The rest of your post seems to be a move from looking at the logic to demeaning the logician. — Banno

I’ll own that. I looked at the logic, found it wanting, so tacitly disparage the logician positing the very thing I found wanting. And while I acknowledge my wanting means nothing in The Grand Scheme of Things, it arrives honestly, with due diligence, hence there’s as yet no reason to rethink it.

I hope Mww joins in. — Jamal

Yikes!!!

Understanding. Faculty of. Faculty of thought; faculty of judgement; faculty of synthesis of conceptions; faculty of pure a priori cognitions. All listed, as such, verbatim.

One division containing two books containing five chapters containing eight sections containing 179 pages. Oh….and an appendix. Depending on translation.

No wonder there’s mass confusion over just how this thing goes about its business. After 20 years of working on it, two somewhat differing renditions, copious margin jottings, a plethora of peer correspondence….hell, by the time he got done, he might have confused himself.
————

Kant does overlook the difference between S’s abstract and intuitive cognitions, but S overlooks Kant’s difference between discursive and intuitive cognitions. If it is discoverable that Kant’s discursive is not that different than S’s abstract…..S’s criticism is pretty weak.
————

There is a distinction between Kantian and ancient notions of noumena, following from a distinction between Kantian and ancient philosophy. Whether subversion or progress, it is the way of human intelligence generally: build on or tear down whatever some predecessor said.

…..didn’t S do the same thing with respect to Buddhist notions, as S accused Kant of doing with respect to the Greeks? You know….change meanings, relations and whatnot? I dunno myself, although I am aware he associated himself with Buddhist thought in some ways. Just asking.
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Kant defines noumena. He stipulates exactly how he intends the conception to be understood in relation to transcendental philosophy in general and the faculty of understanding in particular. Nowhere in the definition is there a clue, an implication, or even a vague hint, of a relation to the ding an sich. It’s in the text, black and white, done deal. Take it to the bank.

The misuse of the conception, in opposition to its definition…..that’s not on him.

That he elaborates on his intended use of the conception in such a way as to confuse the use with the definition….(sigh)…..that is on him, but only because he’s writing for academics, who are supposed to grasp the subtleties on their own, unlike me and those like me, who wouldn’t normally even know there is such a thing to begin with, much less a proper/improper use for it.
(Hume and S call us “vulgar”. At least Kant wasn’t so mean, only referring to us as “common”. Actually, they mean the vulgar or common capacity of our understanding, not us personally.)
————

Universal is listed in the table of judgements, it is an a priori conception, but it is not a pure conception of the understanding, so named in the text, which are the categories, in which universal is not listed. The conceptions in the table of judgements are thought, are put there….arrived at…..as a part of the process of reason; the conceptions in the table of categories are contained in understanding without being thought, insofar as they are “true pure, primitive”, “original”, they’re just there naturally, as integral to our kind of intelligence. Although, there is a bit about the introduction of “transcendental content”…..whatever that entails isn’t given much explanation.

Metaphysical reductionism covering ubiquitous Kantian dualism writ large, for better or worse.

Anyway…. I joined. Whether contributing anything beyond mere opinion, that’s another matter.

….things known empirically that he claims are necessary truths. — Banno

I think this is a misunderstanding…..literally. Things that are known empirically is one thing; that there are necessary truths is quite another.

It cannot be an absolute necessary truth that H is P, if there was a time when they were known with apodeitic certainty to be different things. The Greeks were quite aware it is absurd to name one thing differently, which makes explicit it was necessarily true for them there were two things, and H was not P. It is only now necessarily true that H/P/V are all one and the same object, which makes the truth of the relation between H and P such that H is P, contingent on the time of its being understood.

Funny thing about that…..to be consistent with the Greeks, one must have a congruent experience of this particular celestial object, which is merely a bright spot in the sky in the morning and a bright spot in the sky at night, and nothing else whatsoever. Now we arrive at the real necessary truth, and that resides in the quality of whatever experience it is from which the knowledge is given. It never was necessarily true H was P, but it is certainly necessarily true whoever thinks they are, must have the exact same understanding of their experiences. Necessary truth isn’t inferred from what is known, but deduced from the understanding of what may or may not eventually be known.

If you understand it is necessarily true an object made of wood cannot be made of ice, you must have already understood how an object made of wood manifests as an object of your experience. If you didn’t already understand how a thing is, you couldn’t say how it isn’t. To say a thing known as being made of wood can’t be made of ice, is merely an exercise in cognitive redundancy, which doesn’t tell of anything not already understood. Whether one realizes it or not, is irrelevant; it still happens just like that, with no more or less theoretical speculative authority than Kripke himself posits in his thesis.

Actually…I take that back. Kripke demeans his speculative authority but asking it repeatedly to be imagined, then informing that to imagine is itself flawed. Why imagine something, only to find out you had no warrant to imagine it? Or that you were doing it all wrong? It surprises me to no end Kripke thinks it even possible to imagine incorrectly, when the very conception of imagination as a human cognitive faculty or capability, precludes it as such, from ever being a source of truth.

That being said, I don’t want to be told what I shouldn’t do to arrive at something; I want to be told how to get there.

he gives a variety of examples of what he says are necessary a posteriori facts... — Banno

Yes, he does. But he neglects to mention how, and certainly doesn’t inform as to the possibility that, the examples get to be facts.

“…. For explanations and examples, and other helps to intelligibility, aid us in the comprehension of parts, but they distract the attention, dissipate the mental power of the reader, and stand in the way of his forming a clear conception of the whole…”
————

Disclaimer: I understand this article is a transcript from an oral lecture. I also understand the audience more than likely has some philosophical background, which means they should have a clue about the subtleties not addressed in the lecture itself.

As well, being of analytic persuasion, Kripke has no inclination to metanarratives regarding human intelligence. So saying, a proper critique of the article as it stands on its own, confined as it is to language use and intentionality towards it, finds little support for the procedure by which the content of the article comes to be, and non-analytic philosophers will find little agreement with it for that very reason. The best to be said herein, then, is that Kripke is right in his own way but his own way isn’t right.

Any empirical knowledge is contingent
— Mww

(…) hard to see why Kripke denies it. — Banno

Reference? Page number?

"Heat is necessarily the motion of molecules" cannot literally be true
— RussellA
I don't agree. — Banno

Heat is the motion of molecules…..as far as our experience informs us. Any empirical knowledge is contingent, therefore heat is necessarily the motion of molecules cannot be literally true. It is only as true as we know as of this point in our experience. Will it always be the motion of molecules? Probably, but we are still not logically justified in saying it is necessarily so. Hume’s problem of induction, T.H.N., 1.,3.,6., 1739. You know……more of that old stuff.

What will probably be argued by Mww is that, if heat is the movement of molecules, then while we learned this, it is an a priori fact deriving from the definition of heat. — Banno

Not quite. After we learn this, it resides in experience, such that we can say we know a priori heat is the motion of molecules without immediate testing or experience to prove it. Besides, if I read you right, if it is an a priori fact given from definitions, we wouldn’t need experience to prove it.
———-

we know stuff only by induction or by deduction? — Banno

We know empirical stuff by experience, we know possible empirical stuff, or empirical stuff possibly, by induction; we know a priori stuff only by deduction because there is no need for immediate experience on the one hand, and indeed there may not even be any on the other, for that kind.
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What's puzzling Kripke is what it might mean to call such truths a priori. — Banno

Dunno why it should be puzzling. For that which is true a priori just means there’s no immediate proof from experience, or no proof from experience possible at all. Whatever makes something true in such case, is merely logical.

Maybe he shouldn’t confuse truth with that which is true. There are no empirical truths; there are only relations between things that do not contradict each other, which makes the relation true under the conditions from which the relation is given.

I’m not a fan of true/truths as such. Far too ambiguous and subject to the inclinations of whomsoever is professing it. Plus, we gotta keep in mind just what kind of intellect is doing all this knowing and truthing and whatnot.

Then comes:"But, all we need to talk about here is this: Is everything that is necessary knowable a priori or known a priori?" — Banno

…..and in the talking about, is the very containment of epistemological within metaphysical statements he denies.

Since it is a mathematical statement, if it is true, then it is true in any possible world - it is necessarily true. — Banno

….which is a metaphysical statement regarding knowledge. From a few instances of a posteriori proofs is developed a principle. For any instance other than from experience, in which the principle is the ground, the proof must hold as it did a posteriori. Otherwise, it is impossible to deduce how the principle could be thought in the first place.

Since we do not have a proof, we do not know if the conjecture is true. Hence we do not know a priori that the conjecture is true. — Banno

It is already given no proof from experience is possible, in that the iterations of the statement are infinite. We have nothing with which to judge infinite conditions, except the logical validity of the principles by which the iterations stand as proven a posteriori, which is of course, the epitome of knowledge a priori.

It becomes unclear what it might be to claim it is true a priori. — Banno

We don’t care if the conjecture is true, we can’t ever arrive at its finality anyway; we only care that the principles which ground the conjecture, work together and do not contradict themselves. We know a priori the principles of universality and absolute necessity, from which is given the LNC. From the LNC is given validity of the conjecture, even without the possibility of empirical proof for it.

What it might be to claim it is true a priori, then, is just to show that if it isn’t, the entire base of human intelligence, re: logic, is junk, insofar as if we cannot use the LNC to validate the conjecture, the use of it to validate anything at all becomes questionable, which is itself a contradiction.

We can reduce ambiguity and increase certainty by employing axioms which leave no room for ambiguity. — Metaphysician Undercover

Agreed. Which returns to I think a major bone of contention in Kripke’s thesis, with respect to classes of statements of knowledge and of metaphysics, where he says, pg 177, “Now I hold that neither class of statements is contained in the other”.

This is to categorically deny the validity of a priori knowledge, the statements of which are always metaphysical, and by such denial the very possibility of purely logical truth disappears. And if that is the case, then purely logical conceptions, in particular, the modal relations under which this entire thesis is constructed, are empty.

Your “leave no room for ambiguity” is the very same thing as the validity of principles, and the “increased certainty” arises from the subsequent employment of them in deductive inferences, which are only and always from pure thought, a quite metaphysical enterprise, I must say.

Just in passing…..rhetorically speaking.

Ok. Thanks.

What do you make of this, pg 177-8:

“One could not say that though in fact every even number is the sum of two primes, there could not have been some extra number which was even and not the sum of two primes. So we certainly do not know, a priori or even posteriori, that every even number is the sum of two primes”.

But does temperature equate to (the sensation of) heat? — Banno

For a thermometer, or some sort of mechanical probe, seems so. For the human skin, its sensation is of more or less heat, or heat or no heat, temperature, as representation of a specific degree of heat relative to a standard, being irrelevant.

Pass. MU’s mindset is closer to mine than Kripke’s.

Still, Kripke does say he’s not considering the ontological side of existences in possible worlds. Which, to me, just says a possible world is this one under a completely different set of conditions. But then, the setters of those designators wouldn’t be here to set them, and there’s no warrant to say that possible world would have the means to set its own designators, so…..vicious circle.

But, I’ve recently discovered…there’s a logic for that.

Ahhh…another one of the cool kids.

Best I could do was a Beavis and Butthead reference.

Sorry, Frank. Dunno what that means.

I’m a virgoyankeebabyboomer with no sense of humor.

Oooo…always wanted to be in a unit.

Would it help you….. — Banno

Not particularly. I’ll just do my own thing, try to keep up.

I’m not even going to ask how you did that.

Must suck to have to stop and teach the preliminaries before you can get to what you want to talk about.

I find your puzzlement, puzzling. — Banno

My fault; I’m not up on the subtleties.

I mean….what’s the point in having identity, giving it absolute power as an irreducible necessity, then say it can have substitutivity attributable to it? Makes no friggin’ sense to me. From which follows, of course, x = y becomes a metaphysical abomination.

Seems it would be worthwhile going over some of the "oddball symbology". — Banno

Cool. Interesting. Thanks.
————

Question: why drop out the part known to be true?

Say there is a law. To remove something that makes it a law, is it legitimate to still call it a law?

If there is a certain undeniable truth already given, and it is deleted….dropped out…..how does that not go to great length to falsify the product of whatever formally contained it?

The whole thing begins with…..for any two objects x and y, if x has these properties and y has these same properties, then x is the same as y. Sounds rather obvious, at first, and just the words themselves are sufficient to call it a true statement, insofar as these words, taken by themselves, don’t contradict themselves.

This must be why Kripke dropped out the F, insofar as it is impossible for every property F to belong to both x and y simultaneously such that x = y. If it were possible, then x =x is false, but it is already an established necessary truth that x = x and cannot be both true and false.

I think one needs be no more than a low-level logician to understand that dropping out both a logical necessary truth and an empirical impossibility, are both required in order to sustain the ideas behind the article.

So….ok, two questions….can the article still have any meaning if those two dropped-out conditions are left in?
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quote="Banno;767932"]Those diamonds and boxes and other oddball symbology serve us well in avoiding such misunderstandings.[/quote]

….or creating them?

Thanks for the clarification for is and =‘s.

……that water boils at 100℃ is known a priori. I gather that you are thinking something like that 100℃ just is the boiling point of water, by definition? — Banno

It is now, after the discovery of it. That water boils at 100C is known a priori only by those after having immediate experience, re: those that test for it, or mediate experience, re: those that learn of the test for it. It’s irrelevant that water always had a specific boiling point, as long as no one knew what it was.

“…. Mathematics and physics are the two theoretical sciences which have to determine their objects à priori. The former is purely à priori, the latter is partially so, but is also dependent on other sources of cognition….”

With respect to the theoretical science of the boiling point of water, the aspect partially a priori, to “determine their objects a priori” is to think how to find out the boiling point of water, to ask oneself, when does water boil, how do I find out, and herein “dependent on other sources of cognition” refers to the observation, hence the phenomenon, that water does in fact behave in a certain way given certain conditions. Somebody, somewhere sometime saw water boiling and wondered how hot it had to be to act like that, all a priori, even if under empirical conditions.

As I mentioned, this is one of the things in Kripke I took exception to, in that he said the astronomers that figured out P and H were “one and the same” couldn’t have done it by means of “a priori ratiocination”, when in fact, it was the only way they could have done it. No different than finding out water boils at 100C.

….some may suppose that all statements of the form x=y are necessary, and hence a priori (Is this Mww's view?) — Banno

Whole bunch of caveats before this is Mww’s view, first being, even assuming linguistic liberties in the original, no statement in itself is ever necessary in the domain of pure logic, to which the very idea of necessity solely belongs.

Second being, only x = x is necessarily true under any possible conditions, and that because the god Aristotle said so, and proved it in his way in his time.

Third, that x = x is necessarily true under any conditions because Aristotle said so, yet that truth is an a priori judgement, or cognition, is because the god Kant said so and proved it in his way in his time, as an extension of Aristotle’s law not addressed by him.

OK, so we got x = y. X is a dog, y is a mammal. It turns out it is necessarily true a dog is a mammal, even though a mammal is not necessarily a dog which an equality implies, so the formula holds in one direction but not in the other.

Staying with x = y, but this time x is a dog but y is a can of green beans. Here, it is absurd that a dog is a can of green beans. Why put rational trust in a logical construct that doesn’t hold under any conditions, which must include its own inversion? If it depends exclusively on what x and y are, such that x and y are somehow predetermined as connected to each other, how can a universal logical truth such as x = y be built on it?

And to cap it all off….that a series of square, diamond and oddball symbology will make it so, where a series of words won’t?

Way past my bedtime……

Length is fine, but you lost me early on. — Banno

Yeah, I feel ya, bruh. When I see “∀F(Fx ↔ Fy) → x=y.” my eyes just sorta glaze over, mind goes blank, reason goes…..say what????

At its initial inception, and the ground of all others, A = A is one of Aristotle’s three logical laws of rational thought, this particular one found in “Prior Analytics”, 2, 22, 68. Whatever Leibniz or any others did with it, follows from that.

For what it’s worth….

If we are given two analytic propositions "Hesperus is Phosphorus" and "Hesperus is not Phosphorus"….. — RussellA

What if we are given one proposition, and its negation?

….how do we know which is true…. — RussellA

Does it matter which, if there can be only one?

….if the truth of an analytic proposition is independent of any empirical knowledge ? — RussellA

The analycity resides in the relation of the conceptions. Doesn’t matter if the conceptions are empirical. It is only after experience informs that P and H are in fact V, is it the case that all the conceptions which comprise V are found in both P and H, and it is necessarily true that either P or H represent V without any possible contradiction. The next step, then, says that there is nothing contained in the conception of P that does not belong to the conception of H, therefore, P and H are the same thing, or, that P is H is a necessarily true statement. We don’t need the experience those conceptions represent, only that all of them are thought to co-exist equally in one object.

And here is the support for the claim that time is not a property of objects, which just might be the reason the whole shebang rears its head in the first place.

Tangled web and all, doncha know.

But we are substituting this into an opaque context - whether they are empirical facts. — Banno

If you want to use logical shorthand, we have P = V, H = V, therefore P = H. Regardless, there was a time when it was a fact this thing in the sky was called P, and there was a time when it was a fact this thing in the sky was called H, and in these times, P was not known to be H. At some later time, experience informed that P, H and V were all the same thing in the sky, P = V at one time, H = V at a certain other time relative to the first time. After that, after the facts changed due to new experience, the thing in the sky was just V.

P never was equal to H, the proposition P is H never occurred to the Greeks, as Kripke said of something else and thus misspoke**, “surely no amount of a priori ratiocination on their part could have conceivably made it possible for them to deduce P is H”, so why are we belaboring the nonsense of it now?
** He said it of astronomers who discovered the distinction, when he should have said it of those who never considered there was one. Besides, one needs no a priori ratiocination when he’s got a telescope and a camera.

So it seems we are left with empirically discovered necessities. — Banno

Ehhhh…..maybe. I’d say we have empirically discovered relations, the relations we understand as being so because they necessarily conform to the laws we invent to describe them.
—————-

WHere's the argument? — Banno

In the text, which as you must well know, is a convoluted mess, requiring some presuppositions, and wouldn’t benefit this discussion.
—————-

Knowledge is experience, experience is always changing with time, so knowledge is always changing with time, therefore knowledge is contingent on time.
— Mww

Well, we know 4=2+2, but that doesn't change over time... an we know water boils at 100℃, at any given time; that doesn't change. So that doesn't work. — Banno

By “knowledge is experience”, the term knowledge is tacitly understood to be empirical knowledge. Mathematical propositions are not empirical knowledge in their construction, but only in their proofs. Mathematical propositions change over time only insofar as the system that constructs them changes; the human cognitive system that constructs mathematical propositions hasn’t changed so the propositions won’t change.

We knew once a liquid substance; we knew later a liquid substance we deemed to label water; we knew later the liquid substance we deemed to label water, boiled; we knew later water boiled at 100C, we knew later water boiled at different temps relative to pressure. Hell, we knew later, not only do things float in water, but water itself floats!!! How cool is that?? Knowledge changed over time.

We didn’t know water boils at 100C at any given time, as you say, until we learned at one time water boils at 100C. We know post hoc and a priori, as mere inference, water under a certain set of conditions will always boil at 100C. Just like, because you put it there at one time, you know a priori that stupid cup is still in the stupid cupboard at any other time, as long as nothing happened to alter the initial conditions.

It is possible the set of conditions under which water boils at 100C changes, such that water no longer boils at 100C. Some would like to proffer that this is sufficient reason to claim physical law is tentative, and in so doing, imply human intelligence is schetchy at best, insofar as it is human intelligence alone which determines physical law. Which is tantamount to those some slapping themselves in the face, getting nothing from it but a ruddy cheek.
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Kant and Kripke. There is obvious disagreement, but they are doing different philosophies, so no big surprise there. The idea was probably, if Kant was brought into this era would he find current philosophy noteworthy. While it is patently unjustified to speak for him, personally I think he would find it unapologetically superficial, there isn’t a particular philosophical doctrine these days a majority of thinkers support, and, there’s a conspicuous dearth of cognitive metatheories.

Nowadays, people who philosophize at all are apt do so regarding what’s said and its communal effect, rather than what is thought and its private effect, and his magnum opus concerned the rational subject over the empirical object, and even with the spectacular advances in physical science, the rational subject is still pretty much just as he was in the 18th century, so I think CPR would be written pretty much as it was. His other sciency stuff would probably be different, and there’s reason to suppose he might have come up with stuff that set the tone for other scientists, just as he did on the 1700’s.
————

might be of further interest to Mww.

That this table is not made of ice is known a posteriori - by examining the table. Yet that this table is not made of ice is a necessary fact about this table - if it were made of ice, it would not be this table. — Banno

All that’s fine, but what’s the point? That this table is made of this substance immediately precludes it being made of any other substance. I rather think that if this table is made of, say, wood, wood isn’t so much an essential property, as being a given property. It would seem the essential property of a table is merely is spatial extension, its shape, without regard to the substance of its construction.

Of more import, methinks: Kripke says, “…this table, if it exists at all…”. If he talks of a table, isn’t its existence given? Otherwise, shouldn’t he be talking of a possible table? Minor quibble, one of many, and overall, irrelevant, other than to exemplify differences in philosophical ground.

Then he says, “this table if it exists art all was not made of ice is necessary…”. Taken as a complete sentence, shouldn’t that have been “…was not made of ice is necessarily true”? Continuing, and under the assumption he means necessarily true, he says, “was not made of ice is necessarily true, it is certainly not something we know a priori”.

Hmmmm…..I don’t think that’s quite right. He’s asking about what we know. So we have a thing we know, a table, made of something we know, say, wood, so we can say with certainty it is not made from anything else, but the ask concerns only what we know, not what we can say.
(Recall the quote, “ Experience no doubt teaches us that this or that object is constituted in such and such a manner, but not that it could not possibly exist otherwise…”)

Experience cannot tell us the table could not have been made of something else, but if it is necessarily true it couldn’t have been made of anything else, because it isn’t, we must have known that necessity a priori.

It isn’t that we know it isn’t made of ice, it’s that we know it is necessarily true it isn’t made of ice. Given that there are only two ways for a human to know anything at all, experience and reason, and the former is from experience but the latter is not, therefore the knowledge in question must be from reason alone, which is, of course, a priori.

I’m not going to apologize for the length of the post. Peruse or not as you wish.

I am surprised….. — RussellA

Explained in the rest of what I said, maybe? Note the CPR quote references universality with respect to empirical judgements, where I referenced necessity with respect to analytical cognitions, both under the a priori umbrella.

That there are two names representing a singular whole object makes explicit the conceptions by which the first name represents that object, reside in the second name equally, such that the second name represents exactly the same whole object, hence “Hesperus is Phosphorus” is a pure analytic proposition, hence necessarily true. It is no less analytical than the proposition “bodies are extended”.

Now you might say, to point to one is not to point to the other. But one does not point to a name, but the thing represented by the name, so he points to the same thing, the same aggregate of conceptions, even if not the same name.
——————

As I could have chosen any name, the connection between the name "Phosphorus" and "Venus" and between "Hesperus" and "Venus" are contingent. — RussellA

Yes, the names are contingent, fully arbitrary, yet usually related to something antecedent to the name itself, in this case a combination of Roman and Greek gods. Nevertheless, the conditions under which the names are chosen, the connection between the representation and that which is represented, is not contingent, but given a priori in the synthesis of conceptual representations with sensory representations, which makes any name itself a mere representation. The names of the gods are just as analytic and necessarily true, insofar as the Greek god Phosphorus cannot refer to anything other than that for which it was cognized.

To say those names are contingent merely because those names were chosen arbitrarily, is nowhere near the logical contingency indicated in epistemological metaphysics. Or, to put it in simplest terms….see how easy it is to force language to screw with reason.
————-

quote="RussellA;767433"]even though I can only know Hesperus and Phosphorus a posteriori[/quote]

That’s not quite right. You can only know of an object in space a posteriori. The object in space is not its name, it is just a thing. The name you know a posteriori because you learned it through experience, as opposed to being the one that installed the name on the object. But to know the object as such, is not to know the name of the object as such, insofar as they are completely different perceptions. You are merely relating the object to the name, which you cannot do a posteriori, but only in reason a priori, yet under a posteriori conditions.

So according to Kripke, that Hesperus is Phosphorus is known a posteriori, yet not contingent. — Banno

It’s is an empirical fact Phosporus is Venus, and, it is an empirical fact Hesperus is Venus. It is therefore an analytical cognition, hence necessarily true, that Phosporus is Hesperus, in that it is just saying Venus is Venus. Technically, this just means there are no conceptions belonging to the one that do not belong to the others. But it is nevertheless contingent, re: not necessary, that the second planet from the sun is called out by any of the names Venus, Phosporus or Hesperus, such names arbitrarily determined by whoever took it upon himself to assign them. As Kripke said, “it could have turned out the other way”, or, even moreso, the same planet could have been given any name that didn’t already belong to an object known to the one assigning. Nevertheless, identity belongs to the object necessarily, indicating how we are to be affected by it, as a function of our human sensibility, yet naming belongs to the agent’s cognition of the object, merely indicating how it is to be represented, as a function of our human intelligence.
———-

On the principle of induction:

“… Secondly, an empirical judgement never exhibits strict and absolute, but only assumed and comparative universality (by induction); therefore, the most we can say is—so far as we have hitherto observed, there is no exception to this or that rule. If, on the other hand, a judgement carries with it strict and absolute universality, that is, admits of no possible exception, it is not derived from experience, but is valid absolutely à priori.…”

Knowledge is experience, experience is always changing with time, so knowledge is always changing with time, therefore knowledge is contingent on time.

“….. Experience no doubt teaches us that this or that object is constituted in such and such a manner, but not that it could not possibly exist otherwise…..”
————

So there is disagreement between you and Kripke? — Banno

Of course, in that he is analytical, I’m continental, with all the implications carried therein. But he’s famous, got letters after his name, might even hold a chair, and I’m none of that, so…..

The suggestion is that Kant took necessary and a priori to be interchangeable….. — Banno

There is a serious caveat here, in that for Kant, when he speaks of the a priori he means pure a priori, meaning having nothing to do with any experience whatsoever. He set this as a definition, probably so he didn’t have to modify the term every time he used it. Conventionally speaking, on the other hand, when the term a priori is used, or even when the uninitiated read CPR and find Kant using the unmodified term constantly, it refers to those conditions of no immediate experience, but grounded nonetheless in antecedent experience.

With respect to Kripke’s metaphysical terms, he actually says independently of ALL experience, which is Kant’s pure a priori, but a priori in its conventional sense, as most are inclined to use it, is not necessarily independent of all experience.

“…. In the first place, if we have a proposition which contains the idea of necessity in its very conception, it is a priori….”

“…..Now, that in the sphere of human cognition we have judgements which are necessary, and in the strictest sense universal, consequently pure à priori, it will be an easy matter to show. If we desire an example from the sciences, we need only take any proposition in mathematics….”

So it is that necessity and a priori are always connected, through the LNC, so if one wants to call them interchangeable because of that connection, I guess he could. There’s so much more to all this, that would show they are not, but…..some other time perhaps.

…..and similarly for a posteriori and contingent. — Banno

The a posteriori is always contingent, through the principle of induction, but again……interchangeable?
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There's this additional complication, the use of "synthetic" and "analytic" in the place of "necessary" and "contingent".

This seems to be equating a grammatical difference with a modal one. — Banno

Maybe equating the relational with the modal. Still a catastrophic rational error. Necessary/contingent are modal categories, which are logical conditions; synthetic/analytic describe relations of conceptions in propositions, which are relational conditions.

I see what you did here, letting me in without fear of court. I owe you a toddy. Or two.

Metaphysical terms needs an edit.

Would you agree a justification for something, is obtained by a judgement on that something? That justification is a derivative of the act of judging, which itself a derivative of judgement?

I'd rather stick to the Leibniz principle, and hold the belief that if any true statement made about x is also true about y, they are really one and the same thing. — Metaphysician Undercover

I covered that, and probably best to leave it at the same kind of thing.

the meaning of "synthetic a priori judgements" cannot be irrelevant to the thread, otherwise, why mention it in the first place. — RussellA

Has nothing to do with it’s meaning; only with juxtaposition. If Kant can justify the one, then it is reasonable to suppose Kripke should be able to justify the other. Successors denied the one, successors may well deny the other. Nowhere in the article is one related, compared, or otherwise connected, to the other, and because it isn’t, whatever meaning it has, is irrelevant with respect to the article.
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I have two searchable editions, in which transcendental is found 568 times but transcendental knowledge doesn’t come up at all. You probably meant knowledge of the transcendental, which was never intended to be knowledge as such. Transcendental, in its strictest sense, is merely a sub-system of thought, premised on the complete absence of anything empirical. Included in that, are conditions of which there is no conscious awareness, hence cannot be known. In a purely logical system they don’t have to be known; they only need to be non-contradictory. As such, the subject knows of a logical validity, but not the objects that belong thereto.

In the B edition, Kant inserted a refutation of idealism. — RussellA

Yes, that being “material” idealism of Descartes and Berkeley. In A, it is the fourth paralogism.

Kant was an empirical realist. — RussellA

Yes, but more than that. (A370)

Kripke didn't want to unite contingent with identity, he wanted to unite necessity with identity. — RussellA

Then why would he present as a problem of philosophy, “how are contingent identity statements possible?”. Upwards from pg10, does he admit “identity statements are necessary, and not contingent”. If the second, why ask the first?

No more Kant. will take us to TPF court, and I can’t afford the fines.

Ehhhh…..as Kripke says, guy writes a book on something, another guy writes a book on how wrong the first guy was. Been that way since Day One. You and I, operating under the auspices of basic logical laws, reject the accordance of contingency with identity, but if somebody comes along and tweaks this definition, or fiddles with that perspective, he can obfuscate the established laws accordingly, and posit something nobody’s ever thought of before.

If you and I are going to get along with the pure analyticalists, we have to concede that when Kripke says, “ for any two objects x and y, if x is identical to y….”, it is more the case x is congruent to y rather than x being identical to y. Pretty simple, really; x is x and therefore not-y. Two objects having common properties is not the same as two objects being identical.

As for the category mistake, here’s my agreement with it:

“For every property F…..” F can be any property, such that if F belongs to x, and if x is identical to y then it is necessary that F belong to y. If F is the property of being round, and if x is round and y is identical to x, then y is round. That’s fine, in that x is, e.g., a round cue ball and y is, e.g., an identically round baseball. Which is also fine, insofar as the conditional is “for any two objects”, satisfied by one cue ball and one baseball.

It remains that a cue ball is not a baseball. But if x is to stand as identical to y, one of every property F is obviously not sufficient to cause x to be identical to y because of F. So keep adding F’s to x, maybe hundreds of F’s, such that when those properties also belong to y, they become closer and closer to both x and y being either a cue ball or a baseball. Still satisfies “for any two objects”, as well as for any property F which belongs to x also belongs to y.

The kicker: “For every property F….”, in order for the cue ball x and the baseball y to be identical, every property F must belong to both equally. It follows that in order for x to be identical to y, a space F belonging to x is the same space F belonging to y, and x and y simultaneously be commonly imbued with every other possible F equally. But two objects sharing the same space F is a contradiction, which negates the case. It must be, then, that they occupy different space F’s but still be commonly imbued with every other F equally. How does that happen, you ask….surely with bated breath. Well…..the space of x in one world, and the space of y in another world. What else?????

Hence contingent identity, contingent on the possibility of other worlds. Under the assumption of another merely possible world, however, such world can only have possible space, from which follows only a possible y can have the property of possible space, or, more correctly, only a possible y can occupy a possible space possibly, which reduces to a real x being identical to a possible y, which is not the original argument. In effect, then, in order to assume x = y identity necessarily, mandates a veritable maze of contingent possibilities.

And that’s a category mistake. Dunno if it’s yours or not, but it works, doesn’t it? The article goes on to circumvent these mistakes, re: “let us use necessity weakly”, or actually, to deny them altogether, re: “I will not go into this particular form of subtlety** here because it isn’t relevant”, in order to justify the notions contained further on in it.

But still, if a theory starts out illogically, and if the circumventions are not all that valid, wouldn’t it jeopardize the whole? Kripke is just saying, if it was this way, we could say this about it. But if it couldn’t be this way, why still talk as if it could? He goes on to talk about it in a different way, that’s all.
(** existence as a predicate, reflecting on existence in possible worlds)

The term "synthetic a priori" should be understood as an idiomatic expression rather than as a literal guide to Kant's doctrine of "transcendental idealism". — RussellA

Kantian transcendental idealism, not needing any inverted commas, is predicate on the possibility of synthetic a priori relations, and cannot stand without them, so must be understood as a literal guide to it, whether or not one regards the philosophy itself as legitimate.

In Kant, identity is the ground for truth in analytic judgements, which are never contingent. Synthetic judgements do not rely on identity, and the truth of them relies on the relation between its conceptions, hence is contingent. Kripke wants to unite the contingent with identity, which Kant deemed, if not impossible, then at least logically insufficient in regard to a brand new philosophy.

So maybe Kant’s term isn’t a mere idiom after all. Which is neither here nor there with respect to the thread.

“…. Now it may be taken as a safe and useful warning, that general logic, considered as an organon, must always be a logic of illusion, that is, be dialectical, for, as it teaches us nothing whatever respecting the content of our cognitions, but merely the formal conditions of their accordance with the understanding, which do not relate to and are quite indifferent in respect of objects, any attempt to employ it as an instrument (organon) in order to extend and enlarge the range of our knowledge must end in mere prating; any one being able to maintain or oppose, with some appearance of truth, any single assertion whatever.…”
(CPR, A61/B86)

Possible world semantics: amusing to play with, but don’t think for a minute there’s any knowledge to be gained by it. And if there’s no knowledge to be gained, whatever amusement there is, is time poorly lost.

To see if two is a number, one looks at the list of numbers to see if it included two. — Banno

You GOT to be kidding me. If a guy doesn’t know whether or not 2 is a number, how would he know what the list of numbers looks like? So, what….he knows…like…3 is a number, but doesn’t know 2 is a number? The list of numbers is infinite. How does one look at an infinite list?

But maybe you meant, to see if this object perceived is a number 2 or not. To understand the object as being a 2, representing a specific quantity. Of course he would not, if he had no experience of the series of numbers having that particular member in the series. But he would still have an understanding of successive quantitative magnitudes, regardless of the form of its representations.
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To see if "the cup has a handle" is true, just check to see if the cup is on the list of things with handles. — Banno

(GASP) How long is the list of things with handles? The handle on a hammer looks nothing like the handle on a cup, but the hammer must be on the list of things with handles. To see if it is true the cup has a handle, why not just look at the farging cup???? It never was a question whether the cup has horns, or wings, or is in the shape of a basketball; it is only asked if it is true the cup has a handle, which immediately presupposes it’s supposed to, insofar as handles are a necessary conceptual schema for that which are cognized as cups. Things which perform similar functions as cups but do not have handles, are cognized as goblets, or whatever.
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2 is a number. That's not generally something one experiences as a phenomena — Banno

Oh dear.

2 is nothing but phenomenon. 2 is an object to be perceived by sight. That which 2 the empirical object thus phenomenon represents, on the other hand, is something not generally experienced. Actually, it isn’t at all; it is merely thought, and thought a priori in descension as quantity, and as schemata of a series of successive quantities, finally as specific schema representing a particular quantity.

“…. Philosophical cognition, accordingly, regards the particular only in the general; mathematical the general in the particular, nay, in the individual. This is done, however, entirely à priori and by means of pure reason, so that, as this individual figure is determined under certain universal conditions of construction, the object of the conception, to which this individual figure corresponds as its schema, must be cogitated as universally determined.…”

Number the conception as opposed to number the word, is not a phenomenon; a number, constructed to represent a quantity, is. Mathematics is impossible without phenomenal representation of quantity. Just as one can think a triangle but can never think the properties belonging to any triangle without the construction of one, so too can one think number but never count a total series of them, or determine possible relations between them without construction of objects representing them.
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It's also clear that whether the cup counts as red or not is a function of the activity in which we are involved, which includes other folk. — Banno

So if I’m all by myself, I won’t count the cup as red? If I’m all by myself, the activity in which I am involved is all my own, so I can only count the cup as red if I think it does. As for the community, we all can count the cup as red iff each of us thinks it does.

But you’re probably coming at this from the fact that when you were a little tyke, you were told the cup was red, hence the “other folk”, and ever since, you’ve never had to think about the properties of that particular thing. Which is tantamount to saying…..you stopped thinking.

Somebody says to you, hand me the red cup……why did you NOT hand him the green one? If other folk are involved in the activity of what is the case, how do other folk get involved with that which is not the case? Can you imagine….all those folk saying, not that one, not that one, not…there ya go, that one. Shheeeesh, how would anyone have invented the Slinky, under those conditions?
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…..it is a bit silly to berate logicians for not starting with experiences. — Banno

Agreed. Logicians shouldn’t start from experience, but from principles.

Ok, thanks. I’m good with Banno might have put on a green shirt this morning. I’m aware of the logical entailment that in some possible world he did, but my knowledge of either of those is exactly zero, so….

Best way to think of the process is that the facts in a possible world are stipulated. — Banno

”Banno might have put on the green shirt this morning" would be rendered as "In some possible world, Banno put on his green shirt this morning". — Banno

Why would we do that?
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Got it. Thanks.

Some of the stuff found in modal logic runs contrary to Kant, so will be anathema to Mww, — Banno

I don’t think what’s now called modal reasoning is all that contrary to Kant, but more a unnecessary extrapolation of it. Or, to be gentle about it, a modernization. Kantian speculative metaphysics, after all, employs the very same modalities, just without the fancy symbols, and at a MUCH more fundamental reasoning level.

↪Mww ...the property of being made from H₂O is true of water in every possible world, but is known a posteriori. — Banno

Known a posteriori in this world. Empirical knowledge obtained in a given world cannot translate to empirical knowledge in some possible world without contradicting the conditions for empirical knowledge. Ever been to a possible world, observed what is already cognized as water, analyzed it to find H2O in it, or not? Unless that happens, knowledge by experience is utterly irrelevant.

So it must be that is hardly an a posteriori necessity. Only if a myriad of presuppositions hold, the very epitome of contingent identity, would water on any possible world perfectly replicate water as it is known a posteriori on this one, the presuppositions we have logical….you know, one of those cursed a priori “scripts”…… but no empirical, justifications whatsoever, to hold.

So, yeah, true enough, water is made from H2O in any possible world, iff every single antecedent condition by which that criteria is met here, is met as well there. THAT……is what we have no warrant to authorize, insofar as the plethora of antecedent conditions makes explicit there are some of which we have no knowledge, which means we could never claim the criteria there is met because we don’t even know the totality of the criteria here. Therefore, a posteriori necessity is, while not absolutely false, is not necessarily true.

Philosophy was warned about this misuse of reason, but apparently, chose to disregard it.

An individual cannot exist in numerous possible worlds. — Metaphysician Undercover

Agreed. If he exists at all, in whichever of the possible worlds he exists in, that world must be necessary.