' and ego is entangled with world, etc. In practical life, some of these distinctions are vividly lived. We are sure that we have isolated selves (ghosts in skulls) without much thinking about it.

In short, I read Mach as a radical metaphysician along the lines of James and Hegel. But he addressed the same problem that I try to address also, and that's the gap between our wild theories and our lives outside of Hume's study. We never forget ordinary language and its naive realism. We just learn to talk at different levels of abstraction and immediate utility,IMV.

Atoms are a useful way of looking at things. My mother isn't 'really' atoms. — g0d

I did a semester on philosophy of matter in which we read that 'the atom' was a way of resolving the paradox of the One and the Many. The One (c.f. Parmenides) was believed to be the source of all multiplicity and yet beyond all change - which was a paradox, as all we see is multiplicity and change. The stroke of genius of atomism was that 'the changeless' could be understood as the fundamental element of everything; that whilst the atom remained indivisible and eternal in itself and so, like the One, it could at the same time combine in countless ways to produce the 'ten thousand things', so resolving the paradox. I think that intuition remains behind atomism but the original philosophical inspiration long forgotten, as it still preserved the division between 'the uncreated' (unconditioned, unmade, unfabricated) and 'the manifest realm'. So now the original appeal of atomism has been forgotten, but it wanted to discern the bedrock, the basis, the fundamental ground from which everything appears.

I'm not saying that I reject the theory of evolution — g0d

Emphatically, neither am I. I never even thought about it until much later in life, when through the arguments of evangelical atheism I began to notice what I thought were many spurious philosophical arguments based on 'evolution as a religion' (Mary Midgley's book.) Then I noticed how much evolutionary paradigms had seeped into all kinds of philosophical problems - that everything could be understood through the lense of evolutionary biology - including Mach, by the way. It's a Procrustean attitude, because evolutionary biology was never intended to explain the problems of philosophy, while a lot of people - almost everyone on this forum - simply assume that it does. We are this way 'because of evolution'.

That is why the predominant materialism of secular culture is based in neo-Darwinism; it's kind of a 'reverse fundamentalism', as it believes that evolutionary theory debunks the religious account of creation. But it only does that if you first believed that the religious account was literally true; if you've never thought it was literally true (as I did not) then the fact that it's *not* literally true has no significance.

But 'evolution' has become kind of a pseudo- or quasi-religion, standing in the place vacated by religion to inform us of what we really are. That is why there is a taboo on saying that we're anything separate, different or superior to animals, which is a secular heresy. (See also It Ain't Necessarily So, and Anything but Human.)

'Thoughts' and 'things' are names for two sorts of object, — James

Actually in pretty close agreement with James, but would parse it differently.

'Thoughts' are not objects as such; objects exist in thought, or rather, in mind, but you can't be discursively aware of that, because you can't step outside mind or treat mind as an object, as it never is an object. We use the term 'object' metaphorically to describe 'object of thought', but as James says

there is a function in experience which thoughts perform, and for the performance of which this quality of being is invoked. That function is knowing. — James

But I think, all respect to James, whom I have always found a congenial philosopher, something else is forgotten in his work, which is how reason operates at all. Actually in both those excerpts from Mach and James, much is made of 'generalisation' and 'abstraction' as this is just a natural function, but it overlooks something uncanny about reasoning. I think it's something the Greek philosophers intuited, and which was preserved in the tradition of classical philosophy, but which in these empiricist philosophers has been lost.

This goes back to Hegel & Fichte. We get a system of intelligible unities, since the meaning of 'cat' is entangled with the meaning of 'mouse,' and ego is entangled with world, etc. In practical life, some of these distinctions are vividly lived. We are sure that we have isolated selves (ghosts in skulls) without much thinking about it. — g0d

Forgive me, but I'm going to ask you to consider an intriguing passage that I unearthed during another discussion here a few years back which I think is a strong case for a form of dualism. It's in this blog post which I won't reproduce here, but will break out this para:

if the proper knowledge of the senses is of accidents, through forms that are individualized, the proper knowledge of intellect is of essences, through forms that are universalized. Intellectual knowledge is analogous to sense knowledge inasmuch as it demands the reception of the form of the thing which is known. But it differs from sense knowledge so far forth as it consists in the apprehension of things, not in their individuality, but in their universality.

I just find this completely persuasive. What this author - neo-thomist, by the way - is arguing, is that the sensory organs perceive the matter of an object, but the intellect perceives its form - i.e. what it is, what makes it "this" as distinct from "that". 'the senses are material powers, they receive the forms of objects in a material manner; and if the intellect is an immaterial power, it receives the forms of objects in an immaterial manner. '

So, intelligibility arises from the ability of intellect (nous) to discern the forms of things, to understand them as being part of an intelligible order - and emphatically not merely as a 'kind of sensation'. The intellect (nous) recognises the eidos (idea) of the particulars and this is what allows the whole process of reason to get any traction in the first place. But I don't think that reason, as such, is explained naturalistically, as it is not 'evident to sensation', right? I mean a non-rational animal, such as a chimp, will see the same things a human does, but will not be able to interpret it, name it, analyse and compare, etc, because the faculty of reason is not operative. And while the faculty of reason is certainly something that evolved, what is discerned by reason didn't evolve; I mean, the 'law of the excluded middle' didn't come into being when we evolved to perceived it; what evolved was our capacity to perceive it. And this is something I don't believe the empiricist philosophers would agree with.

So this is hylomorphic dualism, matter-form dualism, and I have to confess, it makes sense to me.

The stroke of genius of atomism was that 'the changeless' could be understood as the fundamental element of everything; that whilst the atom remained indivisible and eternal in itself and so, like the One, it could at the same time combine in countless ways to produce the 'ten thousand things', so resolving the paradox. — Wayfarer

It really was a work of genius.

I think that intuition remains behind atomism but the original philosophical inspiration long forgotten, as it still preserved the division between 'the uncreated' (unconditioned, unmade, unfabricated) and 'the manifest realm'. So now the original appeal of atomism has been forgotten, but it wanted to discern the bedrock, the basis, the fundamental ground from which everything appears. — Wayfarer

To me the mystique of physics in particular is still connected to this. Even those who don't want to learn physics still perhaps enjoy their image of it.

Then I noticed how much evolutionary paradigms had seeped into all kinds of philosophical problems - that everything could be understood through the lense of evolutionary biology - including Mach, by the way. — Wayfarer

Indeed, though I think the historical evolution of ideas was noticed first.

Relying on a complex etymology, Vico argues in the Scienza Nuova that civilization develops in a recurring cycle (ricorso) of three ages: the divine, the heroic, and the human. Each age exhibits distinct political and social features and can be characterized by master tropes or figures of language. The giganti of the divine age rely on metaphor to compare, and thus comprehend, human and natural phenomena. In the heroic age, metonymy and synecdoche support the development of feudal or monarchic institutions embodied by idealized figures. The final age is characterized by popular democracy and reflection via irony; in this epoch, the rise of rationality leads to barbarie della reflessione or barbarism of reflection, and civilization descends once more into the poetic era. Taken together, the recurring cycle of three ages – common to every nation – constitutes for Vico a storia ideale eterna or ideal eternal history. — Wiki

I think someone before Vico already thought as much, but Vico came to mind.

That is why the predominant materialism of secular culture is based in neo-Darwinism; it's kind of a 'reverse fundamentalism', as it believes that evolutionary theory debunks the religious account of creation. But it only does that if you first believed that the religious account was literally true; if you've never thought it was literally true (as I did not) then the fact that it's *not* literally true has no significance. — Wayfarer

I hear you. For me the gap is between religion that experiences God as an invisible person who sees inside one's heart and does miracles and other more abstract versions of God. More abstract versions of God aren't controversial, as far as I can see, but somewhere between myth and metaphysics. I call myself an atheist because it's the least confusing word I could choose, but I think the myths are profoundly true in ways I would not defend with arguments.

if the proper knowledge of the senses is of accidents, through forms that are individualized, the proper knowledge of intellect is of essences, through forms that are universalized.

I just find this completely persuasive. — Wayfarer

I like the quote. I think that we indeed grasp things in terms of concepts. For me it's important that we also create new concepts. This creativity helps account for the historical evolution of culture. Meaning is cumulative, both for the individual and the community.

So, intelligibility arises from the ability of intellect (nous) to discern the forms of things, to understand them as being part of an intelligible order - and emphatically not merely as a 'kind of sensation'. — Wayfarer

Indeed, we don't receive the world as sensation.

What we ‘first’ hear is never noises or complexes of sounds, but the creaking waggon, the motor-cycle. We hear the column on the march, the north wind, the woodpecker tapping, the fire crackling… It requires a very artificial and complicated frame of mind to ‘hear’ a ‘pure noise’. The fact that motor-cycles and waggons are what we proximally hear is the phenomenal evidence that in every case Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, already dwells alongside what is ready-to-hand within-the-world; it certainly does not dwell proximally alongside ‘sensations’; nor would it first have to give shape to the swirl of sensations to provide a springboard from which the subject leaps off and finally arrives at a ‘world’. — SEP

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/

But I must say that I don't think the empiricists ever believed that we experienced a mess of sensations. I think they were just proto-Kantians. Look at the titles of their works.

If we think about our sense organs long enough, it's fairly clear that somehow our organized experience of the world is synthesized from independent streams of information from our differing sense organs.
Kant made the project explicit, added important detail, and carved out a problematic sanctuary for religion.

But I don't think that reason, as such, is explained naturalistically, as it is not 'evident to sensation', right? — Wayfarer

I think we organize sensation into a world, but this requires time and a culture for human beings. Even animals have some reason, though. Experiments have investigated the number sense in animals. But this story brings it home in context.

A landowner had been quite bothered by the crow since it had chosen to nest in his watch-house. He had planned to shoot it. The bird would fly away and wait until the landowner had left to return to its nest inside the watch-house, given that no-one would be inside to shoot it. In order to deceive it, the landowner had two people enter the watch-house and one leave. The crow was not deceived by this malicious plan, even when three men entered and two left. It wasn’t until five men had entered the tower and four had left that the bird did eventually fly back inside the watch-house. The crow thus shows a certain numerical ability to count up until four but not five. — link

https://blogofthecosmos.com/2016/03/01/the-numerical-abilities-of-non-human-animals/

Of course that makes sense if cognition evolved.

And while the faculty of reason is certainly something that evolved, what is discerned by reason didn't evolve; I mean, the 'law of the excluded middle' didn't come into being when we evolved to perceived it; what evolved was our capacity to perceive it. And this is something I don't believe the empiricist philosophers would agree with. — Wayfarer

This is a great issue. I'm not a mathematical Platonist, but I experience a shared realm. For me it's plausibly explained as a blend of subitizing, spatial intuition, and metaphor. I don't know how we can see around our own cognition to check whether what is discerned by reason evolved.

I postulate a biological, cultural, and personal lens through which we experience reality. It seems that anything added by the biological lens would be hard to isolate. The 'beetle in the box' video I posted in reply to @leo also suggests that we could only infer a similar understanding in aliens, for instance, indirectly or through their behavior. Consider receiving this message from outer space:

||, |||, |||||, |||||||, |||||||||||, .... [2,3,5,7,11,...]

We'd infer that something out there grasped both natural numbers and what it means for a number to be prime. That would at least suggest similar cognitive structure.

Actually in pretty close agreement with James, but would parse it differently.

'Thoughts' are not objects as such; objects exist in thought, or rather, in mind, but you can't be discursively aware of that, because you can't step outside mind or treat mind as an object, as it never is an object. — Wayfarer

I agree with you in a common sense way, but I think this misses James' point. For him the 'mind' is one more object in a nexus of objects. Objects are thoughts and thoughts are objects. They are pieces of formed experience. There is no witness left over, only what the hypothesized witness was supposed to be witnessing. The witness is one more thought/object.

For common sense the thought of an apple is not itself an apple. For James these are both just object-thoughts with a similar but still different form.

I'd really have to write objects and thoughts. Because we have left mind and matter behind in such a wild theory. We have to climb the ladder of the witness and the witnessed to get there. And really we've just climbed up to an unsustainable speculative truth, since we are sure to come down.

The radical anti-realist don't just insist that the lens is unstable, they deny the lens metaphor altogether and get a 'subject-object.'

I think is a strong case for a form of dualism. — Wayfarer

I find dualism to be roughly true. On the one hand we perceive redness. On the other we determine the radiation associated with this perception to have a frequency of 710 nm.

To me it's clear as day that redness is not frequency. It may be a beetle in a box, but it's my beetle, and I think it's other people's beetle too.

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/6

“Abstraction, which is the proper task of active intellect, is essentially a liberating function in which the essence of the sensible object, potentially understandable as it lies beneath its accidents, is liberated from the elements that individualize it and is thus made actually understandable. The product of abstraction is a species of an intelligible order. Now possible intellect is supplied with an adequate stimulus to which it responds by producing a concept.” — link

Yes, this sounds right to me.

Just as I see redness, my intellect 'sees' circularity or a cat and not a dog.

So this is hylomorphic dualism, matter-form dualism, and I have to confess, it makes sense to me. — Wayfarer

I think it gets quite a bit right. One of the classic neural network problems is deciding whether an image contains a cat or not. This task was out of reach for a long time, and yet it's so easy for humans. It's only in reach now because we have enough computational power to represent the concept of a cat as a massive spiderweb of floating point numbers whose structure is inspired by brains. And because we expose that computer to many labelled examples.

We also have clustering algorithms that (roughly) divide a world of experience into objects, which is like concept creation. I don't think computers see red or see concept, to be clear. I'm just saying that there is a mathematical pattern associated with human conceptuality.

For me the gap is between religion that experiences God as an invisible person who sees inside one's heart and does miracles and other more abstract versions of God. More abstract versions of God aren't controversial, as far as I can see, but somewhere between myth and metaphysics. I call myself an atheist because it's the least confusing word I could choose, but I think the myths are profoundly true in ways I would not defend with arguments. — g0d

[According to Afrikan Spir] God is not the creator deity of the universe and mankind, but man's true nature and the norm of all things, in general. The moral and religious conscience live in the consciousness of the contrast between this norm (Realität) and empirical reality (Wirklichkeit). "There is a radical dualism between the empirical nature of man and his moral nature" and the awareness of this dualism is the sole true foundation of moral judgment.

The religious perceive our present life, or our natural life, as radically deficient, deficient from the root (radix) up, as fundamentally unsatisfactory; he feels it to be, not a mere condition, but a predicament; it strikes him as vain or empty if taken as an end in itself; he sees himself as homo viator, as a wayfarer (!) or pilgrim treading a via dolorosa through a vale that cannot possibly be a final and fitting resting place; he senses or glimpses from time to time the possibility of a Higher Life; he feels himself in danger of missing out on this Higher Life of true happiness. — Bill Vallicella, quoting Josiah Royce

But I must say that I don't think the empiricists ever believed that we experienced a mess of sensations. I think they were just proto-Kantians. Look at the titles of their works. — g0d

Not 'a mess of sensations' but the 'tabula rasa' principle of Locke was and is a firm dogma of empiricism. Organised sensations, with the organising principle being provided by the evolved brain; 'experience' is extended to embrace the experience of our forebears which is handed down through evolution. But look at the role of observability in empirical science - the yardstick of what is real, is what can be ascertained by sensory experience, amplified by instruments, and mathematical abstraction thereof. It is said that 'science relies on reason' but really it relies even more on what is tangible or instrumentally-detectable; it is nothing like rationalism in the sense that a Leibniz or rationalist philosophy understands, which sought to intuit an order wholly transcending the order of the sense; something which is practically unintelligible to a modern.

So the argument against 'knowledge only through experience', is that reason (etc) is an innate capacity without which experience itself would be meaningless.; as per Kant's 'percepts without concepts are blind'.

Very good passage on Heidegger. And I know that crows and monkeys have rudimentary counting abilities, but must say it doesn't impress me much; it can still be understood within the framework of stimulus and response, as can bee dances.

I find dualism to be roughly true. — g0d

Note the difference between hylomorphic and Cartesian dualism. The former never conceived of 'the soul' as a substance, or something that exists over and above the body. In a sense, Aristotle's intuition is that the soul is the unity of the body.

ot 'a mess of sensations' but the 'tabula rasa' principle of Locke was and is a firm dogma of empiricism. — Wayfarer

First, to argue for the continuity I mentioned, I quote from Locke and Kant.

Since it is the understanding, that sets man above the rest of sensible beings, and gives him all the advantage and dominion, which he has over them; it is certainly a subject, even for its nobleness, worth our labour to inquire into. The understanding, like the eye, whilst it makes us see and perceive all other things, takes no notice of itself; and it requires art and pains to set it at a distance, and make it its own object.
...
If, by this enquiry into the nature of the understanding, I can discover the powers thereof; how far they reach; to what things they are in any degree proportionate; and where they fail us: I suppose it may be of use to prevail with the busy mind of man, to be more cautious in meddling with things exceeding its comprehension; to stop when it is at the utmost extent of its tether; and to sit down in a quiet ignorance of those things, which, upon examination, are found to be beyond the reach of our capacities. We should not then perhaps be so forward, out of an affectation of an universal knowledge, to raise questions, and perplex ourselves and others with disputes about things, to which our understandings are not suited; and of which we cannot frame in our minds any clear or distinct perceptions, or whereof (as it has perhaps too often happened) we have not any notions at all. — Locke

Human reason, in one sphere of its cognition, is called upon to consider questions, which it cannot decline, as they are presented by its own nature, but which it cannot answer, as they transcend every faculty of the mind.

It falls into this difficulty without any fault of its own. It begins with principles, which cannot be dispensed with in the field of experience, and the truth and sufficiency of which are, at the same time, insured by experience. With these principles it rises, in obedience to the laws of its own nature, to ever higher and more remote conditions. But it quickly discovers that, in this way, its labours must remain ever incomplete, because new questions never cease to present themselves; and thus it finds itself compelled to have recourse to principles which transcend the region of experience, while they are regarded by common sense without distrust. It thus falls into confusion and contradictions, from which it conjectures the presence of latent errors, which, however, it is unable to discover, because the principles it employs, transcending the limits of experience, cannot be tested by that criterion. — Kant

As for the blank slate, let's look closer:

For, first, it is evident, that all children and idiots have not the least apprehension or thought of them; and the want of that is enough to destroy that universal assent, which must needs be the necessary concomitant of all innate truths: it seeming to me near a contradiction, to say, that there are truths imprinted on the soul, which it perceives or understands not; imprinting, if it signify any thing, being nothing else, but the making certain truths to be perceived. [15] For to imprint any thing on the mind, without the mind’s perceiving it, seems to me hardly intelligible. If therefore children and idiots have souls, have minds, with those impressions upon them, they must unavoidably perceive them, and necessarily know and assent to these truths: which since they do not, it is evident that there are no such impressions. For if they are not notions naturally imprinted, how can they be innate? and if they are notions imprinted, how can they be unknown?
...
To avoid this, it is usually answered, That all men know and assent to them, when they come to the use of reason, and this is enough to prove them innate. I answer,

Doubtful expressions that have scarce any signification, go for clear reasons, to those, who being prepossessed, take not the pains to examine, even what they themselves say. For to apply this answer with any tolerable sense to our present purpose, it must signify one of these two things; either, that, as soon as men come to the use of reason, these supposed native inscriptions come to be known, and observed by them: or else, that the use and exercise of men’s reason assists them in the discovery of these principles, and certainly makes them known to them.

If they mean, that by the use of reason men may discover these principles; and that this is sufficient to prove them innate: their way of arguing will stand thus, (viz.) that, whatever truths reason can certainly discover to us, and make us firmly assent to, those are all naturally imprinted on the mind; since that universal assent, which is made the mark of them, amounts to no more but this; that by the use of reason, we are capable to come to a certain knowledge [17] of, and assent to them; and, by this means, there will be no difference between the maxims of the mathematicians, and theorems they deduce from them; all must be equally allowed innate; they being all discoveries made by the use of reason, and truths that a rational creature may certainly come to know, if he apply his thoughts rightly that way.
...
That certainly can never be thought innate, which we have need of reason to discover; unless, as I have said, we will have all the certain truths, that reason ever teaches us, to be innate.
...
So that to make reason discover those truths, thus imprinted, is to say, that the use of reason discovers to a man what he knew before: and if men have those innate impressed truths originally, and before the use of reason, and yet are always ignorant of them, till they come to the use of reason, it is in effect to say, that men know, and know them not, at the same time.
...
The senses at first let in particular ideas, and furnish the yet empty cabinet; and the mind by degrees growing familiar with some of them, they are lodged in the memory, and names got to them. Afterwards the mind, proceeding farther, abstracts them, and by degrees learns the use of general names. In this manner the mind comes to be furnished with ideas and language, the [21] materials about which to exercise its discursive faculty: and the use of reason becomes daily more visible, as these materials, that give it employment, increase. But though the having of general ideas, and the use of general words and reason, usually grow together; yet, I see not, how this any way proves them innate. The knowledge of some truths, I confess, is very early in the mind; but in a way that shows them not to be innate. — Locke

I recently read Locke for the first time, and I found him pretty likable.

Note the difference between hylomorphic and Cartesian dualism. The former never conceived of 'the soul' as a substance, or something that exists over and above the body. In a sense, Aristotle's intuition is that the soul is the unity of the body. — Wayfarer

OK, yes I see the difference. But I had the impression that you liked both forms of dualism. In James and Mach we have elements of informed matter but no witness.

I want to say thank you for this post. This is something I have heard far too often by people who think they have liberated themselves from religion & philosophy by scientific imperialism. At the core of their departure is some missplaced belief that personal experience is invalid in the department of obtaining knowledge. Whereas personal experience is subjective, to reject any knowledge that is based on it limits a person to complete agnosticism that seems to me would cripple a person's ability to accept any conclussion. I can't think of a thing that does not boil down to personal experience (there may be some but I haven't thought of any). Of course they are really just trying to say that the scientific method is the only source of knowledge. But very little in life can be known by this method. During the scientific method, attempts at it will inevitably lead you to a point where you have to trust something that cannot be verified in that manner. If I wanted to verify something as basic to my life as who my parents are, I would have to take someone's word on it. If it boils down to DNA tests then I must choose to trust a very long line of people beginning with the people who claim to have decoded DNA. If I didn't trust the one doing the testing and I did the testing myself then I must choose to trust the machine that I didn't build. If I build the machine then I must choose to trust myself, and by my denial of personal experiences being trustworthy I have to abaondon my disregard for it in order to accept the outcome of the test that I have done using the machine I have built. I know that sounds contrived, but I feel it is simply taking the denial of experience and applying it consistantly. Again, thanks for the post

God is not the creator deity of the universe and mankind, but man's true nature and the norm of all things, in general. The moral and religious conscience live in the consciousness of the contrast between this norm (Realität) and empirical reality (Wirklichkeit)

I've held a theory like this for quite a while, and it's not far from Feuerbach's humanism. But clearly we don't have consensus about this norm. This site is largely about presenting, comparing, attacking, and defending proposed norms.

The general structure of having a norm ('the sacred') does seem innate.

The religious perceive our present life, or our natural life, as radically deficient, deficient from the root (radix) up, as fundamentally unsatisfactory; he feels it to be, not a mere condition, but a predicament; it strikes him as vain or empty if taken as an end in itself; he sees himself as homo viator, as a wayfarer (!) or pilgrim treading a via dolorosa through a vale that cannot possibly be a final and fitting resting place; he senses or glimpses from time to time the possibility of a Higher Life; he feels himself in danger of missing out on this Higher Life of true happiness. — Bill Vallicella

This is a fascinating quote, but note that it frames the religious person in terms of longing, sorrow, and fear who merely glimpses something Higher now and then. What is not mentioned is a general sense of well-being. To be sure there is plenty of vanity in the world, but we can choose our spouses, friends, books, etc. Can we not get better at life as we get better at riding a bike?

I do like the 'wayfarer' metaphor. And I agree that the intensity of 'spiritual' experience is not constant. Peak moments come and go. But I'm personally more anti-anti-worldly than anti-wordly. As far as I know this is the one world and one life that I actually have. My thinking is that we transcend vanity by identifying with what all good people have in common. We meet in our profound myths, thoughts, rituals, works of science, works of art in different media, etc.

It is said that 'science relies on reason' but really it relies even more on what is tangible or instrumentally-detectable; it is nothing like rationalism in the sense that a Leibniz or rationalist philosophy understands, which sought to intuit an order wholly transcending the order of the sense; something which is practically unintelligible to a modern. — Wayfarer

Isn't it more complicated than that?

${\displaystyle i\hbar {\frac {d}{dt}}\vert \Psi (t)\rangle ={\hat {H}}\vert \Psi (t)\rangle }$

Hypotheses are often created in an unwordly language of pure form. Of course they are tested in terms of the tangible, but atoms for instance are beyond the order of sense. QM doesn't even make sense (" I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.") So we trust and use patterns in measurements that we can't ground in intuition.

But look at the role of observability in empirical science - the yardstick of what is real, is what can be ascertained by sensory experience, amplified by instruments, and mathematical abstraction thereof. — Wayfarer

Well empirical means (roughly) 'based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic.' So, yes, empirical science is concerned with the observable. As far as leaving rationalist philosophy behind, well that makes sense.

We've talked about the quest for unbiasedness. A careful measurement is just about as unbiased as it gets for us humans. Eternal truths revealed to intuition are problematic, probably because people don't agree about these universal truths.

If you claim that, given measurement x at time t_0, I should expect measurement y at time t_1, then you have truly said something definite. In a world of so much confusion and wishful thinking, this is beautiful.

For me man is the metaphysical animal and philosophy is an ultimate treasure, but science by reducing its project in some sense gains something that philosophy can't offer.

Again, thanks for the post — Cris

You're most welcome, and thanks for your comments.

I had the impression that you liked both forms of dualism. — g0d

The problem with Cartesian dualism is the very idea of there being a 'thinking substance'. It is an impossible abstraction, and has lead to enormous confusion. Husserl has a great criticism of that in Crisis of European Sciences. But it is what ended up as 'the ghost in the machine'. Whereas in hylomorphic dualism, mind is 'what grasps meaning'; not a substance or object of any kind; much more subtle.

[The mind] thus falls into confusion and contradictions, from which it conjectures the presence of latent errors, which, however, it is unable to discover, because the principles it employs, transcending the limits of experience, cannot be tested by that criterion. — Kant

This is from 'the antinomies of reason'. It is about the fact that there are questions traditionally regarded as metaphysical, which can never be resolved, like whether the world has a beginning or whether there is a first cause.

The senses at first let in particular ideas, and furnish the yet empty cabinet; and the mind by degrees growing familiar with some of them, they are lodged in the memory, and names got to them. Afterwards the mind, proceeding farther, abstracts them, and by degrees learns the use of general names. In this manner the mind comes to be furnished with ideas and language, the [21] materials about which to exercise its discursive faculty: and the use of reason becomes daily more visible, as these materials, that give it employment, increase. But though the having of general ideas, and the use of general words and reason, usually grow together; yet, I see not, how this any way proves them innate. — John Locke

Right - there's a succinct statement of the 'blank slate'. In IETP, on Kant's metaphysics, we read that

Empiricists, such as Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, argued that human knowledge originates in our sensations. Locke, for instance, was a representative realist about the external world and placed great confidence in the ability of the senses to inform us of the properties that empirical objects really have in themselves. Locke had also argued that the mind is a blank slate, or a tabula rasa, that becomes populated with ideas by its interactions with the world. Experience teaches us everything, including concepts of relationship, identity, causation, and so on. Kant argues that the blank slate model of the mind is insufficient to explain the beliefs about objects that we have; some components of our beliefs must be brought by the mind to experience.

...Kant gives a number of arguments to show that Locke's, Berkeley's, and Hume's empiricist positions are untenable because they necessarily presuppose the very claims they set out to disprove.

This is the sense in which Kant criticizes the empiricists. The gist of it is, to even make the arguments that they make, the empiricists are already assuming the very faculties which they believe they can account for in terms of experience. 'According to the Rationalist and Empiricist traditions, the mind is passive either because it finds itself possessing innate, well-formed ideas ready for analysis, or because it receives ideas of objects into a kind of empty theater, or blank slate. Kant's crucial insight here is to argue that experience of a world as we have it is only possible if the mind provides a systematic structuring of its representations. This structuring is below the level of, or logically prior to, the mental representations that the Empiricists and Rationalists analyzed.'

Notice that Locke is arguing that if ideas were truly innate, then we wouldn't have to learn them, and children and idiots would already possess them. But I think it's a rather simplistic interpretation of what 'innateness' means. The 'categories of the understanding' and the 'primary intuitions' which Kant points to, are not necessarily available to conscious inspection - in that sense, innate - but they're innate in the sense that they provide the structure whereby "making sense of experience" is possible. Likewise, I think that universals are like the real constituents of the mind's capacity for reason - in that sense they're innate, but innate in the sense of being the native constituents of reason, not as fully-formed ideas. On the other hand, child prodigies, etc, really do seem to have an innate talent or recollection. In either case, it's not nearly so simple as Locke makes it out to be.

It is said that 'science relies on reason' but really it relies even more on what is tangible or instrumentally-detectable; it is nothing like rationalism in the sense that a Leibniz or rationalist philosophy understands, which sought to intuit an order wholly transcending the order of the sense; something which is practically unintelligible to a modern.
— Wayfarer

Isn't it more complicated than that? — g0d

It is extremely complicated, but the fact remains that 'empiricism' means 'demonstrable in objective experience', right? 'Modern science emerged in the seventeenth century with two fundamental ideas: planned experiments (Francis Bacon) and the mathematical representation of relations among phenomena (Galileo). This basic experimental-mathematical epistemology evolved until, in the first half of the twentieth century, it took a stringent form involving (1) a mathematical theory constituting scientific knowledge, (2) a formal operational correspondence between the theory and quantitative empirical measurements, and (3) predictions of future measurements based on the theory. The “truth” (validity) of the theory is judged based on the concordance between the predictions and the observations. While the epistemological details are subtle and require expertise relating to experimental protocol, mathematical modeling, and statistical analysis, the general notion of scientific knowledge is expressed in these three requirements.

Science is neither rationalism nor empiricism. It includes both in a particular way. In demanding quantitative predictions of future experience, science requires formulation of mathematical models whose relations can be tested against future observations. Prediction is a product of reason, but reason grounded in the empirical. Hans Reichenbach summarizes the connection: “Observation informs us about the past and the present, reason foretells the future.” - E G Dougherty.

So all science has predictions (on the left hand side) and results (observations and experimental results, on the right hand side). It can be distinguished from philosophical reasoning that is aimed at effecting a transformation of insight, as was traditional philosophy; science is results-oriented and instrumental in nature. Not wrong on that account, but also not necessarily efficacious in any sense other than those.

This is a fascinating quote, but note that it frames the religious person in terms of longing, sorrow, and fear who merely glimpses something Higher now and then. What is not mentioned is a general sense of well-being. To be sure there is plenty of vanity in the world, but we can choose our spouses, friends, books, etc. Can we not get better at life as we get better at riding a bike? — g0d

I don't think it's all or nothing. One can 'live in the world' as many a good Christian, Buddhist or Hindu might do, but still feel that sense of the radical insufficiency of natural life. The feeling the post talks about is an intuition of radically transformed way of being; but it concludes that, certainly, not everyone has this sense, which is also true. I quoted it to illustrate what I think having a spiritual/religious type of outlook amounts to, rather than believing in a sky-father type of God, as it's a sense which could equally apply to Buddhists, who don't believe in God.

I would think that nothing is more tangible to a person than their own thoughts and experiences. There is a quote I heard a long time ago, but I don't know who it was. It was something like this-- Some say the universe is made of atoms, but I say it is made of stories.

I would say that I agree with it because all that we know comes in the form of a story. I have never seen an atom. I simply believe the story I was told. This is the case for all I know. No on has ever seen the continents drift from a single land mass to where we ae now. People found a bunch of bones and stones and pieced togehter a story. No one has ever seen the big bang. They observed things and did some math and then told the story that they believe and now so do I. It's all a story that is told to us by someone else, or one that we tell ourselves. We compile the stories and form our worldview. If the stories are harmonious then they are more believable and we enter them in as knowledge. If they are not compatible then one must go and we will look for anoter to fill its place. That seems to be the scientific method.

As far as that which is common to us all that would constitute knowledge that is not learned, but innate; our dissatisfaction with the world as it is, seems to be a norm that binds us all together. Why is it that we all find the state of the world to be disgusting? Wouldn't that point to an innate knowledge?

The problem with Cartesian dualism is the very idea of there being a 'thinking substance'. It is an impossible abstraction, and has lead to enormous confusion. Husserl has a great criticism of that in Crisis of European Sciences. — Wayfarer

Well I agree that Cartesian dualism, like IMV every exact metaphysical system, falls apart upon close examination. It gets something right at the cost of getting something wrong. Our language is too fluid and complex to model itself in an artificial structure.

I'd say that the notion of a thinking substance was anything but arbitrary. It sounds like a soul. And it gets the part of us that quietly talks to ourselves right. But indeed it is an impossible abstraction. All brittle systems crumble, and systems are brittle IMV because they imagine that concepts are like distinct crystals. And that distinctions are perfect rather than approximate.

This is from 'the antinomies of reason'. It is about the fact that there are questions traditionally regarded as metaphysical, which can never be resolved, like whether the world has a beginning or whether there is a first cause. — Wayfarer

Yes, and you mention one of my favorite antinomies. Kant made it obvious that human cognition has glitches like that.

Right - there's a succinct statement of the 'blank slate'. — Wayfarer

But it's so harmless in context, at least to me.

t is extremely complicated, but the fact remains that 'empiricism' means 'demonstrable in objective experience', right? — Wayfarer

I think I know what you mean, but empiricism means (roughly) 'a philosophical belief that states your knowledge of the world is based on your experiences, particularly your sensory experiences. According to empiricists, our learning is based on our observations and perception; knowledge is not possible without experience.' So it's more general than that.

I do associate science with demonstration via objective/unbiased experience.

It can be distinguished from philosophical reasoning that is aimed at effecting a transformation of insight, as was traditional philosophy; science is results-oriented and instrumental in nature. Not wrong on that account, but also not necessarily efficacious in any sense other than those. — Wayfarer

I agree, but I think that some tie their sense of the spiritual to it. As we've discussed, unbiasedness is also a spiritual concept. I also suggest that engineering can be experienced as art. We love beautiful machines, powerful machines, ...

I don't think it's all or nothing. One can 'live in the world' as many a good Christian, Buddhist or Hindu might do, but still feel that sense of the radical insufficiency of natural life. — Wayfarer

I agree that it's not all or nothing.

Some say the universe is made of atoms, but I say it is made of stories. — Cris

Hi. I like this. Yes, the world is made of stories...and atoms and windmills and smiles and toothaches and mothers and trapezoids and...

I have never seen an atom. I simply believe the story I was told. This is the case for all I know. No on has ever seen the continents drift from a single land mass to where we ae now. People found a bunch of bones and stones and pieced togehter a story. No one has ever seen the big bang. They observed things and did some math and then told the story that they believe and now so do I. — Cris

Yup. I agree. We mostly just get stories. But I have flown to New York in a few hours. I was up in the clouds. The story of atoms gets our attention because it is connected to events like these. Of course there are profound internal experiences associated with religious stories, but those experiences are more elusive. So religious stories are more controversial.

We compile the stories and form our worldview. If the stories are harmonious then they are more believable and we enter them in as knowledge. If they are not compatible then one must go and we will look for anoter to fill its place. That seems to be the scientific method. — Cris

I think you describe the way humans think in general.

The observable process which Schiller and Dewey particularly singled out for generalisation is the familiar one by which any individual settles into new opinions. The process here is always the same. The individual has a stock of old opinions already, but he meets a new experience that puts them to a strain. Somebody contradicts them; or in a reflective moment he discovers that they contradict each other; or he hears of facts with which they are incompatible; or desires arise in him which they cease to satisfy. The result is an inward trouble to which his mind till then had been a stranger, and from which he seeks to escape by modifying his previous mass of opinions. He saves as much of it as he can, for in this matter of belief we are all extreme conservatives. So he tries to change first this opinion, and then that (for they resist change very variously), until at last some new idea comes up which he can graft upon the ancient stock with a minimum of disturbance of the latter, some idea that mediates between the stock and the new experience and runs them into one another most felicitously and expediently.

This new idea is then adopted as the true one. It preserves the older stock of truths with a minimum of modification, stretching them just enough to make them admit the novelty, but conceiving that in ways as familiar as the case leaves possible. An outrée [outrageous] explanation, violating all our preconceptions, would never pass for a true account of a novelty. We should scratch round industriously till we found something less eccentric. The most violent revolutions in an individual’s beliefs leave most of his old order standing. — James

As far as that which is common to us all that would constitute knowledge that is not learned, but innate; our dissatisfaction with the world as it is, seems to be a norm that binds us all together. Why is it that we all find the state of the world to be disgusting? Wouldn't that point to an innate knowledge? — Cris

I don't think so. I do think we have something like a human nature, and that would serve your purpose. But I don't think we pop out of mother with a set of justified beliefs. We can't even talk yet! And I think that's the gist of what Locke was saying. I'm not born knowing the Pythagorean theorem, but I can of course grow up, see the proof, and agree with all the other grownups that 'of course it's true.'

So I say yes to human nature and of course to being embedded in a culture that makes us intelligible to one another. But I say no to the idea that we don't need to learn a language and train our young brains. Of course our brains are structured in a certain way that allows for creating knowledge, but I wouldn't call that potential for learning the knowledge itself.

This is the sense in which Kant criticizes the empiricists. The gist of it is, to even make the arguments that they make, the empiricists are already assuming the very faculties which they believe they can account for in terms of experience. — Wayfarer

I like to see more textual evidence that empiricists
Kant is great, and he added to the empiricists. But what is the spirit of his work? The preface of the first edition is a natural place to look.

It is plainly not the effect of the levity, but of the matured judgement* of the age, which refuses to be any longer entertained with illusory knowledge, It is, in fact, a call to reason, again to undertake the most laborious of all tasks—that of self-examination, and to establish a tribunal, which may secure it in its well-grounded claims, while it pronounces against all baseless assumptions and pretensions, not in an arbitrary manner, but according to its own eternal and unchangeable laws. This tribunal is nothing less than the critical investigation of pure reason.

I do not mean by this a criticism of books and systems, but a critical inquiry into the faculty of reason, with reference to the cognitions to which it strives to attain without the aid of experience; in other words, the solution of the question regarding the possibility or impossibility of metaphysics, and the determination of the origin, as well as of the extent and limits of this science. All this must be done on the basis of principles.

This path—the only one now remaining—has been entered upon by me; and I flatter myself that I have, in this way, discovered the cause of—and consequently the mode of removing—all the errors which have hitherto set reason at variance with itself, in the sphere of non-empirical thought... It is true, these questions have not been solved as dogmatism, in its vain fancies and desires, had expected; for it can only be satisfied by the exercise of magical arts, and of these I have no knowledge. But neither do these come within the compass of our mental powers; and it was the duty of philosophy to destroy the illusions which had their origin in misconceptions, whatever darling hopes and valued expectations may be ruined by its explanations. — Kant

And then the beginning of the introduction:

That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt. For how is it possible that the faculty of cognition should be awakened into exercise otherwise than by means of objects which affect our senses, and partly of themselves produce representations, partly rouse our powers of understanding into activity, to compare to connect, or to separate these, and so to convert the raw material of our sensuous impressions into a knowledge of objects, which is called experience? In respect of time, therefore, no knowledge of ours is antecedent to experience, but begins with it.

But, though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of experience. For, on the contrary, it is quite possible that our empirical knowledge is a compound of that which we receive through impressions, and that which the faculty of cognition supplies from itself (sensuous impressions giving merely the occasion), an addition which we cannot distinguish from the original element given by sense, till long practice has made us attentive to, and skillful in separating it. — Kant

Kant points out that moving from what I'd call naive realism requires 'long practice' and skill. That the empiricists should have accidentally left some of the work of their own minds 'projected' is no surprise. And those who came after Kant criticized him. What we have is an evolving theory of the 'lens' and how it structures the given into experience. Kant aimed at one fixed lens. Others later held to the lens metaphor but insisted that the lens changed with time. Heidegger and Wittgenstein presented something like a soft and evolving lens that we could never quite grasp explicitly and/or comprehensively.

Kant is great, and he added to the empiricists — g0d

No - he criticized them. As is evident from the very material you provide:

though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of experience — Kant

Which is precisely what the empiricists claim. They’re not equivocal about it.

What was it that Hume wrote, that Kant said ‘awakened him from his dogmatic slumber’?

Which is precisely what the empiricists claim. They’re not equivocal about it. — Wayfarer

You have the context, though:

For, on the contrary, it is quite possible that our empirical knowledge is a compound of that which we receive through impressions, and that which the faculty of cognition supplies from itself (sensuous impressions giving merely the occasion), an addition which we cannot distinguish from the original element given by sense, till long practice has made us attentive to, and skillful in separating it. — Kant

And of course:

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. It is, therefore, just as necessary to make our concepts sensible, that is, to add the object to them in intuition, as to make our intuitions intelligible, that is, to bring them under concepts. — Kant

How are these conceptually structured intuitions so different from Hume's impressions?

Compare that with:

The senses at first let in particular ideas, and furnish the yet empty cabinet; and the mind by degrees growing familiar with some of them, they are lodged in the memory, and names got to them. Afterwards the mind, proceeding farther, abstracts them, and by degrees learns the use of general names. In this manner the mind comes to be furnished with ideas and language, the [21] materials about which to exercise its discursive faculty: and the use of reason becomes daily more visible, as these materials, that give it employment, increase.
...
The understanding, like the eye, whilst it makes us see and perceive all other things, takes no notice of itself; and it requires art and pains to set it at a distance, and make it its own object. — John Locke

And consider this:

All the objects of human reason or enquiry may naturally be divided into two kinds, to wit, Relations of Ideas, and Matters of Fact. Of the first kind are the sciences of Geometry, Algebra, and Arithmetic; and in short, every affirmation which is either intuitively or demonstratively certain. That the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the square of the two sides, is a proposition which expresses a relation between these figures. That three times five is equal to the half of thirty, expresses a relation between these numbers. Propositions of this kind are discoverable by the mere operation of thought, without dependence on what is anywhere existent in the universe. Though there never were a circle or triangle in nature, the truths demonstrated by Euclid would for ever retain their certainty and evidence.
— Hume

Hume doesn't go into much detail, but that last sentence is hard to ignore.

We can go back further.

By this it appears that Reason is not as Sense, and Memory, borne with us; nor gotten by Experience onely; as Prudence is; but attayned by Industry; first in apt imposing of Names; and secondly by getting a good and orderly Method in proceeding from the Elements, which are Names, to Assertions made by Connexion of one of them to another; and so to syllogismes, which are the Connexions of one Assertion to another, till we come to a knowledge of all the Consequences of names appertaining to the subject in hand; and that is it, men call SCIENCE. And whereas Sense and Memory are but knowledge of Fact, which is a thing past, and irrevocable; Science is the knowledge of Consequences, and dependance of one fact upon another: by which, out of that we can presently do, we know how to do something els when we will, or the like, another time; Because when we see how any thing comes about, upon what causes, and by what manner; when the like causes come into our power, wee see how to make it produce the like effects.
...
No Discourse whatsoever, can End in absolute knowledge of Fact, past, or to come. For, as for the knowledge of Fact, it is originally, Sense; and ever after, Memory. And for the knowledge of consequence, which I have said before is called Science, it is not Absolute, but Conditionall. No man can know by Discourse, that this, or that, is, has been, or will be; which is to know absolutely: but onely, that if This be, That is; if This has been, That has been; if This shall be, That shall be: which is to know conditionally; and that not the consequence of one thing to another; but of one name of a thing, to another name of the same thing. — Hobbes

There is a difference in attitude between the empiricists (excluding the Bishop, whom I didn't quote) and Kant.

I must, therefore, abolish knowledge, to make room for belief. — Kant

What was it that Hume wrote, that Kant said ‘awakened him from his dogmatic slumber’? — Wayfarer

This is fascinating page: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-hume-causality/

Whereas the concept of causality is, for Kant, clearly a priori, he does not think that particular causal laws relating specific causes with specific effects are all synthetic a priori—and, if they are not a priori, how can they be necessary? Indeed, Kant illustrates this difficulty, in a footnote to § 22, with his own example of the sun warming a stone (4, 305; 58):

But how does this proposition, that judgments of experience are supposed to contain necessity in the synthesis of perceptions, agree with my proposition, urged many times above, that experience, as a posteriori cognition, can yield only contingent judgments? If I say that experience teaches me something, I always mean only the perception that lies within in it, e.g., that heat always follows the illumination of the stone by the sun. That this heating results necessarily from the illumination by the sun is in fact contained in the judgment of experience (in virtue of the concept of cause); but I do not learn this from experience, rather, conversely, experience is first generated through this addition of the concept of the understanding (of cause) to the perception.

In other words, experience in the Humean sense teaches me that heat always (i.e., constantly) follows the illumination of the stone by the sun; experience in the Kantian sense then adds that:

the succession is necessary; … the effect does not merely follow upon the cause but is posited through it and follows from it. (A91/B124)

But what exactly does this mean? — link

Yes, what exactly does it mean?

How are these conceptually structured intuitions so different from Hume's impressions? — g0d

They’re quite different. Understanding why is the kind of question that might make a term paper in Kant or early modern philosophy.

Kant criticised both the empiricists (Locke, Hume) and the rationalists (Leibniz, Wolff, Descartes). The rationalists (following the Platonist tradition) claimed that there were innate ideas inherent in the mind which could be known by reason alone, but the empiricists insisted that knowledge is acquired by experience alone; that is what defined them. So Kant criticized, and in some ways synthesized, both of them.

Hume (empiricist) argued that there was no certain basis for the notion of causality, that we merely presume causation because we observe some causes always have the same effects. Hume argued that a priori truths, i.e. 'a bachelor is an unmarried man', logically follows because the conclusion is implied in the premisses. So this therefore is logical necessity. But the fact that A causes B is not of the same order - it is shown in experience, but is not logically necessary, i.e. it is something like a habit of thought. There is no logical reason why causal necessity obtains, it is an inductive rather than deductive claim. Put crudely, it might be that fire causes heat, right up until the time we observe that it doesn't (and indeed there are chemical reactions that cause something like fire at a low temperature).

This is Hume's 'skeptical challenge', and remember he was 'enquiring into the nature of the understanding'. Hume seemed (as Russell says in HWP) to challenge the very basis of scientific reason.


So Kant answered that challenge, claiming that he

rescues the a priori origin of the pure concepts of the understanding and the validity of the general laws of nature as laws of the understanding, in such a way that their use is limited only to experience, because their possibility has its ground merely in the relation of the understanding to experience, however, not in such a way that they are derived from experience, but that experience is derived from them, a completely reversed kind of connection which never occurred to Hume.

So I think one way of putting that is that Hume is arguing that we can't actually perceive a necessary relationship between cause and effect, but that Kant counters that, without the 'categories of the understanding', which intuitively perceive such relations, then experience itself wouldn't be cohesive - we literally couldn't think, let alone argue. So Hume is arguing that all knowledge accrues from experience, but Kant is saying that the mind must furnish the framework within which experience is meaningful in the first place.

Notice the emphasis on the 'synthetic a priori' - this is the idea that, unlike purely a priori truths which are tautological, in some sense, the synthetic a priori 'synthesis' rational arguments to arrive at a novel conclusion, i.e. one which is not implicit in the premisses.

There are some subject areas, or ideas, which are not amenable to the kind of analysis that will yield the kind of empirical evidence that is considered scientific, so questions about those kinds of topics aren't considered legitimate at all by scientific standards. — Wayfarer

And there it is: the blind spot of science, as the topic title describes, put simply and clearly. Is this topic over now? :wink: