Isn't this just a vacuous concept by definition then? — Pantagruel

The noumenon? It’s a critical concept: philosophers like Leibniz built systems around noumena, and Kant is diagnosing this disease. He also thinks he can’t just ignore it, because he regards it as an unavoidable product of the understanding.

Good, difficult questions.

What does "objectively" mean as you use it?

If we concede there are conditions for our knowledge and our knowledge is subject to those conditions and if those conditions are peculiar to the perceiver, how is our knowledge of anything objective? — Hanover

I’m trying to use it as Kant did, to refer to universally valid judgements about the objects of experience. By “universal” he means it holds for all rational creatures, and it's based on a priori structures of knowledge that are independent of experience (though they only produce knowledge when applied to experience).

The two need not be in conflict: you and I have objective knowledge that cats have whiskers and that fire burns human flesh, even though we know it in our own special human way. This is pretty much the way I use the word myself. You, in contrast, imply that you understand objectivity to require an absolute perspective—a view from nowhere. I think this is a more recent sense of the term. Kant describes such attempted judgements not as objective but as transcendent, and as applying to the unconditioned.

Something can be known objectively without being known independently of experience, since in fact it is only to the given content of experience that knowledge applies. Knowing is a process that happens in a certain way to specially constituted knowers, but it is not thereby subjective. Objectivity is not transcendent, but immanent. The basic idea is similar to Hegel, of a unity between subject and object, even though the object is an object for us, not in itself.

I don’t want to pretend there are no difficulties. It might be fair to interpret Kant as establishing objectivity only by downgrading it to a feature of the subjective. What I’m doing is trying to get at what Kant was doing and what he meant; I'm not claiming that his arguments were entirely consistent and valid or that they didn't lead to unforseen conclusions.

If upon transcendental contemplation we determine X,Y, and Z are the conditions for our knowledge, doesn't X,Y and Z become the lens upon which we view the noumenal and what we then actually perceive we refer to as the phenomenal?

I get that science will only concern itself with the phenomenal, but I don't see how you reject the suggestion that the phenomenal is a distortion of the noumenal. Isn't the phenomenal just the noumenal filtered through X,Y, and Z as you described it?

Your description of the transcendental was most helpful, but with Kant I'm always stuck with the meaning, purpose, and relevance of the noumenal and the difficulty in saving him from idealism. — Hanover

Maybe we have to get into the differences between the thing in itself, the positive noumenon, the negative noumenon, and the transcendental object. But here is a first attempt...

The first appearance of noumenon in the first edition is here:

If . . . I suppose there to be things that are merely objects of the understanding and that, nevertheless, can be given to an intuition, although not to sensible intuition . . . then such things would be called noumena (intelligibilia). — A 249

From the beginning, Kant uses the term to refer to objects of thought: as unavoidable results of the operation of the understanding, which attempt to refer to something beyond possible experience. Real objects, objects we can know, are objects in space that are given to us in perception; these phenomena are beings of sense, whereas noumena are beings merely of understanding.

I posted a long response to you on the old forum, attacking your notion of distortion and attempting to show that it was incoherent. Looking back, it might have been badly written--you never did reply--but I'd still want to make the same point. Only a signal can be distorted. That is, only one's perception is subject to distortion. The object perceived cannot itself be distorted by its perception.* The noumenon is the concept of a purported thing beyond possible experience, and as such cannot be distorted.

That is to say, there is nothing there to be filtered or distorted. Simply to be an object of knowledge is for a thing to be known via the senses and understanding. If there is no possible disembodied, unperspectival way of apprehending a thing, then the idea of distortion has no meaning.

* I’m not saying the object perceived is the noumenon, by the way.

:up:

Lately been listening to a lot of baroque music. There's something strange in it that I cannot explain. — Olento

Is it that it lies in an uncanny valley or a liminal space between the pre-modern and the modern? That it’s strange and familiar at the same time?

Do we infer the unperceived existence of what we perceive from the nature of our experience? If so, how? If not, why not? — OwenB

On second thoughts, I don’t think it is worded very well. At least, it’s not precise enough. It might be asking a general question about perception: does it work by inference? (Russell, following Hume, seemed to think so) Or, more precisely, is inference the way that we know things via perception?

If the answer to that is yes, then the questioner may also want to know if we thereby (by inference) know of the existence of things when we’re not perceiving them—but this isn’t explicit in the question, as @bert1 pointed out (it’s “do we infer,” not “do we correctly infer”). Personally I’d assume the question does have this meaning even though it’s ambiguous.

If the answer to the first question is no, then either we know of the continued existence of things unperceived by some other means than inference, or, agreeing with Hume, we don’t have any such knowledge at all.

Also, there is a major interpretative choice to be made in dealing with the question. Does “the unperceived existence of what we perceive” refer to the continued existence of things while we’re not perceiving them, or does it refer to the thing as it is in itself, roughly speaking the aspect of a thing that is not subject to the structures of human perception and cognition. I think it’s the former (how do you know the cup is still there when you close the cupboard door), because the wording used is similar to that found in Hume. (EDIT: it should also be noted that these are close to being merely two descriptions of the same thing, i.e., the thing as it is in itself is, from a certain point of view, synonymous with the thing as it is when you’re not perceiving it)

If you need to contact me privately, use private messages here on the website, not email. Go to my profile and click “send a message”.

Unperceived existence.....ask about this.... clear as mud?? — Mark Nyquist

I suggest you take a break from this particular thread, Mark. Maybe it’s just not for you, you know?

More off-topic responses will be deleted.

Is this about the British empiricists? Locke, Berkeley, Hume? — bert1

Looks like the person who formulated the question has that background in mind. Whether Owen’s daughter is expected to know that or has any such reading materials, I don’t know.

Still works. For “unperceived” you could think “continued, when we’re not perceiving it”. The question as asked is just very condensed and terse.

@OwenB

I have no idea if this is a good way to go for your daughter in her particular situation, but the way I’d look at it is to tackle David Hume’s argument against the inference of continued (unperceived) existence in the Treatise of Human Nature. He says that we infer continued existence—the existence of the cup in the cupboard when you can’t see it—from the constancy of our perceptions, but that this is unjustified.

When we believe any thing of external existence, or suppose an object to exist a moment after it is no longer perceived, this belief is nothing but a sentiment — David Hume

That quotation is from the “Abstract”, which is a summary of the Treatise. The argument itself is around 1.4.2 (that’s Book.Part.Section).

But there must be secondary sources that could make it more manageable.

Unlike others, I don’t see anything wrong with the wording of the question. It’s out of Hume.

You need to parse each word or phrase in a nested set if that is any help.

Looks like four elements.

You probably need to start with your best theory of mind to make any progress. — Mark Nyquist

@OwenB You will probably get many answers that are useless or worse, like the one I’ve quoted here. I hope someone will come along and suggest a good approach. It’s a difficult question though. Michael’s suggested SEP article is good, but maybe it’s not entry level.

Great post. I particularly appreciate two things: the analogy of writing, which I’d never thought of before (I’ll probably use that in future); and the idea that the back-and-forth between radical sceptics and their opponents is perennial, rather than just a debate of the modern period.

We are biological entities, engendered and evolved in a physical environment, governed by and dependent for survival on the same physical laws as are all the inanimate and animate entities in that 'outside world'. Being delimited by a thin layer of dermis and epithelium does not truly divide us from the physical world of which we are a product and in which we live.

Before we evolved to the point of being able to perceive and reason, we received sensory input and nourishment from that same physical outside; we responded to it, interacted with it, injected waste products into it, manipulated and altered it.

Why should be we not be able to say how we experience it, now that we can enhance, measure and articulate our sensory input? — Vera Mont

This was the very first response in the discussion and it might still be the best one. It eschews a direct engagement with the OP's argument and instead offers a better conceptual framework (or paradigm or what have you), one that can replace the worn out assumptions of the early moderns. Philosophical advances tend to be made that way, rather than with direct point-by-point refutations.

But some philosophers, or enthusiasts of philosophy at least, tend to cast such responses as philosophically naive, as if the modern scientific conception of lifeforms reciprocally engaged with their environments, while it might be okay for practical purposes, is inadequate to the higher demands of philosophy, where it obviously just begs the question (because evil demons and the Matrix and so on).

The OP begins in the head. Vera is saying, let's begin in the world. My question is for everyone here: is there a serious problem with this? If you say it's begging the question, that scepticism about knowledge and about the external world is still appropriate, then don't you need grounds for that doubt? In the face of our knowledge of the world, of the evolution of animals, of ethology, anthropology, and sociology, what warrant do philosophy enthusiasts have to carry on interrupting by saying, ah, but couldn't it all be a dream?

In any case, what justification is there for beginning in the head anyway? Developmentally, we are social first, and only later retreat into our thoughts.

I specifically mention philosophy enthusiasts rather than philosophers per se, because as far as I can tell, the latter indulge in this kind of scepticism as a teaching tool for the history of philosophy, and no longer take it very seriously. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong about that.

We've had two centuries* of philosophers rejecting the solipsistically-inclined philosophy of Descartes and Kant's epistemology of the independent bourgeois individual, etc. When is everyone else going to catch up?

* Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Wittgenstein all reject the Cartesian starting point in philosophy

Your questions imply that you consider the seeing of a thing to require that there be no light passing between the thing and the eye; that if there is a physical process involved in the perception of a thing, that thing is not being perceived. — Jamal

This is not my position and I have absolutely no clue how you could possibly glean this from anything I have said. — AmadeusD

I got it straight from this:

I'm still wanting an explanation of how it's possible we're seeing "actual objects" that i can explore. Every explanation attempting to do so just ignores entirely that we literally do not see objects, but reflected/refracted light which in turn causes us to 'see' a visual construct. No one seems to disagree, but still reject the fact that we cannot ever access external objects. — AmadeusD

Here, you imply that we cannot see objects, for the reason that light intervenes between the objects and the visual system. If that is not what you meant, and there is some other argument here, I cannot see what it could be.

You say we see light — Jamal

I do not. — AmadeusD

But that’s what you said:

Every explanation attempting to do so just ignores entirely that we literally do not see objects, but reflected/refracted light which in turn causes us to 'see' a visual construct. — AmadeusD

Is there some other way to understand “we literally do not see objects, but reflected/refracted light”?

If you don’t actually mean what you say, and you can’t remember what you said, and you’re unwilling to read over what you’ve said before to understand my objections, then it’s not surprising that I’m not getting through to you.

I can’t tell if it’s just that your reading comprehension is bad or if you’re intellectually dishonest. I’ve responded to you patiently and very precisely, each time quoting what you said and responding directly, and now you’re flying off the handle, ranting and raving, and making very little sense. This discussion hasn’t gone the way I hoped, so I’ll bow out.

I'm not going to get into it this time. This is partly because I don't like the debate any more, but also because since you developed your more reasonable version of indirect realism a couple of years ago, it pushes the debate back to more deep and difficult matters: the distinction between appearance and reality, the idea of things "as they really are", etc., all of which I am deeply suspicious of. I think that internally your position is well-argued, but I just don't think I accept the terms any more, the way it's all framed. Sorry to be so vague.

Under certain definitions I can settle for either (1) or (2). It depends. (2) could describe various correlationisms. Whether it's direct or not might not be a fruitful debate, because the way the term is understood is so diverse as to be hopelessly confusing. One person might mean "as it really is, independently of perception," and another might mean "perceived without intermediate objects of perception" or whatever. Seems like a historical debate and I don't know what to do with it any more.

Yes, I understand. You can be a phenomenalist or indirect realist without making mistakes like “all we see is light”. So yeah, your view is more advanced, since it avoids the linguistic confusions—but it is thereby even more deeply wrong. :grin:

I'm still wanting an explanation of how it's possible we're seeing "actual objects" that i can explore. Every explanation attempting to do so just ignores entirely that we literally do not see objects, but reflected/refracted light which in turn causes us to 'see' a visual construct. No one seems to disagree, but still reject the fact that we cannot ever access external objects. It's an odd thing to note. Seems to always boil down to 'we look at something, therefore...' with no treatment of the intermediary.. — AmadeusD

Ah, so you’re one of those guys!

—I can see rain over there behind that hill
—Actually, you can’t
—What?
—All we see is light!
—Oh my God, this shit again.

Your questions imply that you consider the seeing of a thing to require that there be no light passing between the thing and the eye; that if there is a physical process involved in the perception of a thing, that thing is not being perceived. Why would you think this? We see things by means of reflected/refracted light, don't we? This is part of how we access things around us.

But it’s actually quite hard to tell what you think, because your use of terms seems quite unstable. You say we see light, which in turn allows us to “see” visual constructs, which suggests that you think we don't really see things or the visual constructs of those things (since you put the word "see" in quotation marks for the latter). But a more common form of phenomenalism would say that internal images (or models, representations, whatever) are the objects of perception, rather than the raw sensory stimuli; I would have expected this to be your kind of position. And in any case, why does your personal use of the word differ so much from everyone else’s?

The propagation of light, the movement of the perceiver’s eyes, the retinal photoreceptors, the special cells, the electrical signals in the nervous system…and so on. There is a lot that happens to enable us to see things. And yet you deny that we see things. Don’t you think it’s weird that we would have evolved such an elaborate system if it were not for perceiving things in the environment?

Of course, the particular problem here is really just linguistic (ideological too, but I won't get into that), like when people say, without thinking, that what we think of as solid objects are not really solid. I'm not going to fully untie the tangled usages, since what I've said should already suggest a strategy of auto-disentanglement.

To use an analogy: neither travelling to New York, nor travelling to New York directly, demand that I use a teleporter. There is an intervening process, and yet it’s still New York I’m travelling to, directly.

At the risk of being moderated for self-promotion ... I deal with some of these issues in an old article that used to be on the TPF articles site but is now just on my blog: The Argument for Indirect Realism (and there are also two discussions on TPF about the article).

But, having recently come to the CPR I literally have never seen a respected philosopher claim what you're claiming. Perhaps 'patent' is a touch far, but as I see it, this is the standard for anyone not trying to be edgy. — AmadeusD

We were talking about two worlds vs two aspects. The latter is the predominant interpretation of Kant among philosophers. You didn't know that, but now you do. Check the books and the internet if you don't believe me, rather than shouting about how incredulous you are. They asked this question in the last PhilPapers Survey: Kant (what is his view?): one world or two worlds?.

Just because two aspects is more popular (except in Canada) doesn't mean it's right, but it does show that your incredulity is inappropriate.

And didn't you see my quotation from Kant himself, arguing against two worlds? Is he not a "respected philosopher"?

However, if you're referring to the more edgy side of my interpretation, namely that Kant is not any kind of idealist at all--despite incorporating something called transcendental idealism in his system--then that has support among respected philosophers too, notably Arthur Collins in his book, Possible Experience: Understanding Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. As I recall, I actually think Collins goes a bit too far and lets Kant off with too much--but anyway, I haven't even said much along these lines in this discussion; most of what I've said is pretty standard.

If there is any particular statement of mine about Kant's philosophy that strikes you as outrageous, then please quote it and I'll either elaborate on it until you begin to nod in agreement, or else correct myself.

The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares. — Jamal

Finished. Score: 4.2/5. Susanna Clarke must have been influenced by it when she wrote Piranesi.

Next:

• Thus Were Their Faces by Silvina Ocampo
• Inverted World by Christopher Priest, a favourite author of mine who died a few days ago

Corrections are intended to correct. I do not see that you've done this. Asking to be corrected is not asking to be either taken for a ride, or to accept any objection on its face. I've tried to explore the ideas you've put forward and tehy are left wanting to me. If you see this as you describe, far be it from me :)

Yes. They are. Unsure why you're somehow using that as the examplar of the argument, rather than a fairly direct and illustrative couple of analogies. Which you've said it is. So, at a bit of a loss mate :\ They illustrate well that aspect of what I've put forward that you are not getting. If you're not wanting to explore that, then so be it! No issue :) Perhaps I just don't understand - and if that's the case, I couldn't accept what you're putting forth anyway so please don't fault me for either 1. disagreeing with you; or 2. Not understanding you. I am trying to be honest, not difficult. — AmadeusD

Stream of consciousness is cool in modernist fiction but confusing in this context. :wink:

Anyway, it’s rhetorical bluster with a hint of bullshit, but it seems good-natured so you’re forgiven :grin:

But as an example, it seems patently incorrect when you reject the notion that Kant uses the 'two worlds' model. It is clear he does, and this is expressed by other philosophers constantly — AmadeusD

Patently incorrect to agree with the majority of philosophers today, who reject the two world interpretation? It’s a debate with respected adherents on each side—and always has been. So it’s patently incorrect to say that the two aspect interpretation is patently incorrect. The key secondary text is Allison’s Kant’s Transcendental Idealism.

Having said that, I always feel like saying that the two world interpretation is patently incorrect, since Kant is quite obviously drawing a dichotomy between things (regarded) as X vs things (regarded) as Y. But I can’t say that, since I’m forced to admit that Paul Guyer, proponent of the two world interpretation, is a respected Kant scholar.

Talk of a noumenal world looks plainly wrong to me, since noumena are objects of thought, insofar as they are objects at all. They are conceptual. Bearing this in mind, Kant does address a two world interpretation:

Hence the division of objects into phenomena and noumena, and of the world into a world of sense and a world of understanding, cannot be per­mitted at all in the positive signification, although concepts do indeed permit the distinction into sensible and intellectual ones. — A255

This is because the concept of a noumenon is…

… only a boundary concept serving to limit the pretension of sensibility, and hence is only of negative use. But it is nonetheless not arbitrarily invented; rather, it coheres with the limitation of sensibility, yet without being able to posit anything posi­ tive outside sensibility's range.

But remind me why we’re talking about the two world interpretation?

BTW I have personally found LLM AI tools to be sometimes bad with philosophy so I suggest you avoid them except perhaps for guiding your study—certainly don’t give them the last word.

I will say you are perhaps the sweetest person I have interacted in this forum so far. Of course, the bar is not high — okay the bar is low —, but you do come across as kind. — Lionino

You reap what you sow. Since I invited you a couple of months ago you've been arrogant, snarky and insulting to people. And you like to throw around these blanket insults too: sometimes it's that most people on TPF are idiots, now it's that they're not nice.

Fix yourself first. You can't even give a compliment without insulting somebody else.

[And I haven't even mentioned your bizarre fixation on Latin vs French, and the strong possibility that you're a returning banned member who hated the place so much he couldn't get enough of it]

Initially you seemed to be asking for someone to correct your interpretation of Kant if you’d got anything wrong, which is the only reason I commented. But you are sticking to your misinterpretation, and sticking to what really seems like a wilful misunderstanding of what I’ve said, e.g., that I've claimed, contrary to what I've explicitly said a few times, that Kant believes we can access things as they are in themselves—so I won’t continue down that road. I'll just leave you with these, which I think you have not absorbed:

[the thing as it is in itself] is merely an aspect of an external object, the aspect that we logically cannot access — Jamal

The short answer is that Kant is an empirical realist, but the thing-in-itself is not an empirical thing. It's a conceptual construction, a thing imagined as having no properties, and as such a limit beyond which there is nothing more to know. We should not expect to have access to such a thing. — jkop

(There is a very slight tension between these descriptions, which seems to align with the difference between the thing-in-itself and the noumenon)

The example was in response to (i think Janus) positing that via the senses, the inference we make to external objects is essentially 'perfect' and provides 'direct access' to those objects in some way.
My response was to deny this categorically, and the examples used were:
A shadow does not give us any access to the object that caused it to appear, despite (possible) a 1:1 match in dimensions.
The second example was that if you're standing in a bay (A) and a tidal wave hits (lets assume you're Dr. Manhattan) this gives you no access whatsoever so the empty bay(B) across the ocean whcih caused it. While crude, I think these hold for Experience (A) and ding-an-sich (B). — AmadeusD

These are just analogies. Assuming they apply is to beg the question. I thought, from what you said, that you had a better argument.

We Who Are About To... by Joanna Russ. — Jamal

It was really annoying so I abandoned it.

The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares.

We Who Are About To... by Joanna Russ.

If I die, nobody would truly care. This is even worse than if someone thinks negatively about you. When you pass unnoticed through life. — javi2541997

Remind me who you are?

I’m so droll. But seriously, you’re a likeable chap so don’t be so hard on yourself.

Hey wait a minute. If you were fishing for compliments, I took the bait as fast as a hungry flounder.

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." — BC

Finding happiness requires a whole bunch of circumstances to align just right, but there are infinitely many ways that it can remain unattained.

Or, unhappy families are more interesting to hear about from a storyteller, whereas happiness or contentment is always similarly boring from the outsiders' perspective. Every unhappy family's unhappiness has a unique drama.

I think we can say that there is truth to Tolstoy's opening line, although it may not be true without exception and without qualification. This is true of a lot of things you find in literature. Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde are full of stuff like that but they were not being stupid. Even just simple metaphors sound good but are in some sense false, at the same time as being good metaphors. As you get older, time flies, but it doesn't literally fly.

But here is my contender, which I think is truthful despite being false:

Only exaggeration is true. — Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment

I think it was because you had said it was your first time writing a short story. Considering it was really good and you won the contest, I thought that was impressive, and was therefore surprised. — Noble Dust

Ah, that’s not so bad then :smile:

I thought that was impressive, and was therefore surprised. I was also sad to see you deleted it. Attempting publication perhaps? — Noble Dust

Yes, I regret doing that, since there was another way I could have hidden it from the internet. By the way, the Symposium is now private so stories no longer get indexed by search engines.

I'm wanting something from Kant that indicates he thinks we have an access to things-in-themselves — AmadeusD

I have never claimed anything like that, so I don’t know why you’d be looking for it from me.

Of course, I actually do. You’ve said it yourself: you think an external object just is a thing as it is in itself. But the latter is merely an aspect of an external object, the aspect that we logically cannot access (what it looks like when you’re not looking).

If you’d prefer to use a different scheme, one in which it’s all in the head, then do so if you’re into that, but don’t try to use Kant in support of your position. He doesn’t think what you think he thinks.

That said, he does appear to contradict himself quite a lot so I understand the misunderstandings.

This seems to be a fairly direct explication of what i'm positing - we can be 'sure' that intuition is 'caused by' external objects of whatever, unknowable, kind. But our experience is indirect and we do not have access to those objects. — AmadeusD

I think maybe you have misunderstood. He is saying that inner experience, unlike outer experience, is indirect.

Here he summarizes the idealist position:

Idealism assumed that the only direct experience is inner expe­rience and that from it we only infer external things; but we infer them only unreliably, as happens whenever we infer determinate causes from given effects, because the cause of the presentations that we ascribe—per­haps falsely—to external things may also reside in ourselves. — B276

Then he goes on to present his own contrasting position:

Yet here we have proved that outer experience is in fact direct, and that only by means of it can there be inner experience

In a footnote for “direct”:

In the preceding theorem, the direct consciousness of the existence of external things is not presupposed but proved, whether or not we have insight into the pos­ sibilitv of this consciousness.

Since we have direct access to external objects, their existence is not merely inferred.

So you say. But you have no addressed anything I've put forward as reasons for my position, so far. The tide example is a really good one, to my mind because (to the bolded) that isn't access to external objects. And your formulation earlier in this same comment seems to agree with that.

To the underlined: This seems to be an extremely restricted way of considering different view points. It's not idealism to contend that while we're able to reliably infer external objects (and take them as 'given' in some noumenal sense), we cannot access them. In fact, as best i can tell, that is exactly what 'transcendental idealism' amounts to. Again, why I think Kant's intention was never to pretend to overcome the mitigatory fact of sensory organs producing experience 'of the world'. — AmadeusD

Sorry, I didn’t read any of your previous posts in the thread so I don’t know your arguments. What’s the tide thing?

I won’t address your comments about transcendental idealism, because TI is not very relevant at this point. TI plays a special role in allowing Kant later on to establish human objective knowledge of the world.

Aside from Kant, for the sake of argument let’s say (which I would never say) that we infer external things. Why wouldn’t you accept that this inference is a neural component in our access to the world outside our skulls?

Does that track? — Mikie

I think of you as the Adam Sandler of TPF.

I don’t think you’re an asshole and I don’t think most people see you that way. Some do, but that’s what happens when you post in political discussions and get angry sometimes.

I legitimately have no idea what people think of me. Members educated extensively in philosophy may recognize me as a dilettante, and these days I’m more visible in the Shoutbox than anywhere else so I’m probably thought of as a buffoon, and perhaps an arrogant one.

I’ve had responses to my philosophical discussions revealing that there are members who’ve been around since the beginning who have no idea, and really no interest in, what I’m saying, despite knowing me for many years (and yet they go ahead and respond to my OPs).

Another time, @Noble Dust expressed disbelief on finding out that I wrote a certain short story that he liked a few years ago. That was weird to me. I wondered, why is he so surprised? Never did find out. I didn’t hold it against him though, I should add.

In a nutshell, I am none the wiser, and it’s probably not worth worrying about.

Absolutely. And again, we have no access to those objects (on my, and I am weakly confident, Kant's account). — AmadeusD

I know I said enough Kant, but just a small point about this. You make a good point, although in the Refutation he does state that “inner experience is itself only indirect and is possible only through outer experience.” (B277)

Whether he carries the argument from the existence of external things to the experience of those things, it’s obvious that he thinks the latter is possible.

Also, if you need me to get the bits where he sets out his empirical realism I guess I could do it tomorrow, if you’re interested. However, you are not precise enough in saying what you object to.

I do not think he intended, and absolutely reject that he succeeding, in establishing any way to access external objects. — AmadeusD

Maybe you’re thinking of a different philosopher, because this is a really odd thing to say about Kant. Your move at this point ought to be to say that for Kant, external objects, which we do have access to, are mere phenomena, and thus mind-dependent. I take issue with that too but it’s at least a decent interpretation.

But that’s probably enough Kant for now.

And If I am wrong, I am arguing against Kant, not you. But I maintain that we do not have that access. As noted earlier with, i think Janus, You absolutely cannot access an empty bay in Bengal by experiencing a tidal wave in Chile. — AmadeusD

You are most definitely arguing against me too. We are animals in direct sensorimotor engagement with the environment. To deny this like a 17th century philosopher is perverse.

It's not access at all. This is why I'm asking for passages - I recall, and can find, nothing to support this formulation. — AmadeusD

Which formulation, exactly? I’m not sure which passages I should be looking for, since all I did in that paragraph was remind you what Kant famously set out to do in the CPR.

Which things are not 'in-themselves' or external. — AmadeusD

This is crucial. Kant does not conflate the empirical with the internal. In other words, things perceived and theorized about are not in the head, for Kant. A way to think about it: just because we perceive external things under an aspect, i.e., in a certain way, or expressed more generally, as phenomena, it does not follow that we do not perceive external things. Kant is explicit that external things are things we can possibly experience. External = empirical, and Kant is an empirical realist.

There are those who claim that Kant failed in his efforts not to be construed as a subjective idealist, and they sometimes have a point—it was his own fault to some degree—however, I think the direction of his project is in a contrary direction, and of course he was explicit in rejecting that interpretation, e.g., in the Refutation of Idealism, in which he argues that perceiving your own inner states is dependent on the existence of objects in space, i.e., so-called external objects.

Note that everything I said was standard and uncontroversial, except for my bit about the “fleshly container”, which is a modern spin on it.

It seems he is deeply committed, whether he states it or not, to a barrier between the world and our ability to intuit.. anything. — AmadeusD

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Since intuition, in Kant’s technical sense, is the capacity to form representations, and since he spends a lot of time showing how important it is for us, it’s clear enough that he does not think we intuit nothing. But maybe that’s not what you mean.

Anyway, the barrier, such as there is, is between human knowledge and things as they are in themselves.

Your formulation doesn't strike me as particularly workable - where's the access, if the system necessarily precludes it? If you mean to say that Kant advises us that the access we do have, as indirect and unreliable as it is, is in fact access, i would reject it even if i read that into Kant. — AmadeusD

In the Critique of Pure Reason he sets out to show how synthetic a priori knowledge is possible, without considering that it is not. Synthetic a priori knowledge is knowledge that is informative, universal and necessary. This is the reliable access you seek, and our sensibility provides the direct access to things about which we can have this knowledge.

As I pretty much said, if you are instead seeking access to things that cannot be accessed (things as they are in themselves) you will struggle.

Krysař or The Pied Piper, a Czechoslovakian animated film from 1986.

Kant does not, anywhere I've seen, intimate we have any access whatsoever to the things-in-themselves. — AmadeusD

Yes, in Kant's scheme this is almost true by definition, since a thing-in-itself is a thing unintuited, i.e., not presented to our minds through sensation. But since that's how we access things, only some logically possible non-sensible intuition (like a God-like perception) could access them otherwise, whereby they would be noumena, not phenomena--and that's not a talent that creatures like us happen to have.

The objects he discusses are those of the mind, as a result of perception and understanding arranging sense-data into a lil movie for us to watch via the internal projection system of the visual cortex. — AmadeusD

Kant was so steeped in the philosophy of his time that he seems to be understood today as promoting the idea of a barrier between inside and outside, and that's a shame, because when you read him you see that this is not really what he's doing. Rather, he is emphasizing that perception is not a barrier so much as a guarantor of access, and that we really can and do know objective reality (this is the whole point of the Transcendental Analytic). So I'd say the thrust of his thinking is the opposite of how he tends to be taken now, at least in the Anglosphere.

He is certainly explicitly against any movie-in-the-head kind of idea. Think of his epistemology more as stating what was not so obvious at the time, namely that when you think or discuss things, you are doing it in the only way you can: using your faculties of perception and understanding, which have their own structures. You're not a mind in a fleshly container equipped with receptors; you are that container, which includes the brain, directly connected with the rest of the world.

:up:

Yeh, it's good that we're invitation-only.

Thank you for the heads-up. :smile:

Banned @Steven P Clum for low quality culture war stuff and throwing around accusations when criticized.

My guess is audio visual link. Video calls and video-conferencing, basically.