What the Kantian concept fails to see is that noumena is all pervasive. This obviates the nonsense about ontological divisions: there are none

Upon further reflection, I completely agree (with everything you said): the noumena would be perfectly unintelligible, which undermines our reasons to even think they exist in the first place. I mean, if I can't say logic pertains to the things-in-themselves, then why think that things-in-themselves even excite my sensibility, let alone that I have sensibility?

I guess it depends on what you mean by "exist outside of the mind". For kant, space is a mode of intuition, so all he was saying (as far as I can tell) is that in order for the mind to be represented for experience there must be things outside as indicated by our intuitions which is not our mind. However, this doesn't entail that those intuitions themselves are not completely made up (by our representative faculties, a different faculty, or someone/thing else). By fabrication, I just mean it in the sense of something being simulated and not real. Our intuitions could be simulations of real objects which would have spatially separated things outside of us vs. us all the same. So, for you, why would you say that, as well as things in our intuition indicating things which are separate from the mind, there exists real things that impact our sensibility (and are not just made up)?

Is your goal here to see how well you understand transcendental idealism as generally presented or how well transcendental idealism holds up to scrutiny?

Both are fine by me!

Why must something "produce" experience? Why can't experience just exist? It seems you are assuming causality here. But from whence cause and why invoke it here if you're "starting from nothing" ala the cogito?

Something must produce experience because the content of experience is within space and/or time, which are but forms of experience. Thusly something permanent must exist outside of those forms which is the content of it. Otherwise, space and time are somehow producing the content (which is impossible) or nothing is (which is equally impossible).

Also, I don’t think the cogito argument works. Just because there are thoughts does not mean that there is a thinker in the reality as it is in-itself.

In terms of causality, I am not presupposing physical causality (necessarily); but perhaps some causality between what was sensed and the process which occurs to produce a representation of it.

This just seems to beg the question. I can see 1, but then we jump to "something must produce experience," and now to "it must produce that experience due to causes external to itself (inputs)."

The content of experience must be supplied from something, even if it is from the same being. “input” is just whatever is being supplied.

ure, if you assume something like: "data input ----> processing ----> output." But why not assume something more basic, like light passing through a window. Something like: "Experience exists. Experience flows, changes." - seems to require fewer presuppositions.

Well, so the processing part comes from the transcendental recognition that we have a priori knowledge; and so it can’t be like a light passing through a window. Even in that case, though, it is worth mentioning that there is input → output—so you seem to be agreeing implicitly with #4 on this part. Also, are you saying that a the window doesn’t provide a representation in the form of output? I would imagine that the light coming into the window doesn’t 1:1 pass-through unscathed (unless this is like a really, really, really clean window or perhaps a special one).

Personally, I think the attempt to build up a foundation for knowledge from something like 1 is just the wrong way to go about things. Epistemology seems to inevitably be circular and fallibilist to me. But, if you're going to do it that way, then it seems like presuppositions need to be limited (else it is just assuming what you set out to prove).

Interesting. I would say that I know 1-5 based off of fallibilist, evidence-based reasoning and not absolute grounds.

Why must we have "absolute certainty" when it comes to "ontological purposes?" History seems to show that we're bound to be wrong either way. Building up one's system from a "firm foundation," doesn't seem to make it any less likely to crumble. That being the case, it seems like the methods of science are good enough to inform ontological questions (where relevant obviously).

It’s not that we need absolute certainty: it is that we are incapable of knowing the things-in-themselves, which limits the outreach of science (and ontology proper).

Kant does in fact claim things do exist outside minds, and that necessarily so. In fact, there are two arguments in affirmation of it, concluding from either subjective a priori** or objective a posteriori*** major premises.

So, what……you think the warrant for those claims was unjustified, or, you think he had no warrant at all?

The only one I remember off the top of my head is his "refutation of idealism" which only proves that there must be real things outside of me in space for my representative faculties to empirically determine the 'I'; but this doesn't prove that the sensations or intuitions themselves must be non-fabricated. If there is an argument for that, then please let me know.

@Janus

I think @Banno is confusing the ontological with the epistemic consideration of the cup (in their hypothetical situation they posited): just because epistemically we must treat the ontological object as two (viz., the thing-in-itself and the thing) does not entail in any manner that there are actually two objects in reality which we are describing.

It is talk of the same ontological thing. I am not saying there are ontologically two worlds: I am saying epistemically there must be two, ontologically one.

Anticipated by whom? Not by Kant, I think, or whatever Kant-in-himself may have been.

Perhaps I misunderstood you: I was under the impression that you were just noting that things-in-themselves, if this theory is correct, are completely from our grasp and, thusly, are practically meaningless. Is that not what you were saying?

For my part, I blame Descartes for this adventure in the preposterous, and much else for that matter. He started the ball rolling, and doomed otherwise fine minds to the remarkably silly task of determining whether they and all they regularly and continually interact with every moment really exist and are what they are shown to be while we interact with them. To Kant, though, is reserved the claim that there is, e.g., some thing which I call a chair and sit on all the time, which although it is in all respects a chair as I understand a chair to be and I use it as such, cannot be known

Why is this a silly task? Would you rather blindly trust some of your perceptions? I don’t see any other options here.

Hello Corvus,

Thank you for your reply, and explanation. I am not sure if thing-in-itself is an entity that you are forced to formulate yourself conceptually. When you say, it is something that you formulate conceptually, it gives the impression that you know what thing-in-itself is.   That is what conceptually formatting implies

I don’t think it does. I can know X is not Y without knowing anything about the properties of Y. I know that the limits of my knowledge is that of bananas and never cucumbers; so a cucumber could be just like a banana, but I can only know about bananas.

But I think Kant never said that. Thing-in-itself is something that you cannot conceptually formulate.  If you can, then it wouldn't be  thing-in-itself. Would you not agree?

It depends on what you mean by “conceptually formulate”: it can be formulated in so far as it is however the ‘thing’ exists independently of what was sensed of it.

This statement seems to say that you have sensibility, representations, intuition and cognition in order to perceive an external object.

A representation is the production of senses [of a thing-in-itself or multiple] being intuited (in space and time), and intuitions being judged and cognized (with the understanding).

And you suddenly have a sensibility of the cup, a representation of the cup, an intuition of the cup, and then a cognition of the cup,

There is a ‘cup-in-itself’ or something-in-itself that excited my sensibility. I get sensations of it. That gets intuited (into space and time). That gets judged and cognized. The aftermath of which is a representation.

:up:

Hello Corvus,

What do you mean here? The only thing ambiguous is the statement. I used 'you' to denote you = Bob Ross, and 'I' to denote me = Corvus. But I don't think I used 'I' on my previous posts, did I? I used 'you' to denote you for sure.

You are deducing from, ontologically, one’s representative faculties being 100% accurate whereas I was starting from what one could epistemically justify with reason (and not the understanding). — Bob Ross

There seem misinterpretation going on even what I asked about. I did not deduce anything, but pointed out, and asked if what you have been saying about Transcendental Idealism could be a self-contradiction or possibly misunderstanding of T.I, or both.

I am just saying that using “you = Bob Ross” is ambiguous. Is bob ross my reprsentative faculties? Whatever exists in-itself that that faculty is representing? Etc…
I am pointing out that that ambiguity is the source of our dispute (or your question) here: if my representative faculties were 100% accurate, I would never being about to know it with my faculty of reason. This doesn’t negate your point that yes, the representations, minus our a priori means of intuiting and cognizing them, would be 100% accurate but, rather, that, even in that case, I wouldn’t be able to epistemically (with reason) acquire such knowledge: so I would be forced yet to formulate the ‘thing-in-itself’ conceptually.

Also, something I forgot to mention, even if the sensibility was 100% accurate, it does not follow that the representation is 100% accurate; because the sensations are intuited and cognized, which is synthetic.

There were three things you said or implied that I took objection to: (1) that Python is a new language or at least a new language for web development

I do, in terms of what has been used historically by-at-large, think that python is relatively new to the web development game; but I stand corrected insofar as I was unaware of Django being so old.

(2) that Python and/or Python frameworks have not been properly tested and are unstable or insecure

I wasn’t saying that they haven’t been tested or are necessarily unstable, but like JS frameworks they haven’t been around nor used heavily enough for enough eyes to pentest it as rigorously as older ones; but I see that Django is pretty old so that may not be the case for that framework. For example, newer frameworks made out of newer server-side languages (like using JS for it in Node.js server) introduces new vulnerabilities that know one originally thought to test (e.g., prototype pollution). It’s not that they weren’t tested, but rather that it takes time to sort these kinds of things out; so I just error on the side of a more well known and used language.

(3) that PHP belongs in the same language ballpark as Java.

For web development, yes; as a language, all else being equal, no. PHP is a compiled and interpreted language that is dynamically typed; whereas Java is a compiled language that is statically typed. In my opinion, Java is bloated.

What I did not claim is that Python was used in web development before PHP was; as far as I know the Django guys were the first to use it to build websites. But twenty years (since Django was released) is a decent length of time, and its record is very good. And yes, PHP has always been more popular as a way of building websites.

That’s fair. I was not aware of Django, so I stand corrected on that part; but I do think, by-at-large, PHP has been used a lot more, and thusly has had a lot more eyes on it, than Django for web development purposes (but I could be wrong).

Java and Python are general purpose languages that can do anything, and on the other side you have PHP and JavaScript, which are just scripting languages

I get what you mean, but I wouldn’t classify them this way. Java and Python are very different languages (e.g., one is significantly slower than the other, one is tabular, one statically typed the other dynamically typed, etc.). I don’t consider Java a general purpose language, but I guess any language, when you think about it, could be technically used for anything (if one really wanted to).

Likewise, PHP and javascript are traditionally meant for very different purposes: I personally like to keep it that way. The former is a server-side language, the latter a client-side language. JS, as far as I know, is purely dynamically typed and PHP is a hybrid. I am not sure what you mean by a “scripting language”, but PHP is by-at-large only used for websites and that is because that is honestly only where it prevails.

I view python as a really good “recreational programming language”, meaning that I love using it for personal scripts that I create where I am being lazy and don’t care about optimizing runtimes or memory. However, I get people use it for more than that.

It's a difficult question to answer without knowing what you mean, but depending on which way you look at it, it's both. Flask, on the other hand, is certainly minimalist. But Django adheres strongly to conventions and paradigms, such as DRY, and the separation of concerns of MVC (although they use different nomenclature and slightly different structure, namely model-view-template), so it's a good coding experience. Things never got messy for me in Django, as they definitely did when I was building in JavaScript frameworks.

Cool. I will take a look.

But since you don't like Python, there's little point in wasting your time on it.

I like to think I am open minded (;, I will take a look and give it a shot. It is not that I don’t like Python, but, rather, I don’t think it is a good server-side language for web development: it is great for recreational use. Python is basically normal English in terms its syntax and diction.

So I say, enjoy your PHP :cool:

Oh, I will :wink:

Hello Gregory,

I appreciate your response!

If you try to understand what your cup of coffee is, you will find that you always bring up uses and situations of cups of coffee, and also what others told you about it from when you experienced being young.

Fair enough. Our understanding of the world is constrained to language (or at least initially). I do, however, think we can use language in a way to avoid linguistic dependencies. So I don’t find this very compelling.

So maybe people who are telling you the representation is all that's practically needed are the true idealist.

Depends on what you mean by “true idealist”. They would not, all else being equal, be an ontological nor epistemic idealist by merely asserting that.

. This can come apart even further though when analyzing our own thoughts, the very structure of them, as we think of the parts of objects. What does it mean to say atoms exist? The word atom is said in the mind and images are brought up and combined with pure thoughts one has about research into atoms. The thoughts don't stand alone without the images. But if the images are wrong, completely not applicable to reality, how much reality is left when it's asserted atoms "exist".

I think a lot of what an atom is is independent of language. It’s properties are particularly dependent on the language I speak, nor whatever someone else speaks: it references something independent of language.

To say we only know what we say about the world and not the world in itself is idealism

Not under my understanding. That would just be a form of postmodernism, but it doesn’t entail in-itself that the (1) world is fundamentally mind-dependent ontologically nor (2) all one can know is the ideas from minds. I could see maybe how #2 could be misconstrued to count as that assertion, but it doesn’t really refer to language, which is a meta-conscious higher-order operation (like reason) and not deeper mind operations: it could be that we cannot escape language but also that our experiences are not mind-generated (technically).

Yeah, I can see your lack of comprehension.

All you have said (that I can remember) is:

1. New scientific discoveries nullify transcendental idealism;
2. It is awkward to speak about things-in-themselves;
3. Things-in-themselves don’t matter if we can know nothing about them;
4. Two worlds argument; (which was after my post you are responding to here); and
5. 180 proof’s argument (which was also after this post).


Up to that post, you had only made the top 3, which I already responded to.

So you are happy that you have two cups, when realism and common usage says there is but one.

Realism doesn’t entail there is one cup in the sense that you outlined. If we sense objects, then it is meaningful and correct to say that there is a cup-in-itself and a cup-that-we-perceive because there is a gap between them. Ontologically (beyond our representative faculties), obviously there is one cup (or a mush of existent things).

Although I am not convinced by that kind of argument (which I have spoken to 180 proof about), you are confusing ontological with epistemic idealism. Transcendental idealism is a form of the latter, not the former. Kant specifically denies knowledge of the things-in-themselves: so how could he possibly claim that things do or do not exist outside of minds? Honestly, if anything, Kant is an actual realist; insofar as he does try to argue for real objects outside of minds (which I am not convinced by as a transcendentally true proposition).

Not necessarily. All bodies are representations that I experience (including my own), but what they be in-themselves is cut off from me. This is not the same thing as claiming that all that exists is my mind.

That I can only transcendentally prove my own representative faculty exists is certainly true; but I can paradigmatically prove the existence myself (as a body) and other bodies in the same manner.

I think it's been made clear, by myself and by others, that there are problems with the very idea of a thing in itself.

I don’t think you have said much in terms of your contentions yet.

There's also the problem of one or two worlds - an area of disagreement amongst Kantians in themselves...

Interesting: could you please elaborate?

When you count the things that exist - say the chair on which you sit, or the cup on your table - how many do you count? Is it one, roughly the cup-in-itself as you perceive it? Or are there two, the cup-in-itself, unamenable to conversation, and the cup-as-perceived, about which we somehow can converse?

Is this the “problem of one or two worlds”? Irregardless, I would say that, in terms of your cup example, there are two.

Or will you agree with me that being obliged to ask this question shows that something has gone badly astray?

I am failing to see why this would be the case: could you please elaborate? To me it makes sense to separate the thing-in-itself from the thing (i.e., the sensation of it).

How? Nothing I argued entails ontological solipsism. Perhaps epistemic, but not ontological.

And, paradigmatically, I am perfectly fine saying other people exist as bodies just as much as I do.

Hello Jamal,

Flask is older than Laravel, and Python is older than PHP.

Fair enough.

From my experience, I have seen python being used as a server-side language only relatively recently (but perhaps I just haven’t been around the right groups of people who love Python). Originally, people (as far as I know) used Java, C#, and PHP. If someone was running a website, it was most likely PHP or Java (and not Python). If python was used for web servers before PHP/Java (like Django) in a stable fashion, then I am simply unaware of it and will have to read up on that.

I still think Python isn’t the greatest language for a server-side language, but we can just agree to disagree on that.

Django and Python have a very strong reputation for security; PHP does not (an unfortunate legacy of wilder times, no doubt, which the language has put behind it)

I am not familiar with Django (unfortunately), but I see PHP progress as providing ample evidence of it being thoroughly abused and tested by the community. I doubt, although I haven’t looked yet, that Django doesn’t or hasn’t fallen prey to most (if not all) of what PHP has. If Django has been a stable web server framework since 2000s (with its fair share of CVEs and community testing), then I think it meets my criteria of having a good track record; although I wouldn’t use it since it runs Python as its server-side language (:

I will have to checkout Django sometime though. Is it minimalistic or bloated?

As mentioned in the OP and the ensuing discussion, I'm not hosting TPF myself and I don't have any control of the code. It's hosted by PlushForums, built on Vanilla, which you'll be happy to know is written in PHP :grin:

Interesting!

Hello Banno,

A shame. It is apparent that arguing the point pushes you to defend Kantianism, reinforcing it in your mind.
...
Doesn't that sound a bit too good? A bit like the way in which disciples will praise the words of their Guru? Are his ideas perfect, and if not where do they go astray? If idealism is that good, it's odd that philosopher overwhelmingly reject it. Perhaps Kant was right, so far as he went, but was asking the wrong questions
…
As I alluded earlier, flirting with Descartes, Kant, Spinoza and so on is a philosophical rite of passage. It's lack of critique that marks the novice. Can you tell us where Kant went wrong?

Banno, I am not interested in throwing insults back and forth at one another. I am not interested in any badges, prestige, nor pretentious “rite of passages”. I am only interested in the truth. So, what arguments do you find convincing against transcendental idealism? I have my own reservations of it, but I am not here to make your argument for you. If you have contentions with the view, then please share them!

Your very participation here shows that you hold that there are others who understand something of what you are saying and will participate in a dialogue with you. You're already well past "I think therefore I am".

Conversing with people does not entail the cogito argument at all: it could entirely be the case that I do not exist in reality as it is in-itself and still can have a conversation with you right now.

Hello Corvus,

So you have knowledge of a representation of the thing-in-itself, but that does not count as any sort of knowledge of the thing-in-itself.

Correct. The thing-in-itself is necessary not the thing (the sensations): the former is whatever exists for and in itself, not whatever was sensed of it.

Then where does knowledge of the representation of the thing-in-itself come from? I read you saying, it is not the thing-in-itself.

The cognitions come from intuitions, and intuitions from sensations; and sensations from objects-in-themselves. The sensed object, is not the object-in-itself but, rather, whatever one’s sensibility could capture of it (and thusly not the thing-in-itself).

Hello Corvus,

Isn't it the case that when your sensibility is 100% accurate and everything about the thing-in-itself can be and is gathered by your senses, you cannot fail to know it?

Me as a representative faculty would, but me as a self-reflective cognition (i.e., reason) or psychological tip of the iceberg (‘ego’) would never know. Another way to put it, is that one epistemically would never have any justification to say their sensibility was 100% accurate, even if it turns out, ontologically, it was.

Saying that your sensibility is 100% accurate and everything about the thing-in-itself can be and is gathered by your senses, but you would never know it, sounds like a contradiction, if not misunderstanding Transcendental Idealism, no?

It is just an ambiguity between our uses of indexical pronouns (e.g., ‘you’, ‘I’, etc.). You are deducing from, ontologically, one’s representative faculties being 100% accurate whereas I was starting from what one could epistemically justify with reason (and not the understanding).

Firstly, there is no "the best" framework or languages for programming: it depends entirely on what the project is that one is developing.

Personally, for web development, I am not a big fan of using (what was traditionally) client-side languages as server-side (such as javascript with Express.js and Node.js for servers) nor newer languages (like Python with python flask) as they are slower and tend to have been been pentested much less than other, more traditional, server-side languages (like Java, PHP, etc.). The tradeoff is that they are easier to program in and they are the fad.

My philosophical approach to web projects is minimalism (viz., keep it simple stupid), compartmentalization (viz., always, always, always separate code so that it is modularized: cleaner, more scalable, easier to read, and takes up less storage), documentation (viz., always document what the heck this thing does, and pick languages and frameworks that are well-supported: easier to get people to work on the project, easier to teach them, and easier on you to develop with it), and secure (viz., don't pick the newest language, framework, or library on the block, it takes time for ethical hackers to find vulnerabilities); so I love minimalistic MVC (model-view-controller) frameworks with amazing documentation that utilize very well-known and well-established server-side languages, such as Laravel.

PHP is my favorite server-side language, as it has a long track record, great documentation, its dynamically typed but gives the option of statically typing (with type naming), and is fast.

With regards to libraries and frameworks like React and Angular, it is important to know that it all runs client-side, which adds runtime on the user's browser. Although it is beneficial to run some stuff on the client-side, to save server-side runtime, it is important not to over-bloat the client side; which I worry happens with those kinds of libraries and frameworks for a lot of projects who picked them just because they are in style right now. I would rather keep it simple, and use pre-compiled TypeScript for client-side operations, and keep it absolutely minimal to save client-side runtime.

If you are trying to revamp this website, then please do not hesitate to contact me if you need any help; as I would not mind helping out with a site like this that I enjoy using. What are you guys currently using for the client-side, server-side, query, and style-sheet languages?

Hello RussellA,

My belief is in Indirect Realism, whereby our ideas of objects existing in a mind-independent world are interpretations of sensory input derived from a mind-independent world that is real. I also believe that Kant and @Bob Ross can be said to be Indirect Realists.

Yes, Kant would be an indirect realist.

As both good philosophy and good science are founded on sound logic, your argument aiming at being logical is as much science as it is philosophy.

Not in the contemporary sense of the term: I did not deploy the scientific method to determine this, and I necessarily cannot.

When we perceive the colour red, there is the appearance of the colour red in our sensibilities, which we can reason to have been caused by a particular thing-in-itself. When we perceive the colour green, there is the appearance of the colour green in our sensibilities, which we can reason to have been caused by a different particular thing-in-itself.

It is true that we cannot know the thing-in-itself that has caused our perception of the colour red, but we can reason that it is different to the thing-in-itself that has caused our perception of the colour green.

Not really. I mean we have to abstractly remove our a priori means of intuiting and cognizing the said thing-in-itself(in-themselves) that caused either one, and that requires we remove logic, math, space, time, and various categories of the understanding. Without even logic, there’s no real intelligibility to your argument here.

the thing of perception, or appearance, is the thing of the thing-in-itself, the only difference being time, or, occassion.

Time, space, logic, math, and the limits of sensibility. So there’s not much determinate mirroring of the thing-in-itself from the thing.

Hello Corvus,

Could you please elaborate and clarify on this sentence?  What do you mean by "mirror"? Where does the "mirror" come from? How do you know the mirror was given to you? By whom?

I was just paraphrasing what Mww said (which I linked in the previous response): it could be the case that my sensibility is 100% accurate and everything about the thing-in-itself can be and is gathered by my senses; but I would never know it. My point was that I have no negative knowledge of the things-in-themselves either, for I only have positive knowledge of my own representative faculties.

Hence:

Thusly, I cannot say "this X is not Y" but rather "I only have knowledge of Y, which is not X".

I cannot say “this thing-in-itself is not square” but rather “I only have knowledge of a representation of the thing-in-itself, which is not the thing-in-itself.”. So I know the thing-in-itself is not a phenomena, but that does not count as any sort of knowledge of it.

Hello 180 Proof,

1. There is experience, therefore something exists. — Bob Ross
Tautology.
2. That something, or a part of it, must be producing experience.
(See my reply to #1.)

Agreed, but necessary explication if I am to deduce anything transcendentally without blindly trusting the content of experience.

3. The unified parts of that something which are producing it is the ‘I’.
How do you/we know this is the case?

It is definitional. The ‘I’ is the unified parts of that something which is producing experience. Are you asking why I know that there are unified parts? The parts of the something which produces experience must be unified insofar as they can “communicate” or “interact” with each other: if they were completely cut off from each other then they could not produce that experience.

I guess we could also say part of the ‘I’ is the thing-in-itself which is being represented.

4. The ‘I’ can only produce experience through (data) input (i.e., sensibility).
(See my reply to #3.)

Because it is either producing fabrications or non-fabrications: in both cases, the representative facutly(ies) must be taking in that data as input, which are just either real or fabricated sensations. Whether there is sensibility with respect to excitations of senses by real objects (rather than fabricated ones), that is impossible to tell transcendentally; but there must be sensations. There could also be sensibility and the excitations are of fabricated objects (for something else could be fabricating them).

If there is sensibility in the sense that real or fabricated objects excite them (as opposed to ourselves fabricating the content of sensibility), then there are things-in-themselves. If not, and (ontological) solipsism were true, then there aren’t.

5. The production of experience via sensibility (and whatever may afterwards interpret such sensibility) entails that one’s experience is a representation.
Solipsism.

Why?

Hello Banno,

it's plain that talk about a thing about which we can say nothing is at least awkward.

Not really. It follows from us having sensibility.

And our perceptions reach much further than they did in Kant's day, in ways he could hardly have imagined. I wonder would he have been so ready to talk about the thing-in-itself as beyond our understanding had he seen how far recent physics has taken us. Which is just to say he was a product of his time

I honestly think, although it is all conjecture, he wouldn’t have changed anything if he were alive today. Rather, he would have to address different contentions which are raised nowadays (which he could not have anticipated), such as the common Einsteinien special/general relativity one, but nothing would have changed; as it applies equally today as it did then, and will apply just as equally the forever future. That’s the nice thing about Kant: he stuck to a very oddly specific subject matter which can easily subsume all others underneath it.

Finally, if all we are to take from "There is experience, therefore something exists" is the existence of the experience, I don't see that we have made much progress

This just disqualifies the idea that nothing exists, and nothing produces experience.

it's rather that you are already making us of language, along with all that entails; so your very line of thinking presupposes far more than it pretends.

Like what? Making use of language does not necessarily entail any sort of linguistic dependencies in a theory; so long it is carefully distinguishes semantics from the underlying content.

:up:

Fair enough, my friend!

Hello Banno,

One core problem has already been mentioned by
↪Ciceronianus
.

By @Ciceronianus own admission, it is not a contention with transcendental idealism; as it is a necessary and perfectly anticipated consequence of it.

Keep in mind that when Kant posited his ideas, microscopes were a novelty and Dalton had yet to explicate the place of atoms in Chemistry. Much that was hidden was subsequently revealed. We've learned quite a lot about the stuff we couldn't see. This has obliged Kantians to move to treating of phenomena rather than of reality.

So you might reconsider your first argument. Folk have experiences that do not imply that something exists - hallucinations, dreams, illusions and so on. Your conclusion is not justified.

:up: . I don’t see how this is a contention with transcendental idealism, as having an hallucination is also a representation. All knowledge, other than transcendental extrapolations of the forms of experience, are constrained to the possibility of human experience. Likewise, having more refined tools to perform empirical inquiries does not help resolve the problem that all of it is ultimately contingent on human experience.

Fair enough! I was just trying to understand your position, as I still don't know what you are exactly saying; but if you would like to agree to disagree, then that is fine too. I will leave it up to you.

1. There is experience, therefore something exists.
2. That something, or a part of it, must be producing experience.
3. The unified parts of that something which are producing it is the ‘I’.
4. The ‘I’ can only produce experience through (data) input (i.e., sensibility).
5. The production of experience via sensibility (and whatever may afterwards interpret such sensibility) entails that one’s experience is a representation.

I see...so would 'immanent' be simply possible [human] knowledge of things?

Hello Mww,

It is the function of understanding/judgement, to as closely mirror the thing as it is in itself with the thing as it is represented in us. So….not by happenstance, but by logic, Nature herself being the arbiter.

I am hesitant to agree here: wouldn’t it be more that the understanding/judgment facutly(ies) are preconditioned to try to represent things according to principles, conceptions, and judgments? I don’t see how that would entail a close mirroring of the things-in-themselves.

I rather position transcendent in opposition to immanent rather than transcendental, that’s all.

What do you mean by "immanent", and how it is contrasted to "transcendental"?

Hello Mww,

While this is in accord with Kantian T.I., there is nothing implied therein having to do with negative knowledge. “Impossible to know”, or, knowledge not possible to obtain, with respect to thing-in-themselves, merely highlights human sensory limitation and says nothing whatsoever about the cognitive aspect of the overall human intellectual system. It is absurd to expect a system to make a determination on something that was never given to it.
…
So…..upon sufficient reflection, you might find that rather than having negative knowledge of X, there is only positive knowledge of yourself, re: you know there is something you cannot know, from which follows, that forcing the former at the expense of the latter is what the A/B quote is meant to indicate.

This is a really good point I, admittedly, missed. @Corvus I change my mind: I don’t have negative knowledge of the things-in-themselves because it could be the case that what I negate of is false (since I know nothing about it). Instead, I know that what I am given is not a thing-in-itself, but the thing-in-itself could turn out to be a mirror (by happenstance) of what I am given (and I would never know it). Thusly, I cannot say "this X is not Y" but rather "I only have knowledge of Y, which is not X".

Yes, but not for scientific reasons.

Hello Corvus,

For you to arrive at the conclusion that you don't know anything about X, you should have known,...You know a lot about X, when you don't know anything about X. Consequently the conclusion you don't know anything about X is false….And negative knowledge is also knowledge, no?

That’s fine by me. I just don’t think the colloquial expression “I know nothing of X” is contradicted here, since it precludes negative knowledge. But I do not have a problem admitting that I have negative knowledge of X when I “know nothing about it”.

Hello 180 proof,

Again: philosophical statements.

For me, since I am not grasping exactly what the terms you are using are denoting, this just becomes a circular loop: conceptual supposition ↔ philosophical statement. What do either of these mean in your view? Can you be more specific please?

Hello Pantagruel,

If the sensations are fabricated then are you implying that your intuitions of objectivity are unreliable? As long as you are not effacing the link with objectivity that the intuition effects.

If the sensations are fabricated, then I would never know it; but, yes, they would be unreliable with relation to whatever actual exists in the world-in-itself. It wouldn’t change much about practical life though, because, either way, I a condemned to compare experiences and navigate my life with them. So if I were, for example, in a matrix, then it really would not impact my practical life at all. I still have to do what I have to do.