Can humans get outside their conceptual schemas?
Maybe we wish to check the world against our conceptualization of it to see how far off we are. However, there has been a long standing claim in philosophy, notably popularized by Kant, but perhaps going back to Protagoras, that we can't escape our conceptual schemas. There's no sense in which we can get outside of them to check whether the world is different from how we think of it.
Thus "man is the measure of all things", Kant's fundamental categories of thought and the unknowable noumena beyond it, and the resulting correlationism, as Meillassoux puts it, where we say things like, "those rocks in the ground appear to us to have been bones of an extinct animal millions of years ago, because that's how we relate to the world."
But is this really the case? Let's consider a couple of examples. The ancient Hebrew cosmological schema was the following:
Our modern cosmology is radically different than that. Why is it that we have such a different conception of the universe? And not just the ancient Hebrews, but any ancient cosmology. The reason is because after centuries of careful astronomical observation and developments in physics, those old concepts about the universe massively failed to fit what humanity has learned.
Second example. The Churchlands and some others have put forward the suggestion that folk psychology is radically mistaken, and a mature neuroscience will eliminate propositional content as an explanation for human cognition. Regardless of whether one buys into their arguments, this illustrates the possibility for humans to seriously revise or even outright replace fundamental conceptual schemas.
It would seem then that conceptual schemas are fluid, and subject to revision or replacement after checking the world.
TGW would point out that we don't even need to bring science into. Human beings learn conceptual schemas as they grow up, depending on one's culture and education, and change them as needed. We also often don't agree on what concepts are the right ones. You can see this from endless disagreements in philosophy, politics, religion, etc which tend to have their roots in fundamentally different ideas.
Thus "man is the measure of all things", Kant's fundamental categories of thought and the unknowable noumena beyond it, and the resulting correlationism, as Meillassoux puts it, where we say things like, "those rocks in the ground appear to us to have been bones of an extinct animal millions of years ago, because that's how we relate to the world."
But is this really the case? Let's consider a couple of examples. The ancient Hebrew cosmological schema was the following:
Our modern cosmology is radically different than that. Why is it that we have such a different conception of the universe? And not just the ancient Hebrews, but any ancient cosmology. The reason is because after centuries of careful astronomical observation and developments in physics, those old concepts about the universe massively failed to fit what humanity has learned.
Second example. The Churchlands and some others have put forward the suggestion that folk psychology is radically mistaken, and a mature neuroscience will eliminate propositional content as an explanation for human cognition. Regardless of whether one buys into their arguments, this illustrates the possibility for humans to seriously revise or even outright replace fundamental conceptual schemas.
It would seem then that conceptual schemas are fluid, and subject to revision or replacement after checking the world.
TGW would point out that we don't even need to bring science into. Human beings learn conceptual schemas as they grow up, depending on one's culture and education, and change them as needed. We also often don't agree on what concepts are the right ones. You can see this from endless disagreements in philosophy, politics, religion, etc which tend to have their roots in fundamentally different ideas.
Comments (104)
I think that is a very simplistic and problematical gloss of what Kant said. To actually explain what is called 'Kant's Copernican revolution in philosophy', would take a very long and detailed exposition, like for example one of the several lengthy articles devoted to that subject on SEP or IETP.
However, all that said, I think the 'conceptual schemas' you refer to here are very much more like Thomas Kuhn's 'paradigms' than the Kantian 'categories of the understanding' (which are derived from Aristotle). A paradigm is much more like a worldview of the kind presented by your graphic. And Kuhn's book is very much concerned with what it takes to force the adoption of a new paradigm (a paradigmatic example being the rejection of the Ptolmaic for the Copernican system.)
I don't think Kant's Critiques really require, or depend on, a worldview, as such, as they're aimed at (as it says on the label) being "critiques" - of reason itself, what are the constitutive rules and laws of thought and reason. Whatever they might be, we cannot stand outside them. You can't lay aside thought, and then proceed to think about something. So in that sense, you certainly can't step outside the 'laws of thought', not at least if you want to make sense of anything.
Man being 'the measure of all things' is the theme the Protagoras, and is the subject of trenchant criticism by Plato on the grounds of it being sophistry. So saying that Kant represents that kind of relativism is, I think, a reckless portrayal, of one who was exceedingly meticulous and cautious in his reasoning about such matters. (Some Kant scholar, which I am certainly not, might know if Kant commented on the Protagoras.)
Quoting Marchesk
I think it can be disputed that there is 'a modern cosmology' at this point (bearing in mind that the word 'cosmos' means 'an ordered whole'.) While all of the many disputes about parallel and multiple universes remained unsettled, anyway, and they don't look like being resolved anytime soon.
Quoting Marchesk
That obviously means that a 'mature neuroscience' will have no propositional content, which, I would think, is solid grounds for ignoring it (unless, of course, you are engaged in actual science, rather than pop philosophy).
When I eat an apple I eat the apple -- I do not eat the concept of the apple.
But I know what the apple is by means of conceptualization.
But eating is not the same sort of thing as knowing. Acting is not the same sort of thing as believing. And what I know about is not the same sort of thing as how I come to know about it.
I'd posit that the question is a bit ambiguous -- in the sense that we can understand 'conceptual schemes' to entail either conclusion.
In one sense we could think of 'conceptual schemes' as nothing more than the set of beliefs that cohere together rationally. In which case, of course we have contact with things outside of our conceptual schemes, and thereby there is no need for us to ask of escape.
In another sense, we could say that in order for us to make sense of the 'manifold of experience' -- or for there to be a 'manifold' in the first place, more properly speaking -- there has to be some kind of conceptual structures in place for speech, or knowledge, to even take place. In which case there wouldn't be an escape, but there wouldn't even be the question of escape -- there would just be a limit upon what we could say, from a rational point of view.
To use your example of the ancient Hebrew's cosmology: Did anyone, then, come to believe differently? Probably not. And when different ideas have come to the fore it wasn't a matter of escape, I'd say, either -- but discovery, invention, and oftentimes politics.
Which, I guess, I'd just ask after this 'escape' word, really. I don't think that conceptual schemes are things we escape from. Rather, they are liberating in that they bring sense to the world. Also, I'd say that conceptual schemes are not permanent -- so there is nothing to escape from. Rather, there is a sort of play between conceptual schemes, and then there is the world we live in which is surely both mediated by our concepts and is also something which we compare our concepts to.
It's just a matter of not taking them too seriously, and not too lightly too.
... does that make sense? I'm sort of exploring at the same time as saying what I think...
What if what Kant said was simplistic and problematical? Of course we don't want to believe that because we sunk a lot of time into reading him. But what if he just had no idea what he was talking about, and believed something stupid?
I can't reply to that without appearing discourteous, but suffice to say, I don't believe there's anything to discuss.
Looks vacuous to me. If you can recognize that a conceptual scheme is different from your own, then you are ipso facto not trapped in your own scheme. Think of Caesar assuming that the Germanic tribes to the north worshipped "Mars" because of his assumption that their gods were the same as his.
I think the sense of the question is whether we can get outside of conceptual schemas per se. I would say the obvious answer to that is 'no'.
That being said, the question of whether there is a reality external to our conceptual schema is a horriffic tangle. "On Certainty" is the best attempt I've seen.
Kant maintains that our conceptual access to the world structures the world as we perceive it. "Kant claimed that in traditional forms of epistemology the mind was conceived as a mirror that reflects being as it is in-itself, independent of us. He argues that mind does not merely reflect reality, but rather actively structures reality." * Consequently we can never know the world as it is in-itself and the correlation between subject & object cannot be broken, and we have no independent access to either subject or object.
Meillassoux attempts to develop a view which enables knowledge of the objects independent of the subject. While his method of access (going back to the conception of primary and secondary properties of things, where primary properties can be described mathematically thereby providing independent access) may have it's own problems.
*see https://euppublishingblog.com/2014/12/12/correlationism-an-extract-from-the-meillassoux-dictionary/
"Fluid" is probably too strong a term, since conceptual schemas tend to be relatively stable, especially for any given person. It seems to me that each such schema is a set of retroductive hypotheses that we have deductively explicated and inductively corroborated to a degree sufficient to warrant embracing them as provisional beliefs. Any experiences that are inconsistent with the expectations generated by one's conceptual schema will be unpleasant surprises that prompt the irritation of doubt, which motivates a process of inquiry, which may result in revising one or several of the hypotheses.
His argument - that the very idea of a conceptual scheme is found wanting - is founded on translatability. His analysis seeks to show that as soon as we communicate, with any success, the very idea of a separate conceptual scheme fails.
Is the question as to whether we can "get outside" our conceptual schemes meant in the sense of 'outside all possible conceptual schemes' or 'outside one conceptual scheme and into another'?
Also, is this question understood by you to be equivalent to the question as to whether we can get outside our "faculties"?
Is Davidson treating the idea of a conceptual scheme as the idea of something absolutely hermetically sealed from all other conceptual schemes? Why should conceptual schemes not be isomorphic to varying degrees, as different languages seem to be? I cannot see how translation should then be thought to be problematic for the idea of conceptual schemes.
(It's a long time since I read that paper, and I don't remember being too impressed with it when I did, so I would be reluctant to spend time on it again).
My understanding in critiquing it is that there are fundamental categories of thought we can't escape, or check the world against to see whether the world is different than how we think about it.
So time would be one that Kant mentioned, and yet, modern physics, philosophy and science fiction have all played with different notions of time, even to the point of denying that time is fundamental. That it could be an illusion.
Good question. Someone like Meillassoux would say we do with math. We are able to model things black holes and the inside of atoms without being able to experience them. We're also able to create imaginary worlds different from our own, or ask what it's like to be a bat.
And yet, strangely, and in counterpoint to what you are suggesting, Kant, in claiming that our notion of time cannot be applicable to the noumenal or the in-itself, would also seem to be denying that it is fundamental.
Yet I wonder whether our ability to model things mathematically is not one of our faculties and an integral part of our experience.
Is 'the self' part of a 'conceptual schema'? I think I am self, which comprises all of me in various media (meat, ideas, memories, perceptions...). I think I am one self among many other selves, but the only self I know is me, and I can not escape me. I can't step away from my self to think about who I am. I cannot get outside this schema.
Maybe I am not a self; maybe I am part of a larger schema which 'projects' nonexistent selves on a wall. If the projector went dark, then those selves would cease existentng. I can not get out of this schema either.
O:)
The notion of "conceptual schema" is incoherent. See Davidson.
Shouldn't this be intensional content?
How so? I'd rather read what Banno has to say than "see Davidson".
I should read that again. It's been a very long time.
Others might disagree, since I have ranted on, on this topic, at great length.
In "One the very idea of a conceptual scheme" Davidson shows (to my satisfaction, at least) that the notion of an uninterpreted reality, which is then interpreted into a conceptual scheme, is incoherent; after all, how is one to make sense of an uninterpreted reality which is itself interpreted as an uninterpreted reality? One way to think of this is that Kant did not go far enough; even labelling the noumena was an error. Davidson can also be seen as providing a footnote to Wittgenstein, to which Unenlightened alludes.
Isn't this, in the least, an attempt to do just that - to step outside one's conceptual schema?
The mind has evolved over time and despite some hiccups here and there, it's still has the power to self-reflect and even if this doesn't amount to a ''stepping outside a conceptual schema'' it still has seed of it.
That makes sense to me; and I agree with the point about Kant. The upshot then would seem to be that there is nothing but reality as interpreted; which would seem to be synonymous with reality as conceptual schema, or Wittgenstein's 'world as the totality of facts'.
If mental constructs are socially-conditioned aggregations of ideas and attitudes, then one way out of them is through analytical self-awareness of our own social conditioning.
Question: if you wanted to enroll in a course that taught this approach, which department would it be in?
Yes, although I've read where the Churchlands have said there aren't any propositions in the brain, excepting the ability of the brain to produce propositional statements. Anyway, it was just an extreme example of potentially changing how we think about something considered fundamental.
Then there is no sense in which we are inside them...
Maybe so. Now that you've put it that way, inside is a spatial metaphor. It gives the idea that we're trapped inside some space, and can't get out to the much larger space called the world.
On the one hand, we might follow philosophers like Haim Gaifman and Xinli Wang by pointing out that the notion whose coherence Davidson attacks is not a generic conception of conceptual scheme, but rather the particular conception of conceptual scheme developed by Quine (as recognized by the latter in his "On the Very Idea of a Third Dogma," where he traces his own concept of conceptual scheme to Lawrence Henderson's 1935 monograph Pareto's General Sociology).
Alternatives have been developed by Gaifman and Wang, but also (and especially) by Wilfrid Sellars. Sellars's alternative is notable for allowing comparison between frameworks while still avoiding one of the main targets of Davidson's critique (which critique was inspired by Davidson's reading of Sellars): the crude reductionist conception of an uninterpreted element common between frameworks.
On the other hand, we might argue that, much like Quine's attack (in terms of the analytic/synthetic distinction), Davidson's attack on the possibility of a coherent notion of frameworkhood (in terms of the impossibility of establishing untranslateability) supposes that frameworks must be individuated formally, in terms of internal semantic or syntactic criteria, rather than (say) externally, in terms of differing systems of (non-linguistic) practical norms or uniformities of behavior, through which conformity with particular frameworks (or conceptual schemes) is realized.
That is, we may recognize, following Quine and Davidson, that framework-internal, formal criteria of framework-individuation are not forthcoming, while still distinguishing between frameworks in terms of their conditions of realization in the world. To block the latter move, Davidson would have to persuade us that his radical interpretation account of belief-ascription precludes my recognizing any behavior as conforming to a rule which I do not myself follow -- and to do so would be to render his own account even less adequate to explaining language-acquisition.
There's a problem of induction. There's apriori knowledge. Whatever's being learned as one grows up, it's not space and time. It's not how to apply logic to new situations. Ounces vs grams? Sure. We learn that as we grow up.
But then what are we to make sense of the world without us, since the totality of facts shows us that we've only been around a short time, and only exist on little speck of dust.
Is the world really on as humans conceive it? Or is it that the world has to be as we fundamentally conceive it (time, space, quantity, etc)?
Or is it that there is no world without us, which runs counter to totality of facts we've accumulated.
I don't understand this position by Davidson, Kant or Witty. Are we back to Protagoras? Man is the measure of all that is and all that could be? Yeah, humans!
This is simply an impossible question to answer because any answer we give will be a reflection of our own conceptualizations.
The best we can do is to say things like, for example, that if we had been around at the time of the dinosaurs, and if we are right in thinking that they existed at that time, then we would have seen them.
Which would mean it's possible the world is as we think it is, at least in some cases, such as dinosaurs living 65 plus million years ago, we just can't get outside being human to know.
So then the Greek skeptics were right about our knowledge claims.
I think we have very good reason to believe that our thinking the world is a real process, an expression of the world, like anything else, like for example, a flower is an expression of the world. Our thinking is a kind of flowering of the world, it is in in that sense in total harmony with the world, like all expressions of nature. Really, when you think about it; how could it be otherwise?
Because humans noticed a long time ago a discrepancy between appearance and reality, and that people are quite capable of being wrong about a number of things. Simon Blackburn called this the loose fit between mind and world, and the reason that philosophy came into existence.
Dennett has said that although some animals appear to notice the difference and appear troubled by it, they are not able to reflect on it.
I would say the discrepancy is not between appearance and reality but between imagination and reality. The imagination can confabulate all kinds of things which never actually reliably appear. Anything that does reliably appear is considered to be real.
Is the stick bent in the water, or does it just appear bent, or are we imagining it to be bent? Did I hallucinate the person in the window, or just imagine seeing a face there?
Is it hot in here is it just me?
As observers, we could be spatially located anywhere in the universe and it wouldn't make a difference (except in terms of our comfort). But the only place we could be in time is on the cusp of the present.
So when it comes to schemas vs naive realism, the idea of being stuck inside with our ideas, and wondering about what it would be like to jump the fence to see what is really outside, is itself a limiting schema. Conceptualisation is instead about open ended predictions. We have good reason to expect a lot of what will happen based on past experience. Yet then at the point of possibilities becoming actualised, it is the contradictions of our expectations - the differences that make a difference - that stand out in attention as what "really just happened".
The temporal view anchors consciousness. The spatial view leaves it untethered. The temporal view makes it clearer that the goal of conceptualisation is not to "give us reality" in a way that makes the world's own process of possibility-actualisation redundant. Instead, concepts are necessary to us even being sensitised to what is really happening - in terms of being that which we didn't quite manage to predict.
And that is what we can't get outside of. If we have no prior expectations, then nothing can meaningfully count as "an event". We can't construct a view of the noumenal except in terms of how there was some phenomenological surprise, some failure of a conceptual schema that we then need to correct - by a reconception that leads to better future prediction.
So a spatial metaphor of the realism~idealism issue fails because it is essentially dualistic. Minds have no real attachment to a location in space. It makes no essential difference seeing the same world from somewhere else.
But the temporal metaphor is inherently triadic and semiotic. We are located now at the one particular point which marks a transition from the possible to the actual. Until the future becomes the past, nothing is real in the naive realist sense of being some concrete state of affairs. Propositions can only be referring to probabilities and other kinds of conditional fictions.
And that fits with the natural logic of the psychological process. To be aware of the realities of the present, we must be informed by the expectations of our past. And keeping it all "internal", it is our failures of prediction which constitute our signs of what "really just happened". We know we were surprised and so by logical implication (rather than direct knowledge) it is right to suppose that there is the noumenal out there as the apophatic source of our uncertainty.
The first was the diary note of Joseph Banks, who was the botanist on Captain Cook's 'Endeavour' when it sailed into Botany Bay on its discovery voyage to Australia. The Endeavour sailed in and dropped anchor in Botany Bay, which is a large, almost circular bay immediately south of what is now the City of Sydney. Banks noted that there were a group of indegenes on a sandbank some distance from the ship, but within clear sight. However they showed no sign of recognizing the Endeavour at all. After some hours, the Endeavour put down a longboat which began to row towards the shore. As soon as the longboat separated from the Endeavour, the indigenes all began to take notice - pointing, shouting and raising spears. Banks didn't offer a rationalisation, other than to say that the indigenes behaved exactly as if they didn't see the Endeavour. I wondered (of course I don't know) if it was because they were not able to assimilate or comprehend the image, to the extent they remained unconscious of it, up until something like a canoe appeared. (This anecdote is reported in Alan Moorehead's The Fatal Impact.)
There was another anecdote concerning a pygmy chieftain, who was transported to a mountain look-out. This individual had lived his whole life in the very dense forests of Central Africa. When taken to the look-out, he started to kneel down and reach in front of him. The anthropologists realised he was reacting to a herd of wildebeest that were visible on the plains below - he was trying to touch them. He had no conception of the kind of distance he was looking at and thought the distant animals were small and close.
There were other examples I read about in cognitive science. Plus there's the well-known stories of neurologist Oliver Sachs, author of 'The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat', involving the strange consequences of brain injuries and conditions on perception and cognition. They illustrate the way the mind 'builds' the world and assimilates novel information into it.
Which means a naive view of perception or realism doesn't work. But it's also a mistake to conclude that just because our minds work that way, the world is that way. For example, some have concluded from a meditative or drug induced state that all is one, because of their experience. But another explanation is that the mediation or drugs created the experience, and it has no meaning beyond showing that the mind is capable of collapsing self-other distinctions.
You're saying that surprise is justification for belief in the world beyond us. If we were never surprised by anything, never wrong about how we think or perceive, then there would be no reason to suppose there is more to the world than what we think about it.
It is thus a temporal process of reasoning. But that becomes hard to see if consciousness is being understood as a spatialised thing that exists at a location, like stuck inside the head looking out through the windows of the eyes to the world beyond.
It would seem that our sight dominated hominid brains have been fooled by a metaphorical way of thinking about our relationship to the world.
You mean, the world as it is not perceived?
Quoting Marchesk
Seems like an opportunity to mention Donald Hoffman.
I heard hims say that in a talk on consciousness with Chalmers and Dennett. Dennett did not agree.
It's an interesting metaphor, but the problem I have with it is how we learned that pretty much of all of reality is stuff we don't need to know.
His argument is that despite only having the desktop appearance available to us when using computers, we've still managed to figure out quite a bit of the internal workings such that we know the desktop is an illusion. Evolution itself is a good example of figuring stuff out.
Dennett's counter argument was basically that animals need to be able to know enough truth to be fit, such was who's a mate, what food is, and what will kill it, otherwise evolution wouldn't work.
If the argument is that mates, food and things that kill are just metaphors, then one wonders what evolution is selecting on.
Interesting, Glahn; but I'm not sure what the above phrase might mean. An example?
So the spatial location of a world of real things is what the naive realist presumes they ought to be able to see because that is "what's there". But if you check our visual system, it in fact relies on constant change to construct its impressions of visual stability. If an image is actually stabilised on the retina, it rapidly fades from awareness as the neurons are tuned to signalling only changes in luminance.
So if we fixate on something in the world that is not moving or changing, then our eyes have to compensate by dancing about in microsaccades - keep up a constant jitter to maintain some kind of excited surprise in the retinal cells.
The naive realist reasons the world is some located collection of objects, so the brain just has to look and can see that directly. It is a shifting and unstable world that would instead require an extra effort to decode and represent.
But the temporal nature of consciousness means the opposite. We are always projecting the future and anticipating change. If the world lacks sufficient change to keep us interested, then we start prodding it and disturbing it. We have to force it to change. Consciousness can't exist if it stays in the spatial location. It has to keep riding the edge of change - the temporal location that marks the transition between past and future.
Understood that way, the conceptual basis of awareness becomes an obvious necessity. We must start with some idea of the next moment like a scientific hypothesis to be falsified. We are projecting ourselves into the world as a set of putative actions rather than passively receiving the world as belated news of some existing set of fossilised facts.
That story is cobblers. Just didn't happen.
Quoting apokrisis
Which is why Kant is still taken quite seriously in cognitive sciences.
According to evolutionary biology, homo sapiens is the result of millions of years of evolution. For all these millions of years, our sensory and intellectual abilities have been honed and shaped by the exigencies of survival, through billions of lifetimes in various life-forms - fish, lizard, mammal, primate and so on - in such a way as to eventually give rise to the mind that we have today.
Recently, other scientific disciplines such as cognitive and evolutionary psychology have revealed that conscious perception, while subjectively appearing to exist as a steady continuum, is actually composed of a heirarchical matrix of thousand, or millions, of interacting cellular transactions, commencing at the most basic level with the parasympathetic system which controls one’s respiration, digestion, and so on, up through various levels to culminate in that peculiarly human ability of ‘conscious thought’ (and maybe beyond).
Our consciousness plays a central role in co-ordinating these diverse activities so as to give rise to the sense of continuity which we call ‘ourselves’ - and also the apparent coherence and reality of the 'external world'. Yet it is important to realise that the naïve sense in which we understand ourselves, and the objects of our perception, to exist, is in fact totally dependent upon the constructive activities of our consciousness, the bulk of which are completely unknown to us.
When you perceive something - large, small, alive or inanimate, local or remote - there is a considerable amount of work involved in ‘creating’ an object from the raw material of perception. Your eyes receive the lightwaves reflected or emanated from it, your mind organises the image with regards to all of the other stimuli impacting your senses at that moment – either acknowledging it, or ignoring it, depending on how busy you are; your memory will then compare it to other objects you have seen, from whence you will (hopefully) recall its name, and perhaps know something about it ('star', 'tree', 'frog', etc).
And you will do all of this without you even noticing that you are doing it; it is largely unconscious.
In other words, consciousness is not the passive recipient of sensory objects which exist irrespective of your perception of them. Instead, your consciousness is an active agent which constructs reality partially on the basis of sensory input, and also on the basis of an enormous number of unconscious processes, memories, intentions, and so on. That is the sense in which the philosophy of idealism does indeed recieve support from modern science, insofar as idealism (specifically, Kantian) recognises the constructive nature of conscious thought, of the act of knowing, which lies behind conscious perception.
It's significant that while evolutionary philosophies might appeal to such a Darwinian kind of basis to explain the nature of consciousness, in fact this understanding gives no real comfort to scientific realism either, because it undermines the belief in a 'mind-independent' nature of reality. In other words, whatever significance we attribute to neuronal processes or evolutionary drives, those factors are themselves part of this matrix. That is not to say that they're unreal, but they're not necessarily more real than any other propositional content. In other words, the 'facts of science' are a part of this 'constructive content'; but the point about scientifically-validated facts is that they are 'inter-subjectively' the case, true for any observer.
Here's Bank's Journal. Read it for yourself.
The stick appears bent, and we understand why it appears bent. Appearances can be deceptive, but when they are there is almost always, perhaps even always, a good explanation for why they are deceptive. And it is a range of other experiences (appearances) that tell us that the stick is not really bent. We understand what is real and what is illusion by comparing experiences. We know that the appearance of a stick never spontaneously changes from straight to bent; and that objects generally never spontaneously change their appearances.
Whether there was really someone at the window or whether it was a trick of the light you may never know. But if you were able to verify one way or another it would be via another appearance or set of appearances.
I agree; the idea that they simply could not see the Endeavour is ridiculous. Imagine, for example if a the driver of a road train left the road and drove for miles across the plains approaching a mob of kangaroos that had never seen a road train before. I'm quite sure they would not be able to see it all, and they would all just carry on grazing or whatever and get ploughed into the ground. :-}
Sounds about right! Is there anything about your tail that you are unable to see that you have reason to believe would be there nonetheless if you could see it?
According to Alan Moorehead, Banks simply logged that when the Endeavour anchored, the natives didn't appear to notice. Later, when they sent a small boat out, then they reacted. They might have decided to ignore it - it's obviously impossible to know. Banks didn't say anything beyond the fact that they didn't react. (I can't locate either the relevant page in the actual log, or a copy of Moorehead's book, but that is what it said.)
Apocryphal, perhaps; it is a common assertion in new-age and other psychoceramic circles; sometimes it's Columbus and Indians, sometimes it's Maori. There's a hint of racism about it.
At least good to know I wasn't actually whistling dixie. It was the underlined passage that struck me, but it was my interpretation 'she didn't really see the ship', and I grant that is entirely speculative. Might have, as I said to John, decided to ignore it - which is, however, almost as remarkable, under the circumstances.
It's not reasonable, it's just an aspect of the concept of world. Isn't implication of the unseen an aspect of garden architecture?
I'm not sure if you are suggesting that the situation is the same with the intimation of unseen landscape in the Mona Lisa as is it when looking at an actual landscape?
I think the plausible mundane possibility that is being missed here is that the Aborigines had seen ships before the Endeavour.
That's probably what happened.
Quoting Wosret
That's what I reckon.
I was trying to read your post and I only got a few words into it when it suddenly disappeared. ;)
One would think that an alien craft or species would be far more difficult to detect and identify if similarity to the particulars of experience is what's needed. Universe could be crawling with them, spirits, and all kinds of whatits, but their behavior would just be unintelligible, insignificant, or entirely unperceivable to us.
The actual landscape implies unseen landscape. Belief in the existence of that unseen landscape is not supported by any logic. Problem of induction.
OK, I think I get what you are driving at now. Just because we have found in the past that there are further hills and valleys beyond the hills and valleys that we can see, this gives us no purely deductive reason to believe that there hills and valleys beyond the present hills and valleys that we can see. Is that it?
If that is what you mean, then my reply would be that certainly no deductive logic supports such a belief. It doesn't logically follow from the fact that we can see hills and valleys, that there must be hills and valleys, or in fact anything at all, beyond the horizon. But I do think the conclusion is certainly supported by inductive and abductive logic, and that they are not merely matters of habit, as Hume claimed. All Hume showed, in my view, is that inductive reasoning is not deductive reasoning. Perhaps that was not so obvious in his time.
How would the argument go?
'All the evidence from past experience and the human understanding of geology and geography suggests that there will always be something beyond the horizon of any landscape. There are no known cases recorded where humans have discovered an horizon beyond which lies nothingness. Since this is the only evidence we have available to us, it makes best rational sense to trust it.'
Something like that, I guess. What if you had to bet your life on whether there was something beyond an horizon? I think you would know very well what is most likely based on past experience. This is not merely habit, but is practical reasoning based upon the fact that we never do find the world to be radically different than we expected it to be based on past experience (barring the occasional, apparently lawlike even if totally unexpected, occurrences such as earthquakes, tsunamis, car accidents, unexpected illnesses, food poisoning and the like). This makes past experience, although it offers no deductive certainty, a very good (in fact the only) guide when making inferences to what will most likely be found in any situation.
Logic is not the basis of this faith. Obviously it isn't observation. So what is the basis of it?
I have already acknowledged that deductive logic is not the basis. The basis is inductive logic. They are not the same. Induction is based on past experience. The logic is that past experience is the best (in fact the only) guide that is backed up by any systematic reasoning that is consistent with our overall experience. So, it is rational to rely on it.
Quoting Mongrel
Do you mean "continuity of past to future"? That assumption obviously cannot be deductively supported, but is inductively supported due to its being universally the case in all of human experience so far as we know.To supply an example of a contravention of this, would be to give a well-documented case of a miracle.
Pragmatism.
Past experience is an excellent guide, assuming contiguity past to future. But the challenge was to support this assumption.
And since that assumption is all we've got, it "makes sense"--pragmatically, if neither deductively nor inductively--to go with it.
Well, if the question ia "how can we logically support the asaumption?" then we know the anawer ia that we can't.
Or maybe Bayes?
But is there some "logical" reason to doubt that the past acts as a constraint on future events such that repetition becomes so likely that it approaches the status we grant "a causal law"?
There is a suppressed premise in you argument - that causation is a matter of direct control rather than indirect limitation. But a pragmatist need only presume that the past weighs heavy on the freedoms of the present and so future outcomes can become reasonably assured.
Would that give us confidence or just be an expression of our confidence?
I don't know. Is there?
Quoting apokrisis
I didn't present an argument.
Maybe you have a short memory?
So again, why should we believe induction has a "logical problem" (when it is viewed as the accumulation of a constraining history)?
There was also the issue of the transcendent viewpoint (from which one asks questions about life as if it's a painting.)
I'm a little baffled that you don't seem to know what the problem of induction is.
I don't mean to be pedantic or picky, but I'm not sure what 'contiguity' is supposed to mean in this context. Do you mean 'connection between', 'continuity from' or something else?
In any case, I can't give you any more than I already have; I'm resource-depleted :’(
I do accept that there is no deductively logical entailment that because things have happened in a certain way in the past that they therefore must do so in the future. So there can be no 'pure' rational justification to believe that the world will continue to behave in a regular or invariant way. But, to repeat again, I do think we have practical rational justification to believe such a thing and that it is not merely a matter of irrational habit, as Hume claims.
You put a cup of tea to your lips. You drink it with full confidence that the tea won't change into gasoline on its way down your throat. You're willing to stake your life on contiguity. The question is: why? With this question, British Empiricism bites the dust. Rationalism does as well.
Quoting John
If temporal and spacial extension are apriori knowledge about objects, could we relate that in some way to this confidence?
I don't think invariance can be counted as a priori. We believe that nature is invariant because we have no reliable experiences at all of it not being invariant. We just have no reason to believe that it could fail to be invariant apart from the sheer logical possibility that it could be; that such a thing involves no logical contradiction. I really think it is as simple as that.
I read Meillassoux' After Finitude some years ago; and the problem I found with that book is that, on the one hand he is arguing for transcendental realism, on account of what he sees as a need to be consistent about wholeheartedly granting the reality indicated by the "arche fossil", and on the other hand he is arguing that the only necessity is radical contingency, such that the laws of nature could change any moment.
The problem with this is that if they could change any moment, then they could have changed any number of times in the past; and since our inferences about what is indicated about the past by anything, in this case fossils, is based on the assumption that nature has been suitably invariant from the time they are assumed to have originated until the present time, and since the assumption of radical contingency should undermine any such assumptions, and follows that radical contingency should undermine our confidence in any consistently intelligible and mind-independent reality even more than the correlationism he is wanting to counter does.
In the Truman Show the world is artificial and is provided and directed by a hidden controller. Also the purpose behind this world is in the mind of that controller. In this scenario Harry Truman has no idea of the reality of his world, or the purposes behind its existence. However near the end of the film he finds the door in the sky, exits the set, meets his controller and is given the purpose of his world and its reality is explained to him.
This idea has also been developed by other thinkers and philosophers throughout history, here is another example.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Flammarion.jpg
Perhaps there is some truth in this, pertinent to your question, a truth that we can step out of our conceptual world by meeting our controller(maker), being told of the purposes and reality of our world. But until we are told, we are blind to it.
Perhaps they would change rapidly if a UFO arrived.
Perhaps we can be taught to see the clues to the reality in the world we perceive. Surely the clues are there, were we to posses the eyes to see them.
The Janus principle. I'm reading about 'mood' which I'm writing about. Oddly enough this very issue comes up there; I suppose it comes up everywhere sooner or later. Ed Tronick, writing about infant moods, says:
He argues in a footnote:
[quote=Tronick"] The Janus principle states that we use the past to anticipate the future; that we look backward in order to look forward. Looking back requires that there be some form of representation that carries the past and the present into the future in a meaningful way to guide thought, action and emotions.[/quote]
His argument such as it is assumes contiguity, I know, but if there is indeed 'some form of representation' common to memory and now, and now again, then it would be surely quite a feat to argue that this form of representation doesn't necessitate contiguity.
I'm explaining why a pragmatist might not be bothered. And that's because induction doesn't have to be true right now, just true in the long run. The "undisclosed" or uncertain is what gets constrained or minimised over time.
Hume may have argued the past counts for nothing. Pragmatism argues the opposite. The weight of history is the only thing that could rationally account for the inevitability of some expectable future.
If we can't rely on logic and our knowledge because something might be different five minutes from now, then doesn't that place a major emphasis on our observations - in order to acquire that new knowledge? I mean if we already possessed all knowledge, then what use would our senses have?
You could base your faith in contiguity on observation if you have a functioning crystal ball.
Confidence, except when stipulated as in statistics, is psychological, a state of mind not necessarily consistent with the logic or even the facts of the matter.
I think that our predilection for expecting and behaving as though the past is a reliable guide for the future is essentially an evolved trait--"hard-wired" if you will, into not only human, but also the vast majority of the animal kingdom that have much neurology. We are automatically predisposed simply to imitate, a very efficient and successful way of learning to negotiate our way around the world. And imitation presupposes that what has worked previously will work again.
That we cannot come up with one of our post facto confabulations couched as "rational support" for this pattern of behavior might indicate the irrelevance of such an explanation for demonstrably pragmatic success, not only for humans, but across species.
It's part of a philosophical conversation. It's an "Oh Shit!" moment between British Empiricism and Kant. I actually don't quite understand the significance anybody finds in Kant sans that oh-shit experience.
Is the problem related to causality? If we knew that the sun would be caused to shine for billions more years, then it wouldn't make sense to say it's possible it might stop shining tomorrow.
And that is what we think is the case. The sun has the matter it needs to do fusion for a long time. In order for that not to be the case, nuclear physics would have to change. We have no basis on which to suppose to suppose that hydrogen would stop fusing under the sun's gravity, or that gravity would change.
Why think any of that is the case? Because it makes sense of the sun shining for billions of years. Otherwise, it's just one unconnected moment to the next, where the sun just happened to shine for all that time.
Seems to me that the lesson we might take from the problem of induction is that our ability to construct rational grounds for our behavior has hit a limit.
And our demonstrably pragmatic success in assuming that the past is a reliable guide to the futire reveals that rational grounding is not at all necessary.
It's an "Oh Shit!" moment only for those who mistakenly believe that rational grounding is somehow necessary. Seems to me that the observable evidence is that rational grounding is neither suffucuent nor even necessary. Even when rationally grounded, our conjectures, theories, hypotheses, explanations sometimes fail, and even when not rationally grounded, they can succeed.
Indeed, given that different hypotheses all assume that the past is a reliable guide to the future, we obviously have found that those with the most rigorous rational foundation are more likely to provide reliable predictions. So rational foundation is a very useful tool or method. But this does not entail that it is necessary to achieve our purposes.
If, as Kant says, our experiences are structured by features of our minds, such as time, space, cause, effect ... and our expectation that the past is a reliable guide to the future is an evolved feature of our minds, then the fact that we are not able to construct rational support for such a belief is irrelevant.
Yep. If even causality is in the end merely another reasonable (from observation) hypothesis for us, then that just strengthens an epistemology that is based openly on that kind of pragmatic reasoning. Causality can be an idea we test for.
Two questions arise:
(1) Doesn't the very notion of "testing" for something presuppose the very regularities at issue in the problem of induction?
(2) When we show Hume our test data, wouldn't he simply say, "Yes, I see the constant conjunction. Where exactly is the cause?"
But briefly, the very idea of making that measurement - claiming to see a constant conjuction (to the exclusion of everything else that is always going on) - is the tendentious step. We have already imposed a conception of "an event" on the world at that point.
This doesn't seem troublesome at all when it is a couple of balls colliding on a billiard table. But say you wanted to measure a particular whorl in a turbulent stream. Can you do that by dipping in a bucket and bringing it over for me to examine? In what way can I repeat the physics of the situation with sufficient completeness so that I can claim to understand its causality mechanically?
So causation is complex in reality. Yet Newtonian mechanics is an incredibly useful simplification of that causal reality - at least when our main interest lies is in building machines rather than building nature. And yes, the mechanical view of causation harbours paradoxes if you start to take its modelling literally. But why would philosophy do that? How could it become "a crisis"?
I have no idea how this answers my question. Crystal balls are only useful for seeing things outside the range of your own eyes. But then you'd need to explain how reflected light in a far-away environment gets placed in some crystal ball right before me for my eyes to then see.
Quoting Brainglitch
Just as our senses are an evolved trait that presupposes that things aren't always the same and that the world is dynamic and we need to be constantly updated with information about the state of the world.
The fact that we rely on knowledge gained in the past and that we have senses for acquiring new, or updated information, must mean something. It must mean something when eyes evolved separately in different evolutionary branches of organisms (convergent evolution). Seeing (observing at a distance) must be a very important thing to be able to do.
I don't see your point here.
What is the "something" that all this "must mean"--other than the uncontroversial fact that it has worked so far?
Natural selection isn't perfect. It even seems to be imperfect in the same manner as our own knowledge in that it can only work with what came before. It can only manipulate existing knowledge, or existing traits, into slightly different versions - not completely new and novel ideas or traits out of the blue. This is what seems to lead to the "mistakes".
We can even explain why it has worked so far and explain when it won't work. If the Earth was covered in smog, then seeing via visible light would probably never have evolved, much less evolved separately several times. If the environment of the Earth changes in such a way, then our existing sense of vision might be of no use. Just turn off the lights in your windowless room and you can see what I mean.
What it means is that the world simply changes, but not so much, and not so fast, that we can't adapt to those changes. The fact that there are adaptations at all must mean that the world stays the same for at least a certain period of time - long enough for adaptations to evolve, become useful, and be passed down to subsequent generations because it is still useful. Natural selection seems to determine when it is no longer useful.
What if we were able to fit all of our knowledge from all the different fields of science and all the different domains of investigation in philosophy and religion into a consistent whole? There are a million ways to put a 1000-piece puzzle together in the wrong way, but only one way to do it right. If all of these different pieces were put together in such a way that they work together and even compliment each other, then wouldn't you say that we have finally attained accurate knowledge that would never need to be changed or updated?
It is just that we do not possess all the facts pertaining to any scrutiny; we have very limited knowledge. But that should not keep us from using logic, if we are willing to keep in mind that our conclusions are only probabilistic, not absolute. But if a cult tells me that by performing a ritual of cruel acts on animals I can gain power over people, I know that the probability of that being true is incredibly small, and I walk away from such ideas. This is what logic can do for me. I know with extremely high probability that two plus is two. It is the analysis of abstract truths that take me in realms of substantial probabilities. Applying logic in my sphere of knowledge is just fine. Thus even when some idea, beyond my knowledge of comfortable level defies my logic, I know with high level of certainty that that idea is wrong. Generally we do not much judgment about what doctors say. But let a doctor tell me that aspirin can cure food poisoning, I would know that the doctor is off his rockers.