Kant is a common stumbling block for many people.

The 'thing-in-itself' is where he arrives at the concept of Noumenon as opposed to Phenomenon. We can only talk of Noumenon in a Negative sense. We can talk of Phenomenon in a Positive sense.

It is quite hard to get your head around the idea of noumenon being more than simply 'stuff we do not know' it is more or less 'stuff we cannot even refer to' - hence 'negative' only.

What is unknowable is unknowable.

I have difficulty understanding what you are saying. It seems to me you are addressing the problem solely through reasoning. You might say, that is what philosophy is! But I disagree, that is what other people have made of it.

Kant must have observed his own mind while looking at how he was perceiving the world. Just as I am tempting you to do with those cookies. Just a minute ago I did it myself again (with checker pieces, not cookies this time) to try the example of RussellA. It is really something you should do and then observe what happens.

all the stuff that's going on — fdrake

The difficulty only happens in the human mind. Paradox is a limitation of language, fundamental reality has no paradox. So be careful with adding more conceptsthan we can grasp.

It seems to me you are addressing the problem solely through reasoning. — Carlo Roosen

I'm responding to the relations of concepts in your post by analysing them, yes. Is this a problem?

Not a problem but I can't follow you. While I believe I do understand what Kant is saying, when I read it I say "yes, yes" every sentence. To me it feels you lost contact with reality and wandered off in concept land. Sorry maybe a bit harsh ..

(That is not true, I read abstracts ;))

Not a problem but I can't follow you. — Carlo Roosen

Alright. What are you struggling to understand in my post, and I'll do my best to rephrase it.

While I believe I do understand what Kant is saying, when I read it I say "yes, yes" every sentence. — Carlo Roosen

Like , I also noticed that the phenomenon/noumenon or phenomenon/thing in itself distinction is misused in your post. If you're using the more common distinction between a representation (like a painting of a duck) and represented (like a duck), your post makes more sense on those terms.

I absolutely do not mean the word "duck" against the real duck. The problem is, the mind always and automatically applies one layer of abstraction. In the above sentence, what you actually read is ""duck"" against the real "duck" (both words get an extra pair of quotation marks). Because, there was never a real duck on your screen.

What I am referring to, and that is what I believe Kant is referring to as well, is that when we look at a duck and call it a "duck", we have never captured its reality. As the example with the cookies show, the letter E is only a way for the mind to point to a pattern it recognises. The same with the duck, although it is more difficult to capture the moment that the mind makes the translation. It is really something you have to try out, not something you can invent while writing. A field experiment, so to speak.

And yet, there is something there. Because when we know there is a duck there, we can do all kinds of experiments and involve other people to prove that, really, there is a duck. That is what I think 'the thing in itself' means. Even while the letter E cannot really be there in fundamental reality, we still can prove it is there. That is not a paradox, it is a simple fact.

What I am referring to, and that is what I believe Kant is referring to as well, is that when we look at a duck and call it a "duck", we have never captured its reality. — Carlo Roosen

Ducks, in the sense of independently existing objects, aren't even "available" (scare quote) for us to call them "duck" though. in Kant though! What counts as a duck is a judgement of our perception. That's a very imprecise and inaccurate way of putting it, it's just supposed to connote that there's no "duck in itself" in Kant.

Whereas our percept of a duck can be thought of as a representation of the duck-in-itself (the duck), we might even see how long its wings are.

yes that is what I mean to say too.

Alright. Which do you mean? Do you mean that

Ducks, in the sense of independently existing objects, aren't even "available" (scare quote) for us to call them "duck" though. in Kant though! What counts as a duck is a judgement of our perception. That's a very imprecise and inaccurate way of putting it, it's just supposed to connote that there's no "duck in itself" in Kant. — fdrake

reflects the dichotomy between fundamental reality and conceptual reality, or that

Whereas our percept of a duck can be thought of as a representation of the duck-in-itself (the duck), we might even see how long its wings are. — fdrake

reflects it?

why not both? If I understand these words correctly, they both agree with what I try to say. Plus it is a lot shorter. To me it seems there we must stop thinking, becuase words/concepts start to work against themselves. It is more about stopping to think in time...

why not both? — Carlo Roosen

Roughly - because the first entails that the judgement only applies to perceptions, whereas the second entails that judgement also applies to the things in themselves.

That is only because terms are confused. Kant sort of denies the conceptual reality. According to him the real thing we cannot understand, leaving us with a feeling of being lost. I propose different terms, but they mean the same. With these terms you can say a duck is real, but only in conceptual reality. The duck only exists in fundamental reality in the sense that it gives the confirmation when you know where to look.

According to him the real thing we cannot understand — Carlo Roosen

Sort of. Expecting to understand the thing in itself is like expecting to be able to bake a unicycle. Personally I don't enjoy Kant's phenomenon/noumenon/thing-in-itself distinction that much, but I don't want to see it misrepresented.

I propose different terms, but they mean the same. — Carlo Roosen

The same as which though? The Kant one or the more generic representation vocabulary?

The duck only exists in fundamental reality in the sense that it gives the confirmation when you know where to look. — Carlo Roosen

That's another ambiguity though. The things in themselves do indeed exist independently of conception and judgement, and it's precisely that independence which renders them unintelligible. So your fundamental reality's existence concept is kind of the same as the conceptual reality one - which means the entities in both are of the same type, no?

I would step swiftly away from Kant and speak as plainly as possible on your own terms and allow someone else to guide you to a philosophical approach that better suits what you wish to say.

It might help. Otherwise this could go on for several pages where everyone talks past each other.

I agree, and tnx for the solid advice!

As for the business, I don't see the difference in what I say and what you say. With the cookies in a certain configuration, that "E" or "F" is a label we give to the form. Fundamental reality provides everything that is needed for these letters to appear, so in that sense they really do exist. But when we call it "E" or "F", we create something in our conceptual reality that is not there in fundamental reality. — Carlo Roosen

Again, I think you've missed the point. Here you are conceptualizing "fundamental reality," but you're not allowed to do that. You can't even really think about it, and yet here you are thinking about it. So what you're thinking about isn't fundamental reality. It's not cookies or patterns or anything. All you can talk about is how it is impossible to talk about it. There is nothing else to say.

Are you familiar with the "Tao Te Ching" written by Lao Tzu more than two thousand years ago. The first lines of the first verse is "The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao, the name that can be named is not the eternal name." The Tao represents the unformed, undifferentiated, unconceptualized, inchoate ground of being - what was there before there was anything to think about it. Lao Tzu calls the Tao "non-being," and the multiplicity of things we perceive here in the world as "being." The implication is that the Tao doesn't exist, which makes sense to me. The idea that there is no objective reality is not a radical one in philosophy.

mercans — Banno

Muricans.

For me the important thing is to stay close to what you can perceive directly. Kant did not invent this theory out of thin air, he observed his mind while it was operating. — Carlo Roosen

I don't think this is true. The noumena/phenomena distinction is not based on empirical observation, it's metaphysics. It's not true, it's interesting and useful. Here's a link to an article you might be interested in - "Kant's Doctrine of the A Priori in the Light of Contemporary Biology" by Konrad Lorenz.

https://archive.org/details/KantsDoctrineOfTheAPrioriInTheLightOfContemporaryBiologyKonradLorenz

After reading it, I have rethought the way I look at this issue.

There is the paradox within Kant's CPR that Kant doesn't properly answer, though gives an attempt in B276, of how we can know that there are things-in-themselves if we can never know what they are. — RussellA

If this is a paradox, I don't think it is a very complicated one. We don't know there are things-in-themselves. It's not unreasonable to say that they don't exist, i.e. they are not things at all. Of course, it's impossible to talk about them yet here we are talking about them. You can call that a paradox, but I think of it as a joke that we're all in on.

Here you are conceptualizing "fundamental reality," but you're not allowed to do that. You can't even really think about it, — T Clark

I don't think that is true. Fundamental reality is a concept to point to the fact that the real nature of things cannot be understood conceptually. We have words for all kind of things that we do not know, I mentioned them earlier "surprize", "future", "unknown" or "black swan", (the latter referring not to a rare animal but a special concept for an unlikely event). So it is perfectly fine to talk about fundamental reality.

And yes, I have the Tao Te Ching, and here applies the same, more or less. We cannot speak about it and yet we do.

He cannot speak of that which he speaks of ... yet he does. Explain. — I like sushi

I always think of it as a joke. We all recognize it's impossible, but then do it anyway.

It is quite possible to speak of things that you don't know. Language doesn't have a problem. The "unknown" you can speak of, just as "future", "surprise". — Carlo Roosen

But it's not unknown, it's unknowable.

Also there is a few things that we can say about fundamental reality, — Carlo Roosen

No.

Why not? Be careful for doctrines. If anybody said that, they must refer to something they have understood by own experience or insight. Do not go where others go but search for what they are searching.

Also "unknowable" is still a word. And "you cannot say anything about fundamental reality" is a contradiction in itself.

Here's a link to an article you might be interested in - "Kant's Doctrine of the A Priori in the Light of Contemporary Biology" by Konrad Lorenz. — T Clark

I fully agree with what is written there so I don't see the issue you have.

I don't think that is true. Fundamental reality is a concept to point to the fact that the real nature of things cannot be understood conceptually. We have words for all kind of things that we do not know, I mentioned them earlier "surprize", "future", "unknown" or "black swan", (the latter referring not to a rare animal but a special concept for an unlikely event). So it is perfectly fine to talk about fundamental reality. — Carlo Roosen

You've ended up understanding things with concepts which you've prior stipulated as being unable to understand with concepts. That is the rub. It's a contradiction, but it's a contradiction which results from your ideas rather than criticisms of them. Generally that means there's a problem with your ideas rather than the criticisms.

You can sustain an opposition by making certain moves, eg by putting the intelligible and the unintelligible in a dialectical relation, but you've not done that.

I'll follow "I like sushi" 's advice and leave it at this.

Why not? — Carlo Roosen

Because the Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.

Also "unknowable" is still a word. And "you cannot say anything about fundamental reality" is a contradiction in itself. — Carlo Roosen

As I noted, it's a joke. This is an excerpt from Ellen Marie Chen's translation of Verse 25 of the Tao Te Ching.

There was something nebulous existing (yu wu hun ch’eng),
Born before heaven and earth.
Silent, empty,
Standing alone (tu), altering not (pu kaki),
Moving cyclically without becoming exhausted (pu tai),
Which may be called the mother of all under heaven.

I know not its name,
I give its alias (tzu), Tao.
If forced to picture it,
I say it is “great” (ta). — From Tao Te Ching - Verse 25

I don't see the issue you have. — Carlo Roosen

I wasn't using it to raise an issue, I just thought you might be interested.

Ok, maybe that was a weak move. Let me try to write it down in a few words.

Conceptual reality is in our minds. It is fragmented, it has a notion of time. It has ideas of things it can expect. It has language. And also, it is sequential, basically we are only aware of a few things simultanously. We can notice that there are strange things in this conceptual reality, for instance that they are organized in levels, from atoms to cookies to letters, but nothing inbetween. We have things like emergent complexity, for instance ants that walk around seemingly randomly yet form living bridges across two branches and we cannot explain how it works. And the brain. We invent or discover things that we didn't know before. So we can clearly see that there are things beyond our knowledge. Also, the world is larger than our skull, so it is obvious that the reality we perceive can never be the full reality, we have to compress it.

For that reason we invent a term, I call it fundamental reality. It is about the things we don't understand. It is perfectly fine to have a term for the collection of things we have no name for, that happens all the time. Just like "future". We can say a few things in general about fundamental reality, in the same way we can have predictions about the future. Still, both the future and fundamental reality are fundamentally unknowable. (that is the only thing these two terms have in common, it is not a full analogy)

One of the things we can say about fundamental reality is that if you know what you are looking for, you can find conformation that it is there. And those conformations regularly do align. So there must be *something* out there, we cannot say everything is just an imagination.

I don't see a contradiction here. If there is one, probably you are misinterpreting a few of my words or introducing concepts that are not mine. Also, I believe what I say is obvious and simple, you can easily verify what I am saying.