Back to Kant and what the individual sees and knows (and can't know). — frank

Is there really such a thing, for Kant, as what the individual can't know? Or is it the case that there is only such a thing as what the individual cannot know empirically?

Fallacy of composition or division

Both, I guess. The fallacy of composition is to assume that because a certain type/element of thought is linguistic, that all aspects of it must be — e.g., if there are things we like about a piece of music or art that we can't put into words, this je ne sais quoi isn't contained in "thought."

But there does seem to be a fallacy of division as well, in that it is in language that thought most obviously"hangs together," as a whole, and yet the linguistic nature doesn't reach all the way down.

In general, I think philosophy of language also tends to underestimate the value of language in non-social contexts, the way in which it is a tool for imagination, planning, and problem solving. I've seen some convincing speculation on how our capabilities for language may have grown out of both social and "internal," use, some from Daniel Dennett funny enough.

Back to Kant and what the individual sees and knows (and can't know).

Interestingly, solipsism was sort of a going concern from the pre-Socratics in the West and showing up as early as the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad in the East. As far as I am aware, the position that "we do not mean things by words," i.e. that our words don't sometimes reflect our internal mental states or refer to things/people around us, is an entirely modern conception. It seems to grow out of the twin tendencies towards reduction and the elimination of difficult concepts — that the limits of the (currently) formalizable represent the limits of possible knowledge.

Banno's rule at work: It is always easier to critique something if you begin by misunderstanding it. Here folk understand Davidson from a few lines and pretending to make sense of Wittgenstein sans private language. Let's leave that aside.

I lifted from SEP an account of a transcendental argument found in Wittgenstein:
"...it is impossible to make sense of what it is to follow a rule correctly, unless this means that what one is doing is following the practice of others who are like-minded"
It seems that this is the sort of thing that @Jamal has in mind, and yet it is not found in Kant.

So it is unclear what, if or how this was a "sublimated" from Kant.

Unless one is to suppose that anyone using a transcendental argument owes a debt of gratitude to Kant. In which case Wittgenstein is hardly in a unique position.

Or is it that Wittgenstein is here being viewed through a Kantian lens? Those with a predilection for a particular philosopher will inevitably bring that philosopher's perspective into novel considerations. Here "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world" is being restructured by others (and not by any means specialists in Wittgenstein) as "the limits of my form of life mean the limits of my world".

Now influences from Schopenhauer are well document. Wittgenstein made use of several of Schopenhauer's arguments and even some phrases. But apparently summed him up thus:
"Schopenhauer is quite a crude mind, one might say, ie though he has refinement, this suddenly becomes exhausted at a certain level and then he is as crude as the crudest. Where real depth starts, his comes to an end. One could say of Schopenhauer: he never searches his conscience."
Schopenhauer made use of Kant, so it would not be surprising to find distillations of Kant in Wittgenstein.

@Jamal , it's s long road from learning that Wittgenstein read Kant to claiming him as a subliminal Kantian.

Is there really such a thing, for Kant, as what the individual can't know? Or is it the case that there is only such a thing as what the individual cannot know empirically? — Metaphysician Undercover

He says we can't know about that logical orphan: the thing in itself. :grin:


:up:

Schopenhauer leaves us with that question: 'what do the necessities of thought have to do with the way the world is?'

Wittgenstein answers that question, so it's a long philosophical conversation. Witt owed Schop, who owed Kant, who owed Hume, and so on.

Ok.

Wittgenstein had an infamous disregard for the history of philosophy. Some might say this was in order to think things through without prejudice; others that it was in order to claim credit for the ideas of others.

But Kant does not loom large either in Wittgenstein's own accounts of his influences, or in the accounts of contemporaries and sympathisers. The links seem to be relatively recent scholarship.

So I would urge some caution.

"...it is impossible to make sense of what it is to follow a rule correctly, unless this means that what one is doing is following the practice of others who are like-minded"
It seems that this is the sort of thing that Jamal has in mind, and yet it is not found in Kant. — Banno

It is true that Kant took it as a given that concepts formed through reason were demonstrations of a universal activity. Wittgenstein's view of what is built through interaction would have puzzled him.

But Kant did approach the insufficiency of Descartes' isolation. In the passage I quoted above, there is:

* The "I think" is, as has already been said, an empirical proposition, and contains within itself the proposition "I exist." But I cannot say "Everything that thinks, exists"; for then the property of thinking would make all beings possessing it into necessary beings. Hence my existence also cannot be regarded as inferred from the proposition "I think," as Descartes held (for otherwise the major premise, "Everything that thinks, exists" would have to precede it), — CPR, Kant, B421

The parallel the OP draws between the different views of limits is at least two examples of relative humility measured against what can be established as universals.

Wittgenstein had an infamous disregard for the history of philosophy. Some might say this was in order to think things through without prejudice; others that it was in order to claim credit for the ideas of others. — Banno

You can't really read the Tractatus without picking up on the way he's addressing Schopenhauer, though.

But Kant does not loom large either in Wittgenstein's own accounts of his influences, — Banno

Kant was Schopenhauer's primary influence. The same basic ideas were probably rolling around?

Hence my existence also cannot be regarded as inferred from the proposition "I think," as Descartes held (for otherwise the major premise, "Everything that thinks, exists" would have to precede it), — CPR, Kant, B421

The alternative? "Not everything that thinks, exists"?

I read the passage to mean that we have no way to confirm the judgment, a neat reversal of the special province of the "I" granted by Descartes.

So, no, not an argument for the opposite proposition.

I don't see the judgement as an empirical one but as a confirmation that the concept of something that thinks involves the concept of existence, further that the concept of anything doing anything involves the concept of existence.

Perhaps a caveat could be added such as "exists in some sense, not necessarily physical", although the idea of a non-physical existent certainly seems inscrutable, and it is questionable as to whether it is even coherent.

Well, yes, but that is insufficient to carry the thesis of the op. In particular whether the three contentions on p.687 of the Hanna article are acceptable.

I don't think any rough equating of the thing-in-itself with that of which we cannot speak will suffice here, but I'm afraid that far more scholarship would be required to carry the point in either direction.

Might leave it there.

I don't see the judgement as an empirical one — Janus

Just to be clear, are you addressing Kant's statement in that regard? Where he stated it was such a thing?

He does say at the beginning that it is an empirical proposition, so yeah, I'm disagreeing with that. I think it is a conceptual matter, you might even say it is tautologous, if something thinks, or does anything at all, then by definition it must exist. The very concept of 'something' seems to involve existence. The alternative seems completely unthinkable.

This goes in a lot of different directions. As a point of departure, how Descartes expresses it as a matter of moving from a center outwards is different from Kant. Kant is asking for something like:

if something thinks then by definition it must exist. — Janus

I don't think any rough equating of the thing-in-itself with that of which we cannot speak will suffice here. — Banno

I agree.

Wittgenstein had an infamous disregard for the history of philosophy. Some might say this was in order to think things through without prejudice; others that it was in order to claim credit for the ideas of others.

But Kant does not loom large either in Wittgenstein's own accounts of his influences, or in the accounts of contemporaries and sympathisers. The links seem to be relatively recent scholarship.

So I would urge some caution. — Banno

When a philosopher has read material of another philosopher, there must be conscious interpretation of the material. Therefore such influence cannot accurately be called "subliminal". So the question I asked above remains. Why do some authors intentionally obscure their influences? Or is it just the case that they are not trying to obscure their influences at all, and other people who don't see the appropriate correlations, like to represent them as obscuring their influences?

Both, I guess. The fallacy of composition is to assume that because a certain type/element of thought is linguistic, that all aspects of it must be — e.g., if there are things we like about a piece of music or art that we can't put into words, this je ne sais quoi isn't contained in "thought." — Count Timothy von Icarus

That's an interesting way of looking at it. It reminds me of recent discussions on TPF, of variation in the extent to which people experience an inner monolog. I wonder if there is much correlation between the degree to which people experience an inner monolog, and a tendency to categorize things that cannot be put into words, as other than thought.

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

He does say at the beginning that it is an empirical proposition, so yeah, I'm disagreeing with that — Janus

So does he. The empirical proposition is initially a derivative of Mendelssohn's materialism; the disagreement is the evolution of the “Refutation of Idealism” in A, to the “Solution of the Psychological Paralogism” in B.

In short, the “I”, previously taken as Descartes’ “thinking substance” and Mendelssohn's “simple being”, cannot exist as conditioned by modal categories, but can only be represented as a non-contradictory transcendental object.

While we all might be quite happy to be informed our respective “I”’s can’t be really real, we still might be a little reserved in our happiness from being informed it’s no more than an intellectual conception.

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
— Wittgenstein — Jamal

I had launched a discussion about 3 years ago on this exact "quotation", a totally unrealistic and naive statement.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/11545/examining-wittgensteins-statement-the-limits-of-my-language-mean-the-limits-of-my-world/p1
Not a single person could support the truth of it, not even describe it or explain it. They didn't rejected it either.

In fact, I read in some article later --I don't have the reference ready-- that Wittgenstein himself had changed his mind about it in his late years ...

Wittgenstein's claim that logic is transcendental differs fundamentally from Kant's transcendental idealism. Logic is the condition for both the world as the totality of facts and our representation of those facts in language. A fact is a state of affairs, a combination of objects or things. Things exist in logical space. This is not a claim about how things are for us, but how they are, necessarily, in themselves.

His claim that ethics/aesthetics is transcendental, on the other hand, is about how things are for us. Not as a matter of fact, but of value. Not as something that can be said, but as how we see or perceive things, how we experience the world.

Logic is the transcendental condition for the world. Ethics/aesthetics the transcendental condition for my world.

A form of life includes something that is missing from both Tractarian logic and ethics/aesthetics - what we do, how we live, and how the world is shaped by us. Rather than drawing limits Wittgenstein is now more interested in possibilities:

… our investigation is directed not towards phenomena, but rather, as one might say, towards the ‘possibilities’ of phenomena.

(PI 90)

He does this not by marking limits to what is possible but by clearing away misunderstandings.

The name “philosophy” might also be given to what is possible before all new discoveries and inventions.

(PI 126)

He has reversed the direction of his investigation. From the conditions for to conditions against, to what stands in the way and prevents us from seeing new possibilities. Related to this is the phenomena of seeing aspects:

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something a because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of their inquiry do not strike people at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck them. And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.

(129)

Here the shift is from the condition for the possibility of experience to the experiences themselves.

Given what you've written, I'm going to assume that you haven't really studied the Tractatus. To understand what Wittgenstein is saying in this quote, you have to understand what is going on in philosophy vis a vis Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege ("I will only mention that I am indebted to Frege's great works and to the writings of my friend Mr. Bertrand Russell for much of the stimulation of my thoughts (p.3 Preface to the Tractatus)); and you have to understand Wittgenstein's goal in the Tractatus. I'm not going to get into the philosophy of Russell and Frege, but I will say a few words about the Tractatus, and what Wittgenstein was trying to accomplish.

In the Preface to the Tractatus Wittgenstein clearly states that his goal is to draw a limit to the expression of thoughts, and since language is used to express our thoughts, it will only be in language that the limit can be drawn (p. 3 Preface). For Wittgenstein there is a definite logic to language. In fact, Wittgenstein's sees a one-to-one correspondence between propositions and facts in the world. Propositions describe the world, they are pictures of the world. So, the three main issues are logic, language, and the world, and Wittgenstein's analysis is an a priori analysis of these three ideas and how they connect.

So, Wittgenstein is caught up in the continuing problem of how thought and language connect to the world, i.e., how is it that we are able to say things about the world? His a priori investigation includes the idea that logic will reveal the structure of language and the structure of the world. There must be a logical connection that will reveal itself through analysis. His work extends "...from the foundations of logic to the nature of the world (Nb, p. 79)."

If as Wittgenstein believed, there is a one-to-one correspondence between what can be said about the world, and the facts of the world, then everything that can be said about the world, would give us a complete picture of the world. We would have completely described the world, given we have everything that can be said. So, if this is true, then the limits of our language, i.e., everything that can be stated about the world, would completely describe the limits of our (or my) world.

This hopefully, will give you a different way of thinking about the quote from Tractatus 5.62.

Also, your own understanding of the world is limited by your grasp of the propositions that really do line up with facts in the world. This, I believe, is why Wittgenstein believed it important to understand the logic of our language, which continued into his later philosophy. Although, his later philosophy is a much more expanded view of the logic of language.

Maybe this will help you to understand the quote a little better, and get you to read more about the history behind the Tractatus. — Sam26

I was not aware of "Mendelssohn's materialism." Will check it out.

While we all might be quite happy to be informed our respective “I”’s can’t be really real, we still might be a little reserved in our happiness from being informed it’s no more than an intellectual conception. — Mww

Or at least the conception is posterior to the intuitions which Kant confirms are active in each person. Sort of taking half of Descartes' certainty at the expense of the other.

the conception is posterior to the intuitions which Kant confirms are active in each person. — Paine

Absolutely. All conceptions are posterior to intuition, in Kant.

Sort of taking half of Descartes' certainty at the expense of the other. — Paine

You mean, cogito at the expense of substance? If so, then yes, I’d agree with that.

Sounds like we agree...

Not sure if you are expecting an answer from me...

Thanks for asking.

I should have said more. Kant would like to confirm the "thinking" as what humans do but does not place that on the level of experience that cannot be denied. The world is built upon our 'outward sense' and the simultaneity of events where other beings exist (if we see them that way). That is a bit of a pickle. The leverage of personal experience is used in one way but not another.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Both, I guess. The fallacy of composition is to assume that because a certain type/element of thought is linguistic, that all aspects of it must be — e.g., if there are things we like about a piece of music or art that we can't put into words, this je ne sais quoi isn't contained in "thought." — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't like your use of "we" here. It implies a type of generalization which is not applicable in the context. If there is something about your experience which you cannot put into words, then you ought to say "I cannot put it in words". With a properly formulated generalization, we'd look at someone else having a similar experience (the same type of experience, by that generalization), and we'd find that it is possible that another person might be able to put that experience into words. Therefore the use of "we" here is not justified.

I believe that this is a very important point when considering the power of language. What is the case for "I", "I cannot put it into words" for example, is not the case for "we". In other words, "I cannot do it" does not equate with "it cannot be done". When we understand this, it gives "possible" and "impossible" a completely different context which is completely separate, independent, from the capacities of the individual.

From this perspective, we can come to realize the fact that language gives us infinite possibility. I cannot restrict "possible" to "what is possible for me", and at the same time, I cannot determine the limitations of everybody. This means that I must leave possibility open, as unlimited, in its real, independent existence. However, as Aristotle determined (cosmological argument), there must be real restrictions to this apparently limitless possibility. The logic of the cosmological argument demonstrates that in spite of the fact that I cannot determine the restrictions, and by inductive reasoning not any single one of us can determine these restrictions, there must be very real restrictions, which are independent from "us". Since restrictions are formal, therefore fundamentally intelligible, this leaves an aspect of "the intelligible" which is unintelligible to "us", thereby opening the door to theology.

Similar to Wittgenstein (and Davidson's "triangulation"), Kant flipped inner and outer experience to give primacy to the latter, i.e., to the experience of the "external world" as opposed to self-knowledge and self-consciousness. — Jamal

I like this image. I believe it is important to understand that the learning process, therefore knowledge in general, begins in our relationships with others, mother, father, and other authority figures. This knowledge is developed through the use of words, therefore the "outer experience" gains primacy in our knowledge. We are taught to resist the inner inclinations, emotions, temptations, and feelings, because they tend to incline us away from the conformity of learning, which would make education very difficult.

The result is that the outer experience is fundamental to knowledge, language, and all the communicative tools. So when we turn to the inner, in the way of Descartes, we employ this knowledge from the outer, and we try to understand the inner by those terms. However, in reality, we need to accept the difference, and not refer to the inner conditions as "knowledge" proper . We need to represent the difference, because the type of thing which the inner is composed of, which appears like a sort of knowledge, the innate, intuition, a priori, is better known as the capacity for, or in Kant, the conditions for the possibility of, the outer experience which composes "knowledge" proper. This gives a completely different perspective on the understanding of "I". Instead of Descartes assertion "I am", we see in the inner, from this mode of understanding, the possibility of "I".