The Mashed is The Potato
There's the potato, and then there's the mashing of it. The mashing of the potato produces mashed potato. The potato isn't necessarily mashed. The mashed potato is necessarily mashed. A potato freshly plucked from a potato tree is not the mashed or the mashing of it or the mashed potato or the potato tree.
There's the orange, and then there's the expressing of it. The expressing of it produces expressed orange, otherwise known as orange juice. A glass of orange juice contains the expression of an orange. The orange isn't necessarily expressed. The expressed orange is necessarily expressed. The orange is not the expression of it. An orange freshly rooted out of the ground is not orange juice. It has yet to be expressed. It has yet to become orange juice.
There's the meaning, and then there's the expressing of it. The expressing of it produces expressed meaning in the form of language. A statement is an expression of meaning in language. The meaning isn't necessarily expressed. The expressed meaning is necessarily expressed. The meaning is different in ways to the expressed meaning, so they're not the same.
We could use the same logic with rules and the expression of rules, and a whole load of other things, but hopefully you've picked it up by now.
There's the orange, and there's the experience of it. There's the orange, and then there's how it appears. I eat the orange. Have I eaten the experience? Have I eaten how it appears?
We all know, at least deep down, that this makes perfect sense. Well, maybe except for potato trees. I'll give you that one. Like idealists, they don't know a thing, nor do they make perfect sense. So why is it right for idealists to conflate such things and turn how we ordinarily talk into a load of nonsense? According to a recent poll I conducted, shockingly, at least half of those who voted are bonkers in these sort of ways as a result of idealist logic and idealist language.
There's the orange, and then there's the expressing of it. The expressing of it produces expressed orange, otherwise known as orange juice. A glass of orange juice contains the expression of an orange. The orange isn't necessarily expressed. The expressed orange is necessarily expressed. The orange is not the expression of it. An orange freshly rooted out of the ground is not orange juice. It has yet to be expressed. It has yet to become orange juice.
There's the meaning, and then there's the expressing of it. The expressing of it produces expressed meaning in the form of language. A statement is an expression of meaning in language. The meaning isn't necessarily expressed. The expressed meaning is necessarily expressed. The meaning is different in ways to the expressed meaning, so they're not the same.
We could use the same logic with rules and the expression of rules, and a whole load of other things, but hopefully you've picked it up by now.
There's the orange, and there's the experience of it. There's the orange, and then there's how it appears. I eat the orange. Have I eaten the experience? Have I eaten how it appears?
We all know, at least deep down, that this makes perfect sense. Well, maybe except for potato trees. I'll give you that one. Like idealists, they don't know a thing, nor do they make perfect sense. So why is it right for idealists to conflate such things and turn how we ordinarily talk into a load of nonsense? According to a recent poll I conducted, shockingly, at least half of those who voted are bonkers in these sort of ways as a result of idealist logic and idealist language.
Comments (155)
In a sense you have eaten how it appears, because it no longer appears in the same way as it did before you took a bite. You are consuming and modifing the experience and the appearance.
In a sense...
And what about the ordinary sense of how we talk? Does it make sense to say that I've eaten an appearance? What makes more sense to say: that I've eaten an orange, or that I've eaten an appearance? Why should we talk in peculiar ways? Because that's the job of a philosopher? To appear to be talking utter nonsense? If so, I'm not sure I want to be a philosopher. Or, better yet, philosophy needs to be reformed. It needs to be [i]emancipated[/I] from the scurge of so-called philosophers, and a new breed of philosopher should take the reins. Out with the old, in with the new. :ok:
No, I am content to talk about things in the mode of science, and I am content to talk about things in the mode of philosophy, so long as it ends up making sense. I am against talking about things in a peculiar way which doesn't end up making any sense. I accept the science of particle physics, for example, but I don't say the absurdities associated with this bad sort of philosophy which uses, or rather [i]exploits[/I], the science to say things like, "rocks don't exist".
And I privilege ordinary language philosophy because it makes more sense and is far more useful outside of the special little context of bad philosophy, and because ordinary people don't think I'm some kind of idiot or crank, and more astute people don't think that I'm some kind of sophist.
Imagine telling people at your workplace that rocks don't exist. What would they think of you if you said that? How would they react?
You could look down your nose at them and think them unsophisticated, not like a special philosopher with special insight. Or, you could take a valuable lesson from this situation about the merits of ordinary language philosophy.
OK I understand that it serves your purpose but be aware that this is a limit to philosophy's potentiality. Not only philosophy but yours also. Philosophy isn't about regurgitating what has been said before, but an exploration of concepts in novel ways that push the boundaries of our understanding. Sometimes experimental and even creative language is needed for that. Anyone who doesn't spoon-feed you with easily digestible concepts is a sophist I suppose.
Who said anything about regurgitating what has been said before? Ordinary language philosophy is a modern thing, and it might just be one of the biggest challenges that philosophy has ever had to face. It's an attack from within. It is far more novel and creative than most of what has preceded it, which is, like you say, to invent peculiar ways of speaking about things, and to foster the illusion of pushing the boundaries of our understanding. Clouding good sense is what philosophy is a great tool for. It's great for obscurantism, great for absurdity, great for feeling special and insightful without realising the rather empty and senseless nature of what you're declaring as a philosopher.
It makes me think of William Tyndale, who first translated the Bible into English. He ended up being executed. He was before he his time, and the authorities weren't too happy about that.
The inability on here, for no particular good reason, to not readily accept simple understandings of language, simply as tactic often drives me nuts. It is not philosophy it is debate. If such clarification is important to the concept being discussed, fine. Buy at least to my very untrained eye, that is the exception.
Yes as a tactic it is a game of mere one-upmanship. But, not readily accepting the traditional (or simple) understandings of language is useful to ascertain and analayze potential presuppositions.
I really do hope that this is a deliberate parody from you. What's a photocopier? Also, what's a beard? What's a heap of sand?
You [I]would[/I] say that, though. It's clear that you're a big fan of obscurantism from your posting history.
You use philosophical terms on this forum that the ordinary person would not understand, therefore I should conclude that you are an obscurantist because you haven't dumbed down your language and that you do not, as you claim, privilege ordinary language. I do think I have been clear in this thread though.
Why is it that hegel, lacan, Derrida etc have been accused of obscurantism by some and yet others have found their work insightful and meaningful? With a little effort you could understand, but I'm afraid that would mean stepping out of your ordinary langauge cave. One man's obscurantism is another's philosophy
I make a conscious effort not to use philosophical jargon where possible, and in any case, if I use a philosophical term, I'm willing and capable of translating it into ordinary language. And I don't take ordinary language - words like "rock", "orange", and "potato" - and give it a ridiculous hidden meaning which conflicts with ordinary usage.
So no.
Quoting emancipate
Because those others are either plain wrong, or because they took the time and effort of translating the peculiar language: which is a con, not a pro. So it's lose-lose, even if there's a decent point to be gained from the philosophy.
Quoting emancipate
And the predictable ad hominem. It's not about that. It's not about me. It's not about my willingness or ability to understand. It's about the language they use. That's what my criticism is regarding. It's bad for being obscurantism in the first place, even if the philosophy has some merits.
Well, it's a philosophy forum after all, so one can never be sure!
I didn't mean any ad hom. Anyway, what you call obscurantist might simply be a philosophers attempt at discourse, without the associations or baggage that comes with using traditional terms. Such as heideggers dasein for example. In such cases the difficulty of their language serves a purpose. Is this OK by you?
Only if I agree that it's necessary, and I don't in your example. “What can be said at all can be said clearly”.
"The less you understand, the better you listen."
The less I understand you, the more likely I am to scold you for not being clear.
This doesn't evince a very good understanding of idealism.
That one wasn't specifically about idealism, actually. It was a more general point. But that claim came from a member of this forum, and I believe the specific philosophical jargon for the position he was advocating is mereological nihilism.
But thank you for once again jumping to the conclusion that I have no idea what I'm talking about. Obviously I must not possess the intimate knowledge which you do, and have yet to earn my wryness. Please, good sir, leave me be so that I may continue this masquerade without being exposed.
That's fine, but if so, and definitions in dictionaries, utterances about meaning, etc. are expressions of meaning and not the same as meaning,* is it possible for us to "point to" meaning (even if just indirectly or metaphorically or whatever) as we could point to a potato or orange? What would we be pointing at? Where would we be pointing?
*of course, I'd say that definitions in dictionaries, utterances about meaning, etc. are not the same as meaning, too.
As later Wittgenstein put it, "I cannot use language to get outside language".
And as early Wittgenstein put it:
"I can only [I]mention[/I] the objects. Signs represent them. I can only speak [I]of[/I] them, [I]express them in speech[/I] I cannot".
This is to run up against the limits of language.
"What if there were something outside the [I]facts[/I]? Which our sentences are unable to express? But there we have the [I]things[/I], for example, [I]and we feel no desire at all[/I] to express them in sentences".
It does not even occur to us that we should express things or objects in speech: we are quite content merely to express their names, that is, to refer to them, to name or mention them.
"There is indeed the inexpressible. This [I]shows[/I] itself".
It is a layer of reality that somehow lurks beneath or behind language. But yes, we can point and gesture, of course.
I thought that everything above this was a way of saying that you can't point at meaning, but your last sentence says otherwise. So what would we point at, where would we be pointing, etc.?
Why, at the things of course.
At what things?
Use your noggin.
Meanings? Wouldn't that answer be kind of uninformative?
What do you want from me? I just told you of the limits of language. Aren't you listening? What's the point of naming names, which you are more than capable of doing yourself. And it's a little difficult to gesture through text, don't you think?
I'm not having you lead me down the garden path again. State your intentions. Make your point. Or don't bother.
It's okay if your answer is that we can't point at meanings contra expressions of meanings, but if so, that's one important difference between meaning and potatoes or oranges.
Meaning, as opposed to the expression of it, is a bit mysterious, it seems, as early Wittgenstein thought.
But things? Objects? Sure, we can point to them.
Trying to parse the op:
A mashed potato is a potato that's been physically modified.
We can express (a very specific meaning of express) an orange to produce orange juice.
Meaning can be expressed in language.
Idealists think that mind is necessary for the existence of a thing.
[the thrust of the post? I'm lost here]
Some people on the forum deny certain distinctions. They claim that a rule [i]is[/I] the expression of a rule, or that an orange [i]is[/I] the appearance of an orange. The opening post reinforces the distinction, and shows why it matters. They say things like all rules are expressed in language, and that there is nothing but appearance.
The distinction, I think, can be expressed in predicate logic as P(x) and P(x, y). [I]P is an rule[/I], on the one hand, and [I]P is a rule, and P is expressed[/I], on the other.
Given congruent, re: similarly constructed, rationalities, if to “point at meaning” is to indicate an origin for it, or if to “point at meaning” is to summarize its possibility, I can offer such pointing to be none other than reason itself, in the form a judgement whereby a conception conforms to its object or it does not. Here, it is judgement that points to, or in effect, mediates, meaning. Meaning is merely a product of reason and in no way is a property of that which reason examines.
As you say, you have to do something theoretical.
The problem with this for S's view is that S claims that meaning would exist if no people existed.
I’m aware.
:brow:
The expression of pain is not pain. I cry out or grimace - the expression - [i]because[/I] I am in pain. I can make that same expression even when I'm not in pain.
That seems to make as little sense as all of the other examples when conflated.
Even Wittgenstein claimed that the word "pain" [i]does[/I] make reference to a sensation (not an expression). But he didn't think that it described it.
I don't know where you're getting this from or why you think it.
Quoting csalisbury
What? You're changing the terminology. That's going to make a difference. You're no longer addressing my point by doing that. I didn't say that a mashed potato is an expression of a potato. The latter makes no sense for a start.
Quoting csalisbury
I did that on purpose. It's a good analogy. They both use the same word for a reason. I could think up others. For example, this also has some key things in common with putting a piece of paper through a shredder. The paper would be the meaning, the person would be the shredder, the shredding would be the expressing, and the shredded paper would be the expressed meaning. It's like a process of conversion or transformation. You input your raw material, and then it gets processed through the machinery, and gets converted into the end product.
I don't know about the English etymology, but I know from my book on Wittgenstein's [i]Tractatus[/I] that in ordinary contexts, the German "aussprechen" concerns our ability to clearly speak, pronounce, or articulate words. And as such, the German word is a hybrid of sorts between "ausdrücken (to express, quite literally in the sense of squeezing out)" and "sprechen (to speak)".
"Ausprechen" is a special case of "ausdrücken" or expression: it concerns what we put into words or language.
This is from [I]Wittgenstein's Tractatus: An Introduction[/I] by Alfred Norman, a professor of philosophy at Technische Universität Darmstadt in Germany, published by Cambridge University Press.
Wittgenstein was Austrian, next door to Germany, and where they speak a variation of the German language; and he taught at the University of Cambridge from 1929 to 1947. Interesting link.
You could even think of the squeezing out in terms of how our throat muscles squeeze together in order produce vocalisations. Vocalising is another kind of expression: the expression of noise.
There are other analogies too. That book I referenced, for example, draws on the early Wittgenstein and makes links with language and music. It's a good book.
It's only a problem if what you two agree on is true. Obviously I reject what you two agree on and put my own philosophy in its place. My philosophy logically results in that conclusion.
Yeah, I can understand how this could be confusing. Let me expand a little, with reference to this :
Quoting S
As I understand it, the common thread linking the examples in the OP is a particular tripartite structure.
For example, with expression, you have
(1) the thing expressed (say, a meaning)
(2) the expressing (say, the writing down of the word)
(3) the expression itself (say, a word)
Expression is taken as a particular example of a more general structure:
(1) something
(2) Something that happens to that something
(3)something else.
But, being charitable, it seems to me that if people have been talking about rules in the way you describe, what they mean is that a rule simply is an statement about what's allowed, what's prohibited etc etc. They are denying that there is an antecedent (1) that undergoes a (2) to become a (3). (I'm not saying I agree - I don't - but I think this is what they must mean.)
Likewise, the idealist (or one type of idealist) is saying the apple is its appearance. There is not some antecedent thing, which then appears. The idealist probaly wouldn't say 'you're not eating an apple, you're eating its appearance' in the same way a nonidealist wouldn't say 'you're not eating an apple, you're eating its being'. They'd say 'you're eating an apple.' (Again, I'm not taking a stance here.)
Any talk of expression butts up, ultimately, against some kind of bedrock - otherwise you have a situation where everything is an expression of something else. Some things must be primitive - they may or may not be expressed, but they are not themselves expressions. Another way to say this would be that they only express themselves. It seems like these people talking about rules consider rules to be things of this sort. Idealists consider appearance to be something of this sort. (I was talking about pain in this way, as well.
Bingo!
And yet @Banno had the nerve to say that my analogies here lead to misunderstanding. Well, no, not if you are bright enough to get what I'm doing. What he did was a bit like a bad workman blaming his tools. "I've messed up" becomes "These tools are rubbish!", and "I've got the wrong end of the stick" becomes "He's leading people to misunderstanding!". (And if you want to comment on this, Banno, then feel free to do so through private message. Although I'm not in the least bit interested in what you have to say).
How's that for a taste of your own medicine? :grin:
Quoting csalisbury
Yes, I agree that that's what they're doing. I'm showing how this clashes with ordinary language use and common sense.
Quoting csalisbury
As a non-idealist, I'm happy to clarify that by eating an apple, you're eating a particular object. That doesn't seem absurd to me at all. It seems true. That's not the case with eating an appearance.
Quoting csalisbury
Agreed.
Quoting csalisbury
And I disagree with all of you.
Would you agree that there are two types of identity? Variable identity, which is an identity which comes before its malleable variation; potato becomes a mashed potato, but it's still a potato since that is its elementary identity. A sofa cannot be a sofa if it is mashed since it's identity comes from the constant identity as a sofa. The sofa is a sofa because of a combination of variable identities into a form which makes it a constant identity.
Therefore, we can define identity based on variable and constant identities.
How would you define expressed meaning vs the initial meaning. Is there a variable meaning that has an elementary aspect to it, or is it a constant meaning that will lose its identifying form when it is expressed?
An idealist could also say that in eating an apple, they're eating a particular object. In fact, I think most would.
Let me put in this way, drawing on the conversation from earlier - A mereological nihilist might say 'you're not eating an apple - those don't exist - you're eating a bunch of physical simples (or whatever). ' Then there's your 'olp' corrective.
Similarly an 'olp' idealist could very easily say (and they do) that in eating an apple, you're eating a particular object - namely, an apple. There's no inconsistency there.
meological nihilism:physicalism::User 'emancipate:idealism
Sure, but they wouldn't mean what they say, and what they really mean doesn't make sense.
What's the ontology of unexpressed meaning?
At least in the case of potatoes and oranges we can say that they exist as physical objects even when not being mashed or juiced, but in what sense does meaning exist when words aren't being spoken?
It may make sense but many idealists will claim it to be false. There isn't an orange and then also its experience, just as there isn't fear and then also its experience. Fear just is the experience and an orange just is the experience.
Quoting S
It's not that you eat the experience of an orange but that you experience eating an orange. Your account of idealism tries to combine the idealist's account of an orange with the materialist's account of eating, which isn't a view that anybody I know of supports.
The modern idealist will say this is backwards. That which is named is always first an undefined appearance susceptible to naming.
Quoting Michael
This is how that same modern idealist thinks. An orange, as any real physical object, just *is* the experience *because* it has already been named, or which is the same thing, cognized as meeting the criteria for “orange”. Experience is just another word for empirical knowledge.
I mean - they would mean what they say. I don't know how else to meet a 'nuh uh' but with a 'yes huh'.
In any case, whatever your feelings on idealism or rules (and I agree with you on rules!), the line of attack laid out in the OP doesn't work. We know you disagree with others on these topics, of course. The question is whether your OP helps develop that disagreement philosophically. As far as I can tell, it's a shaggy dog story that takes a long walk through analogical slippage to arrive back at the same incredulity about Idealism and beliefs about rules we already know you harbor.
Quoting csalisbury
[quote=S]And I disagree with all of you.[/quote]
Alright, but if that's what it comes down to, why bother with the 'olp' stuff? The irony here is that this 'olp' routine- 'what would people at work say' etc - is being used in order to defend...well, I invite you to explain the OP to people at work:
'What are you talking about, man? Potatoes? Orange juice? Rules are just the things written down in, like, the employee handbook or, like, the rulebook in monopoly. There's no mystery. '
There's no way to refute this, not empirically, not philosophically, not logically. It might be fun to discuss at first, but once the novelty wears off it's better to just shake your head and ignore it.
Ignoring it then leaves one with rationality in general and humanity in particular irreducible to a non-contradictory fundamental condition, because the only other possible methodology, empirical science, cannot provide one. Yet. So far.
Quoting Theorem
All physical objects also happen to be objects of experience OR POSSIBLE experience. This prevents the absurdity of “esse est percipi”. It could also be re-written as, all KNOWN physical objects also happen to be objects of experience. Not even science can deny that.
My own take is that "idealism" shouldn't be the final stance one arrives at - its more like a bottleneck. If we try to imagine an apple, but leave out perspective and a subjective sense of time, we cannot do so. If there were no consciousness, the entire progress of the universe would happen in darkness and quiet- and even that isn't quite right, in the same way that darkness and quiet doesn't really capture death. It's difficult to differentiate between that happening, and nothing happening at all, except by describing the former as though someone were there.
But this isn't satisfying either, because everyday life shows us there is a kind of obstinacy of the material, something recalcitrant to our own perceptions and desires. What impresses us about discovering something undiscovered - a far planet, the grand canyon - is inseparable from the feeling that it was there all along - the sublimity of something far vaster than us that exceeds our concerns.
The only thing left is to accept that there is a mystery at the heart of it, something that we cannot understand through philosophy or thinking alone, maybe cannot understand at all. Stove's criticism of the'Gem' is right, in one sense. Just because we can't think/experience/imagine something without thinking/imagine/experiencing it, it doesn't follow that that thing is dependent on thought/experience/imagination. But the proper use of the gem, imo, is to show us that whatever there is, beyond our thought and experience, it is confused to think of it as something that's basically like how we experience the apple, only unexperienced. That in itself is a kind of idealism, only one that isn't self-aware.
Is it though? Sure, there's much to be learned from exploring the arguments for idealism. I'd even be
willing to say that it's a right-of-passage for anyone who wants to take philosophy seriously in the modern/postmodern world. There's no doubt that contemplating idealism can result in critical self-reflection and epistemological humility. And yet, looking at the way most idealists argue their position, I'm not sure that it reliably produces the desired outcome.
As far as I can tell, many idealists end up at something almost indistinguishable from naive realism. Everything is basically exactly as we already know/experience it to be (except for errors, hallucinations, etc), it's just that, contrary to what everyone thought they knew, everything exists mind-dependently. Are we really to understand that this is the epitome of modern wisdom?
Sure, transcendental idealists are ostensibly more sophisticated than that, but are they really? For all Kant's subtlety, his entire philosophy is premised on the idea that all mental content, whether sensual or conceptual, is utterly disjoint from whatever might be "out there". The sensibility represents the world opaquely rather than transparently. The understanding imposes form rather than receiving it. It's not argued, it's assumed. Modern philosophy since Locke simply takes it for granted, while Kant (and his followers) merely continue the tradition.
I think that's the best way to approach it, yeah, but It's true that in my last post I was only speaking for myself, rather than for others interested in Idealism. That said, it doesn't seem to me that most 'postmodern' philosophers are advocating something along the 'same, but mind not matter' lines - all that preoccupation with The Real & alterity etc.
Regarding Locke, he's a big gap in my knowledge of philosophy, but I was under the impression (no pun intended) that with him it was just the opposite - that our ideas receive their form from things outside us. But I may have that wrong.
I'm more familiar with Kant & I wouldn't agree that he doesn't argue for his position - transcendental arguments form the linchpin of his system. You could take issue with those arguments, but I think it would be a big stretch to say that what he's doing rests on mere assumptions.
To my knowledge Kant appropriated this concept of representation from Locke and ultimately made the understanding responsible for contributing even the "formal" content of these ideas via the application of concepts, thereby severing mind from object to an even greater degree. He then incoherently argued that, due to causality, we could still know that external objects exist despite the fact that we can't know anything about what they are like, apparently forgetting that causality was just another one of the categories applied by the understanding and, therefore by his own lights, not applicable to the transcendental context.
So, while it's true that Kant made arguments for his positions, to my knowledge he simply took the Lockean conception of "opaque" representation for granted and proceeded to make it even more opaque.
Quoting Terrapin Station
The universe is pretty big, it seems likely there will be another intelligent being to decipher meaning other than homo sapiens, right?
I get this is not your point at all. But if you ALL can pretend that you don't understand @S, why do you expect to be understood?
AND IT IS STILL BLOWING MY MIND THAT THE LINE OF YOUR'S THAT I QUOTED SEEMS TO BE SEEN AS COMMON SENSE IN PHILOSOPHY CIRCLES. They went too far down the rabbit hole.
When I use "people" or "person" I'm actually thinking "creature, or just simply entity, with a mind." So not necessarily a human. Not necessarily something on Earth, etc.
I also don't like always equating mentality with brains for a similar reason--it might be possible for minds to be instantiated via other sorts of material, in other creatures, for example--maybe extraterrestrial, with very different sorts of anatomy, or in sufficiently complex computers or whatever, but that's too much to explain all the time.
Why "sufficiently complex" here? How is the meaning of a word being held in an AI any different from the colour blue? When we look at a cup, is the colour a property of the cup? I presume from your earlier dismissal of solipsism that you'd say yes. But to be registered as blue, something must do the registering. Sure, that could be a spectrometer, but then isn't the blueness of the cup a property of the spectrometer? Why does the thing doing the information receiving have to be complex in order for that information to be a property of the receiver, not the producer?
Even paradigm-shifting thinkers aren’t right all the time.
I understand your critique of the Critique, and such has been argued similarly from Schopenhauer to Palmquist, Fitche to Russell, on the vagaries and ambiguities of pure a priori knowledge, the self-contradictions and inherent inconsistencies. Still, to call the Kantian theoretical representation “more opaque” is merely a failure to fully understand the depth of the procedure necessary for doing exactly the opposite, for the admonishment against filling ignorance with illusion in the name of assumption.
We don’t need causality to “know what they are like”; we only use the pure categories to show the fitness of their logical constitution as understanding thinks them, “them” being external objects. In addition, causality alone is not a category, but lies always in connection with dependence, which gives cause and effect. While some have claimed Kant used causality itself as a pure intuition, different in scope and employment than the categories, along with space and time, Kant himself does not.
Anyway....a time and a place, as the saying goes.
"Sufficiently complex" because quarks, hydrogen atoms, etc. don't appear to have minds. It appears to require more complexity than that. So there is going to be some minimum level of complexity required for mental properties, although complexity wouldn't be the only requirement.
Re the second question there, it doesn't make any sense to me. No meaning is the same as a color.
Re the color property question, I'd rather save that for a different discussion, as it has nothing to do with meaning in my view. (I don't want to sidetrack to a big tangent that has nothing to do with what I've (or for that matter what S has) been talking about in this thread . . . I also don't want to do multiple topics per post, really--and we already have two topics above this paragraph)
My original point was that despite all of Kant's subtlety much of his system rests on a dubious concept of representation that he inherited from Locke. This is in contrast to the ancient and medieval conception of representation in which the mind is understood as receiving and abstracting the very form of the object of perception. In later medeival thought this was understood to occur through the action of signs (an idea subsequently developed by C. S. Peirce) which "transparently" represent the object to the mind.
It would be, "If there are appearances then there must be something creating or causing the appearances"
Re his formal comment, he's talking about, for example, the spatiotemporal form of the appearances in question.
This is patently false, on two accounts. Intuitions are representations, not appearances, and, appearances correspond to real physical objects presented to sense before any treatment by reason. And they are NOT noumena.
But, in all fairness because you said “This he calls noumena”, if you could refer me to the text where I can read that, I shall be forced to reconsider.
In Kant, what is the distinction there with respect to sensible intuitions?
But it has everything to do with it. The whole question is about where the property of meaning resides. You claim it does not reside in the object producing the raw data, but in the object responding to it. I hear the sound "dog", but the response (thinking of a dog) takes place in my mind, therefore the meaning (image of a dog) is a property of my mind.
Yet exactly the same is happening to the blue cup. It is merely existing with its molecules arranged a certain way (in the same way as "dog" has a certain pattern of sound waves). When light hits it, some is absorbed, some reflected, but none of this means anything unless that reflected light hits something (a spectrometer) which then interprets the wavelength as being that of the colour blue. Yet you claim here that blue is a property of the cup (the thing emitting the data) whereas with words (patterns of sound waves) the property belongs to the receiver of the data.
I just can't see why you would be making this distinction.
I'm neither saying that patterns of sound waves do not occur in the sounds themselves nor that the meaning of blue (you say "but none of this means anything") occurs in the cup.
Meaning is something different than other phenomena. Meaning isn't identical to color phenomena. It's also not identical to soundwave phenomena. And soundwave phenomena are not identical to color phenomena.
I feel like we're having the same conversation in two different places.
I'm not talking here about the meaning of blue. I'm talking about blue, the wavelength. In order to say the cup is blue (blueness is a property of the cup) it is sufficient in your view, that it emits a wavelength which any intercepting object capable of recognising it would register as blue. An incorrectly tuned spectrometer may register it as red, but it would be wrong.
The word "dog" (as a collection of sound waves) emits these sound waves which, upon being intercepted by anything correctly calibrated to recognise them, would produce the image of a dog.
Yet the cup's ability to make capable recipients register 'blue' is a property of he cup, yet the word "dog"'s ability to make capable recipients conjure the image of a dog is not a property of the word, but of the capable recipient.
Good question. Maybe it's a goat like everything else.
Quoting Michael
But do you not think before you speak? And are your thoughts not meaningful? If meaning did not exist prior to being spoken, then how would you plausibly explain what goes on prior to the act of speaking? It doesn't make sense to me that meaning would just blurt out with our speech simultaneously, and then disappear along with it the very second that we'd stopped talking. That sucks as an explanation.
So it makes sense to think that it exists prior to speech, and independently of it, but I'm not sure what it exists [I]as[/I]. I'm not sure what kind of thing it is. That was the whole point of my other discussion.
It is what it is, I guess. :grin:
They may claim it to be false, but if my account makes sense and their's doesn't, then they haven't got a leg to stand on.
Fear isn't much like an orange.
Quoting Michael
Experience eating a [i]what[/I], though? What's an orange to them? An experience? If so, then I'm eating an experience.
Quoting Michael
How do they explain what it is that I'm eating then?
How can it be an appearance if it isn't appearing to anyone, like the orange in my cupboard?
Quoting Mww
The modern idealist makes very little sense, and if they put what you say into practice, then they would have trouble understanding people all the time, since people mean two different things when they talk about the orange and the experience of it. There's a reason why we use different words to describe the one and the other. The modern idealist would have to ignore or disregard this. The modern idealist is a naive idealist.
You could program a machine to do that, sure. The problem is that it's something different than meaning. And the machine isn't even making an association. We'd be interpreting it that way (and programming it in a way that's consistent with what we're interpreting).
Basically, in the cognitive chain, appearances come first, as an un-named object called a phenomenon, occurring immediately upon perception. Empirical intuitions, which are concepts already resident a priori but derived from extant experience, relate to appearances via imagination by which phenomena are then represented, and if understanding judges the positive fitness of such relation we have cognition hence knowledge, if negative fitness we don’t, but we still have the experience of sensing something we don’t understand. It’s major importance arises from perception of objects or physical conditions yet unknown to us, or the understanding of merely possible objects.
In short, it’s a theoretical exposition of how we learn.
So we experience the phenomenon and then afterwards we experience the representation?
Understood.
In CPR 1787 of course, he deleted that whole synopsis given in CPR 1781 you referenced as being incoherent. In B, noumena are give a whole lot less import, and stand as Janus contributed, as merely a logical complement to phenomena and of the form of mere “intellectual existence”. They are not intuited hence are unknowable, which led to the confusion of calling them “things-in-themselves”.
He had to do this, because if noumena are said to have a overt cognitive function we are then required to incorporate two separate and distinct representational functionalities, which the human mind does not have.
I like that even Kant himself thought that he was writing incoherent stuff.
It can be viewed that way, insofar as your order, or sequence, is correct. Nevertheless, when questions are asked about how it all happens, it becomes obscure because of the terminology specific to the theory. In other words, if the logical sequence leads to a certain conclusion, the wording of the conclusion cannot be used beforehand. This means we don’t experience phenomena or representation because phenomena occur in a series of steps before representation and representation occurs just fewer steps before we can call it an experience. Between is understanding, judgement, cognition, knowledge, then finally, experience.
Thing is, nobody questions reason in common everyday living. When you sense a touch, you immediately experience what reason has only allowed as phenomenon whether you know what touched you or not. By the same token, you do know what touch entails because you have been touched before, so you have extant a priori experience of being touched, hence intuitions of things that can touch, even if you do not immediately know what touched you this time. This is of course, more commonly referred to as just plain ol’ memory.
Another problem with this kind of idealism is that much liberty is given to the enunciation of “faculty”. In one place Kant will call representation a faculty but in another he’ll lead one to think of it as an object of some other faculty. Intuitions are representations but reside in consciousness, which really cannot be a faculty of representation because there are notions and ideas also resident in consciousness which cannot have representation, re: infinity, space, time, and other supersensible conceptions, including those cursed noumena.
Kant also acknowledges the theory is quite incomprehensible to those who do not wish to understand it. But if it is understood, it should be found sensible, intelligible, indeed logically possible, but nonetheless no ways near apodectically certain. It is, after all, just a theory.
Do not confuse the appearing of physical manifestation of reflected light, with the conceptual appearing of the effect of reflected light. The eyes mediate the former into the latter and science agrees with the transformation of one kind of energy into another.
I have no experience of oranges in cupboards. My immediate cognition would be empty for lack of understanding. If you tell me there is an orange behind the cupboard door, I’ll say....ok, take you’re word for it. But no such knowledge of fact is available to me. Still, because I know “orange” and I know “cupboard”, I know a priori the possibility of oranges in cupboards is not self contradictory and is at the same time quite possible. Just like those stupid f’ing rocks.
———————————
Quoting S
No, actually, they do not. The orange *talked about* IS the orange of experience, and similarly the orange merely thought is the orange of possible experience. The former is certain, the latter is not. The orange you ate is certainly a orange, the orange in the cupboard is possibly an orange.
———————————
No matter the assignment of naitivity to this particular theoretical epistemology, it is complete. Any question asked of it is answered by it, according to its author. Whether it is appreciated or not is entirely irrelevant; it has yet to be successfully falsified or replaced. And even if science proves the physical mechanisms of the brain sufficient to account for subjective predicates, humans will still think as if it never did, and will continue to act as their own subjects.
So there’s meaning when there’s thinking. Is there meaning when there isn’t thinking (or speaking)?
There’s a painting of a man eating an orange. What is the nature of the orange? It’s paint. But the painting isn’t a painting of a man eating paint; it’s a painting of a man eating an orange.
I dream of eating an orange. What is the nature of the orange? It’s a dream. But I’m not dreaming of eating a dream; I’m dreaming of eating an orange.
Your description of idealism still seems to mix ontologies by assuming a materialist understanding of eating.
Then how are they idealists and not realists? An object, at least in the context of things such as oranges, doesn't ordinarily mean an appearance or an idea or an experience. That's like defining black as white, and then when someone clocks on and says something like that's not what black is, but you just insist that it is, knowing full well that you mean something else and that you're going by an usual definition. In this situation, you would basically be a sophist. How can they be saying the same thing as me, and mean the same thing as me, yet I'm a realist and they're an idealist? You have some serious explaining to do.
I'm guessing you actually knew what I meant when I said that they don't mean what they say. You're just point scoring again.
Quoting csalisbury
It's not very difficult to explain what an analogy is, and what language rules are, even to a layperson. I guarantee you, they would get what I mean, and they would see where I'm coming from, and they would agree.
Now try that with idealist nonsense and see where it gets you!
So, to be is be an object of experience. Except that this falls flat on it's face when it comes to rocks on distant galaxies that no one has ever experienced. They either have to implausibly deny that they exist, or twist the meaning of what's being said beyond good sense.
This is far from being irrefutable. This is lose-lose.
Saying this is one thing. Demonstrating it with a sound argument is another.
Quoting Mww
That's compatible with realism. The irony is that you kept calling me an idealist. No, you're a realist.
Even those rocks on distant galaxies are possible, in principle, to experience. Even if in practice, we never end up doing so, no matter how hard we try. But accepting that they exist is to accept realism. Realism is just that they don't actually need anyone there experiencing them at the time in order for them to exist. You don't actually seem to understand realism.
Quoting Mww
Ambiguous and misleading. The rocks on distant galaxies aren't objects of experience in my sense, yet I know that they exist, and I know things about them; and my sense makes sense. It makes sense, if that's denied, to then ask, "Well who's experiencing them, then?".
But it appears that you mean something else entirely, and you're just not being as clear as you should be about it.
Exactly. Unfortunately, the bottom line is that "plausibility" and "good sense" are all you have to fall back on in your war against the idealists. But that won't bother the idealist one bit because they know that sometimes what seems plausible or sensible to the majority is nothing more than ignorance. You see, the idealist is one of an enlightened few and has seen through the smokescreen of naive realism and has grasped the Truth!
Besides, there's all sorts of ways to get around these kinds of objections. We could posit God, the World Spirit, the Absolute, the Will or anything else we can dream up to account for the fact that things continue to exist even when you and I are not experiencing them.
Oh god, not this again. Just because I can't imagine something, like an apple, without imagining it, that doesn't mean that it can't exist without my imagination. That's a really bad argument.
Quoting csalisbury
No, no, no. Thinking that it's a mystery is precisely the problem. There is no big mystery to the fact that stars were there before us and our experience, and stars will be there afterwards. What do you think we're made of? This anthropocentrism is sheer folly in the guise of wise and insightful philosophy.
Quoting csalisbury
It's not a "whatever it is", it's an apple. If it was an apple before, then it's an apple after. Things don't change their nature in line with our perception of them. That's anthropocentricism again. That wouldn't make you Copernicus, it would make you Ptolemy.
Of course I’m a realist. How foolish to suppose there aren’t real things in the real world. Besides, I couldn’t explain my very own self if I denied objective reality. And if I acknowledge objective reality as not only reasonable, but absolutely necessary, I cannot then deny that same objective reality, and by association its contents, as present when I am not.
I call anyone an idealist if they are rational thinkers. Whether or not those anyone’s agree is nothing to me; it’s just what the name implies.
No, it's a deception.
Quoting Theorem
No.
LOL. There’s hope for you yet!!!! Forsake the LOOOSSERRR side and join the chosen. I’ll show the nudgenudgewinkwink secret handshake.
Drop that capitol T truth, though. Haven’t got that far.
:100:
Someone needs to break the spell that they're under.
Kant, for example. :grin:
Nice. I'm glad that someone is honing in on what seems to be an inconsistency in the reasoning between the two positions I call metaphysical realism and linguistic idealism. I'm a realist on both.
Along with Einstein, Newton, Galileo, Hawking, just to name a few.
Good company.
That doesn't mean jack outside of a sort of empiricism which is extremely unreasonable.
Quoting Mww
If your epistemology only let's you say, "There might be an orange, but then there might not be. It's a big mystery and I'm clueless either way", then your epistemology should be the laughing stock of philosophy.
Quoting Mww
Yes, actually, they do.
Quoting Mww
You've moved the goalposts. The claim is regarding the orange and the experience of it, not the orange and the orange of experience. Try again, but this time with the correct wording.
Quoting Mww
Lol! Are you being serious? [U]The orange[/u] in the cupboard is only [i]possibly[/I] an orange? :rofl:
There is by my account, which works to actually [i]resolve[/I] the problems found through philosophy, instead of [i]exacerbating[/I] them and getting off on it.
A painted orange is a painted orange, and an experience of orange is an experience of an orange.
But I'm asking what an orange is. What is it that's being painted? What is it that's being experienced? And you've yet to give a sensible answer.
Quoting Michael
A dreamed orange is a dreamed orange. This is just yet more equivocation. What is it that you're dreaming of?
Quoting Michael
I'm simply testing whether it can make sense without twisting everything out of all proportion. Your reply still doesn't pass the test. It just kicks the can down the road, leading to the same kind of questions that I originally asked, only now there are more of them, and there's still no real answer. It has exacerbated the problem, not drawn closer to a resolution.
But it isn’t. Lots have done what you are doing, mocking it without refuting it.
Go figure.
Idealism: isn't it just great? I must be a blind fool for caring about things such as plausibility and good sense! :lol:
It's also an argument I didn't make. In fact I brought up this exact argument later on in the same post, in order to say that it doesn't work.
I disagree. It think that it's your argument when exposed for what it really is, without the manipulation of language to make it seem like something more serious and defensible.
What part of that post are you referring to? I didn't respond to the parts that seems unworthy of much of a response because they just seemed kind of empty, like an assertion or an opinion. Where was the substance? Where was the proper argument?
[quote=csalisbury]It's also an argument I didn't make. In fact I brought up this exact argument later on in the same post, in order to say that it doesn't work.[/quote]
Quoting S
Read back through the post again and see if you can find something that sounds like this:
Quoting S
I'll give you a hint. It's the part that says the same thing almost verbatim.
That's a pretty rubbish way of defining your terms. Realist idealists? Atheist theists? Anyway, at the very least, you're not a realist in the relevant sense, given the context of this discussion, because you keep disagreeing with me over my realism. It would be more helpful if you just stuck with my usage to avoid confusion.
But their contributions are still very useful in a very important respect, not just interesting for historical value or as an exercise in critical thinking.
And they were all scientists, by the way. Although apparently Kant did make some contributions to science, but unlike the others you mention, he's not famous for that, he's famous for his philosophy.
I'm doing both, as ever. All the best criticism weaponises humour. Voltaire was famous for it.
My understanding is that Hegel rejected the ding an sich as a 'mind-independent thing', because he saw it as another idea within consciousness, and nothing beyond that. I am not sure if you mean to claim that Hegel also rejected it on account of an alleged misapplication of the concept of causality. I would need to see textual evidence of that.
This quote from Kant only supports my contention that for him the idea of the ding an sich is based on logical, not causal, reasoning. There is no mention of causality in that passage.
What could possibly suggest I’m confused? Because I don’t agree with you? Because I don’t stick to your usage? Because the authority I’m using is confusing to you?
You can’t even know for sure I don’t completely agree with every thing you say, but took the antagonist approach just for the fun of it.
Quoting S
Oh but I don’t, in principle. Only difference is yours is necessary but insufficient, whereas mine is both because a form of idealism is attached as its complement.
Ahhhh. So “you’re sooooo stupid!!!”is a successful refutation in your world?
S, I did a breakdown of your OP, charitably steelmanning it, to show how it didn't work. I engaged with the form and substance of your argument, thoughtfully.
You did not respond in the same way. The biggest part of your response to my post was, bizarrely, to @ Banno, directing to him this steelmanned version in retaliation for what you perceived as a previous slight. There wasn't much to the rest of the post, but it ended with you more or less ignoring my criticism in order to say that, in any case, you disagree with the people who disagree with you.
You've since added the point that if you explained your post to other people, they'd probably agree with you.
You've accused me of point-scoring, but your approach through the majority of this thread has been to quote others who agree with you with a '100' or other variations on 'nailed it,' while fisking other posts in a patently point-scoring way. (this is a tu quoque, by the way.)
You've glowingly approved theorem's caricature of idealists as self-important, while saying things like 'It's time for a new breed of philosophers to throw off the chains, escape the scourge' etc. With a characteristic note of martyrdom, you compared your approach to that of a historical figure executed for spreading information to the masses.
You can understand my frustration. I remain suspicious that you don't quite understand the difference between OLP therapeutics (which I am a fan of ) and appeals to incredulity + pose-striking.
You don't think that if we all use the same terms but mean different things, that'll increase the risk getting our wires crossed?
Quoting Mww
Empty words.
Quoting Mww
I haven't said that. I don't need to.
The orange is part of the experience, just as a dent is part of the car door. Your mistake, again, is in trying to understand idealism from the perspective of materialism, where experience is one thing and the object of experience is some separate thing, but that's not how it is for idealism. There's just the experience of eating an orange and we pick out parts of the experience and name them ("orange", "man", "mouth", etc.).
No, I don't think Hegel brought up the point on causality, though I believe that many of Kant's contemporaries did. I know some modern commentators have tried to defend Kant by claiming that he employed a "regulative" notion of causality or the principle of sufficient reason. I don't know if that defense succeeds, but I suppose it's one possible response.
Probably. Generally however, that’s not the case. Billions of people communicate successfully most of the time.
My caricature was intended to be tongue in cheek, by the way. No offense intended to you or others on the forum.
:100:
(Alright, alright! Maybe I'll take another look and start over. Just hold your horses! But I do think that you're giving yourself a bit too much credit there.)
I see. The orange is part of the experience. So when I eat the orange, I'm eating a part of the experience.
Now it all makes perfect sense. I think you've made me a convert.
You seem to be doing it again where you’re interpreting the act of eating under a materialist ontology, and so I assume accusing idealism of entailing that we swallow and digest experiences with our mind-independent physical bodies.
Of course the problem here is you trying to mix materialism and idealism together. So stop doing that as it’s ridiculous. There’s just the experience of eating an orange, and like with a painting or a dream we can separate it out and say “this part is the orange and that part is my mouth”.
The way I read Kant, he is saying not that the noumenal causes the phenomenal, but rather that it is the phenomenal thought as in itself rather than as an appearance. He was always very clear that causation is thinkable only in relation to the phenomenal. Obviously things are also only thinkable in relation to the phenomenaI, so why could it not be said that just as you have unknowable things in themselves, then you might also have unknowable causality in itself? That would seem to constitute no contradiction within his system.
[quote=Kant CPR]
The understanding accordingly bounds sensibility without thereby expanding its own field, and in warning sensibility not to presume to reach for things in themselves but solely for appearances it thinks of an object in itself, but only as a transcendental object, which is the cause of appearance (thus not itself appearance), and that cannot be thought of either as magnitude or as reality or as substance, etc. (since these concepts always require sensible forms in which they determine an object); it therefore remains completely unknown whether such an object is to be encountered within or without us, whether it would be canceled out along with sensibility or whether it would remain even if we took sensibility away. If we want to call this object a noumenon because the representation of it is nothing sensible, we are free to do so. (A288)
[/quote]
[quote=Kant CPR]The non-sensible cause of these representations is entirely unknown to us, and therefore we cannot intuit it as an object; for such an object would have to be represented neither in space nor in time (as mere conditions of our sensible representation), without which conditions we cannot think any intuition.(A494)[/quote]
Other similar passages can be found where Kant talks about things in themselves "causing" or "affecting" things. So this all begs the question of what licenses Kant to talk about causation or affectation with regards to the relationship between noumena and phenomena given that causation is one of the categories and, as such, does not apply to anything outside of sense representations.
Of course, no amount of talking about noumena gets us any closer to being able to say what any thing, including causality, space and time is in itself, and Kant is very firm about this. I see Kant as nudging up against the limits of thought and knowledge, and also against the limits of language, as Wittgenstein might say.
So I don't see Kant's endeavour as "illicit" use of concepts or language, but as an attempt to show the limits of thought by thinking coherently about the unthinkable as much as is possible.
What's funny is that you [i]think[/I] that I'm doing this, and you're coming up with an elaborate explanation, overthinking it as philosophy-types are wont to do, when in reality, all I'm doing is speaking like an ordinary person, and using logic. People ordinarily talk in this way, and you seem to be having problems with that and blaming it on what you take to be my realist assumptions. It is perfectly normal to eat an orange, and to say that a minute ago, I ate an orange. It is perfectly normal to ask you what an orange is. And that will have logical implications, whether you like it or not. If an orange is a fruit, then I ate a fruit. If an orange is an object, then I ate an object. And if an orange is a part of my experience, then I ate a part of my experience.
What's ridiculous is your tacit suggestion that I accept the illogic you're responding with, and that I stop speaking like a normal person. These are [i]faults[/I] with idealism. I'm not just going to lap it up.
Ok. But once meaning is "produced" can't it exist separate from the producer?
Quoting Terrapin Station
Most things that are created or "produced" continue to exist even if the producer suddenly vanishes.
If meaning is not discovered, but instead it is assigned by rational agents; once assigned the meaning can persist absent the agent.
Quoting Michael
So there is no such thing as anything. Just the experience of all these "things" that don't exist? How is that helpful, useful, predictive, testable, etc? And if this is a mis-use of reducto absurdo (I still haven't looked up the correct latin for that one), please show me why (I expect to be wrong, but don't get it).
Quoting Mww
Would you mind expanding on this? It seems important, but I don't get it (surprise, surprise). If I have never heard of idealism, how is humanity (or rationality) reduced to a contradictory fundamental condition? Doesn't idealism (I expect to be wrong) reduce to "it's all in your head" or at least "it wouldn't exist without your head"? And the common understanding (whether anti-idealist or just agnostic to idealism) would be, "it all exists separate from me"....how is one non-contradictory and one contradictory? Sorry if it feels like teaching a 101 class.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Sorry, I actually did get that. I was being intentionally obfuscatory, because that is how I feel when I read many idealist responses.
Quoting Mww
Is that a predictive ad-hom by Kant? I also think that everyone who does NOT agree with me is just not trying hard enough or maybe they just decided ahead of time that they don't like me.
Or maybe Kant's statement is a meaningless "truth" like "those who do not want to run are less likely to run"?
It seems like a lot of people, read a lot of Kant, and disagree. So they (all) spend all that time just so they can confirm that Kant is wrong? I will agree that some do, probably even most, but surely not all.
I have enjoyed your debate. I look forward to you 2 disagreeing (slightly) on future threads :smile:
If idealism is true and an orange is just part of one's experience then eating is also just part of one's experience. You can talk normally and describe this as eating an orange, or you can be more explicit of the ontology and describe it as the experience of eating an orange, but to describe it as eating an experience is just a misleading use of language which, as I keep saying, tacitly assumes a materialist understanding of eating, which is why it sounds absurd.
The orange that you dream of is just a dream, but when you dream of eating an orange you're not eating a dream. The orange that you experience is just an experience, but when you experience eating an orange you're not eating an experience. This isn't some "elaborate" attempt to make sense of idealism. It's pretty straightforward.
My happiness exists. My tiredness exists. The smörgåsbord of shapes and colours and tastes and smells that are my experience of eating an orange exists. So I don't know why you would suggest that idealism entails that things don't exist.
Yes, it does. This doesn't mean we shouldn't talk about things-in-themselves. It means that we shouldn't talk about them in the way that Kant does (e.g. unknowable), because it's incoherent. Kant draws a line in the sand and tells us it's impossible to cross because he's seen the other side!
Hegel pointed out the distinction between phenomenon and noumenon is itself a distinction of the understanding (otherwise it would be unthinkable) and, as such, the noumenon must logically be "inside the box", along with everything else that is thinkable. But this means everything is inside the box, which basically makes the distinction (as Kant understood it) meaningless. As Hegel writes in the Phenomenology of Spirit:
[quote=Hegel PoS]the difference between the in-itself and the for-itself is already present in the very fact that consciousness knows an object at all. Something is to it the in-itself, but the knowledge or the being of the object for consciousness is to it still another moment.[/quote]
The distinction between what things are in themselves and what they are for consciousness must itself be something to consciousness. I don't subscribe to Hegel's metaphysics, but I think he nailed Kant pretty well on this particular topic.
Quoting Janus
I don't think it's really that natural. It's certainly not how most ordinary people seem to think about it. Ancient and medieval philosophers didn't either (with a very few exceptions), nor did many who came after Kant.
Reductionism 101:
All you gotta grasp is, any attempt to think up conditions without thinking beings, is doomed to failure. It is impossible to think of situations without thinkers because of the absolute necessity of the incidence of the one thinking it up. And the one thinking it up carries the burden of all his consciousness with him. Because he cannot understand the complete absence of meaning nor the complete possibility of eventualities in the world he inhabits, he is not going to properly conceive any world without inhabitants at all. He can’t, because he’s part of in the world he’s thinking as empty of thinkers.
So of course he’s going to insist there’s meaning between the initial producer of it, and the eventual recipient of it. He’s right there during all that in between, because he’s thinking it!!!! So he IS the recipient, just not the one he imagines to be the eventual one. He cannot detach himself from conscious activity in the empty world he thought up, insofar as he pictures, say, Sagan’s brainchild floating aimlessly through space, complete with all it’s contained information, and he absolutely cannot detach himself from his own reason which tells him of its meaning.
——————————
Quoting ZhouBoTong
Dunno. You tell me.
“....Dogmatism is thus the dogmatic procedure of pure reason without previous criticism of its own powers, and in opposing this procedure, we must not be supposed to lend any countenance to that loquacious shallowness which arrogates to itself the name of popularity, nor yet to scepticism, which makes short work with the whole science of metaphysics. (...).... and must, therefore, be treated, not popularly, but scholastically....”
“....raise a loud cry of danger to the public over the destruction of cobwebs, of which the public has never taken any notice, and the loss of which, therefore, it can never feel....”
“....A philosophical system cannot come forward armed at all points like a mathematical treatise, and hence it may be quite possible to take objection to particular passages, while the organic structure of the system, considered as a unity, has no danger to apprehend. But few possess the ability, and still fewer the inclination, to take a comprehensive view of a new system. By confining the view to particular passages, taking these out of their connection and comparing them with one another, it is easy to pick out apparent contradictions, especially in a work written with any freedom of style. These contradictions place the work in an unfavourable light in the eyes of those who rely on the judgement of others, but are easily reconciled by those who have mastered the idea of the whole....”
“Easily reconciled” is rather subjective, to be sure. People have been judged as “experts” on the theory, but only relative to each other, and never relative to Kant himself. While it may be reasonable to master the idea of the whole, it is a ‘nuther story to master the whole itself. Which is odd, seeing as how every human ever used or uses reason his whole life, and none of us understand what it really is.
—————————
Quoting ZhouBoTong
No, not these days, anyway.
(Schopenhauer, WWR-1, 1819)
That's not how I interpret it. "Kant draws a line in the sand and tells us it's impossible to cross because" it's impossible in principle to see the other side.
Quoting Theorem
Again, I see this differently. Of course the distinction between phenomenon and noumenon is "inside the box"; along with everything else that is thinkable, and that is Kant's very point. The only difference with Hegel is that he doesn't want anything to be outside the box ( "The Rational is the Real"), and that is why he is referred to as an "Absolute Idealist".
Quoting Theorem
Once again, I disagree with your interpretation. The human mind in all cultures has grappled with the question of what the ultimate or absolute nature of things is. This can be seen in the case of the Pre-Socratics, and also in Hindu, Buddhist and Chinese philosophy. Kant seems to have been among the first in the Western tradition to realize that this is something that cannot be known (at least by means of rational thought, and I don't think Kant understood faith to be a form of knowing).
In the East it had been long acknowledged that the absolute cannot be known by means of rational thought. (What it could mean to "know" it is some other way than rationally is another seemingly intractable question again!). Hegel on the other hand, the arch rationalist, wants to simply rule out anything which cannot be known rationally; and that is why Schopenhauer, who followed the Eastern traditions somewhat and wanted to claim that we know the noumenal directly via our experience of Will, so despised Hegel.
Now of course the story about Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer is more nuanced than I have quickly painted it, but it seems to me that how I have outlined it is broadly correct, although of course I am open to evidence to the contrary.
It's been almost a decade since I read Kant's Critiques, so I don't have the textual references handy, only a memory of the broadstrokes.
I understand the historical context to be something like [the below]. I imagine I won't get this quite right, because I haven't studied all these figures in depth. Let me know what you think.
Descartes, through radical doubt, severs the connection between our experience and the world 'out there' He reinstates that connection through God (via our awareness of infinity). A perfect God will ensure that our clear and distinct ideas correspond to reality. [tangential, but I think this is more interesting an idea than people make it out to be. There's a lot to chew on w/ the infinity stuff- it's not blind faith as some make it out me. ]
The rationalists - Spinoza & Leibniz - jump in, taking Descartes' lead, and make a lot of use of our innate ideas, the PSR etc.
The empiricists react to the rationalists and, in doing so, hearken back to the Cartesian wedge (between our minds and the world). They see the rationalists as dogmatically making claims about the world, without having any real means of showing that what they're doing applies to the world itself. So - we have Locke and and emphasis on what we actually know of the world through experience.
And then we have Hume - trying to show that Locke isn't really attending carefully to his experience. He's so caught up in inherited ways of thinking, that he has trouble differentiating between what's actually given to us in experience and received conceptual prejudices. He's smuggling in the old rationalist ideas, clouding his own vision.
So then Kant -
The point of the 'transcendental argument' is to show that these ways of thinking, these categories, are necessary if coherent experience is to be possible. Regardless of the relationship between experience and reality, experience must be structured the way it is, lest we have nothing but kaleidoscopic sensory chaos. If we don't have recourse to God, etc (like Augustine, and other of the medievals you hinted at) the only option is to make this coherence - through categories - a product of the transcendental subject.
All of which is to say - I think you need to go back even farther than Locke, if you want to attack Kant at this level. You have to go to Descartes. Either to attack radical doubt, or to resalvage the argument for God.
And that would be deceptive. So, you can talk normally, so long as you're deceptive and don't really mean what you say. And this isn't a problem for idealism?
And no, you can't even talk normally! As I just demonstrated multiple times! Normally, when I ask what an orange is, we can insert your answer into the sentence, "I am eating [an orange]", only replacing the bracketed part with your answer.
Michael, you are in irrational denial here.
Quoting Michael
That's like calling my pointing at the moon "the moon". The moon that I'm pointing at is just my pointing. It's like saying that what I see is my vision. It's ridiculous and makes no sense. It's a problem obvious to most people, except of course some philosophy-types who try in vein to make it go away.
Quoting Michael
Whether it's elaborate or straightforward, it's still a failure.
:roll:
See my discussion about people talking past each other.
He even made it easy for you by using scare quotes. You know, like those "horses" that purr and sit on your lap.
So all we've got to "grasp" is a demonstrable falsehood. Got it.
Quoting Mww
This is a very old and very deceptive argument which has long since been refuted. I think it stems from Berkeley, one of the worst philosophers of all time. It's more sophism than philosophy. I dealt with it when you brought it up in my other discussion. The question is, why are you repeating it?
Thanks for that. It was interesting.
Of course, the philosophers [i]after all of that[/I], around the time of the linguistic turn, also had relevant points to make: G. E. Moore, Russell, Wittgenstein.
And yet Kant crosses it by conceptualizing and talking about noumena and setting them into causal relation with phenomena.
Quoting Janus
Suppose I draw a line down the middle of a page and mark one side as "knowable" and the other as "unknowable". Then I start drawing things on both sides of the divide. If you're smart, you're going to question the legitimacy of my drawing anything over on the "unknowable" side of the paper. After all, if that whole side represents the unknowable, shouldn't we leave it blank?
What I am arguing is that Kant's claims about the noumena - namely, that they exist and that they are the cause of phenomena - is analogous to drawing on the unknowable side of the page. In fact, his entire theory of transcendental subjectivity falls onto that side of the page, since none of it can be derived from the content of sense intuition. The only response that Kant can make at this point (by his own lights) is that he must posit these things due to the regulative demands of reason. But this is a very weak reply given the pains he takes to critique these very types of claims.
In other words, Kant's own theory of transcendental subjectivity implies that his theory of transcendental subjectivity is unknowable. The transcendental subject is itself a noumenon. But then his entire theory of knowledge does not count as knowledge, which also implies that he doesn't know (and can't know) that noumena are unknowable, which is exactly what he does claim to know.
Thus, Kant contradicts himself.
Quoting Janus
I don't deny this.
Quoting Janus
Yes, I'll grant that mysticism has a long pedigree in both the eastern and western traditions. I'm not opposed to mysticism per se, but I am opposed to the particular way in which Kant draws the line between knowledge and belief. I think it is self-defeating for the reasons given above. Likewise, I'm not convinced that the Kantian approach is a "natural" representative for this tradition, though I'm willing to grant that mysticism more generally is a "natural" aspect of human thought and expression.
He sorta did, kindasorta, in as much as one may arrive at a “false” knowledge, which he also calls “unjustified true belief”, the rational procedure for which he calls the transcendental illusion. He thinks this accomplished by the subject permitting his reason to “exceed the bounds of its proper use” and while it is perfectly legitimate to think the supersensible because reason always seeks the unconditioned, such thinking is not thereby given warrant to assign possibility to its reality, re: the oft-argued yet immeasurably important conclusion: “existence is not a predicate”.
Some interpretations (Guyer 1999) reads “....I must abolish knowledge to make room for belief...”, where Kemp-Smith (1929) reads, “...I must abolish knowledge to make room for faith...”. While not actually considered knowledge per se, whether a priori or empirical, Kant recognizes the “common understanding” as desiring some solid ground for his metaphysical necessities, which he will think as something known to him as being true.
Even thought it is true Kant destroyed the arguments of the day for the existence of supersensible entities, he did not argue for proof of their impossibility, but merely showed the legitimacy of a logical negation. As such, he acknowledged faith, but consolidated the rational derivations of it and restricted its applicability to outside the empirical domain.
“....We have noted that a church dispenses with the most important mark of truth, namely, a rightful claim to universality, when it bases itself upon a revealed faith. For such a faith, being historical (even though it be far more widely disseminated and more completely secured for remotest posterity through the agency of scripture) can never be universally communicated so as to produce conviction. Yet, because of the natural need and desire of all men for something sensibly tenable, and for a confirmation of some sort from experience of the highest concepts and grounds of reason (a need which really must be taken into account when the universal dissemination of a faith is contemplated), some historical ecclesiastical faith or other, usually to be found at hand, must be utilized....”
(Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone”, 1792)
For what it’s worth.......
Anyway, the moral of this story is to stop bloody conflating two distinct things, because - [i]surprise, surprise[/I] - doing so causes problems.
Now I've made that point, you can all go back to ignoring my good advice and doing this anyway. Philosophy is doomed so long as ways of thinking like this are dominant.
I can agree with you that Kant's skepticism is ultimately more appropriately rooted in Cartesian skepticism. I agree that Locke's epistemology was, in part, a response to Cartesian epistemology and an attempt to re-establish the primacy of sense perception in the provenance of human knowledge. Basically, Locke tries to play Aristotle to Descartes' Plato, but his efforts go awry, yielding Berkeley and Hume. Kant wanted to save the new science from the skepticism of Hume, while putting the metaphysics of Wolff in it's proper place. He was willing to sacrifice metaphysics in order to save science, but sacrificed both in the process.
I do maintain that Kant uncritically appropriated an opaque conception of representation from his predecessors. At the same time, I can agree that the genealogy of Kant's thought is more complicated than my initial, overly-simplistic analysis allowed for and am willing to acknowledge that entirety of the Kantian corpus does not stand or fall simply on that one point, though I do think it was an avoidable mistake that compromises his system at the foundations. Not compromising it in the sense of introducing an inconsistency, but in ensuring that certain avenues were never open to him, thus forcing him down his tortured path.
Obviously, I don't agree with your interpretation of Kant, but there is no point wasting time and energy repeating myself.
Quoting Theorem
Again, I don't agree that Kant is doing that and I have explained why. So, rather than continue repeating myself, I'll leave it here.
Quoting Theorem
This seems to be the one point on which we agree. Kant's analysis of the transcendental subject is unjustifiable, and in it's own way, repeats Descartes' error.
Quoting Theorem
The point was that philosophers have always tried to determine the absolute nature of things, and I wasn't talking about this predominately from the perspective or in the context of mysticism, but regarding the idea that began with the Ancient Greeks that the truth could be known rationally, via intellectual intuition. Spinoza, Leibniz and following them, Wolff were significant modern proponents of this idea of intellectual intuition yielding metaphysical insight; and it was these thinkers that Kant was reacting against. Interestingly, to reverse Kant's move, Hegel (and Schelling) revived intellectual intuitionism, specifically Spinozism. So I think mysticism is not really the point at issue.
“....transformative familiarity....” I like it!!!
Kant intended his practical philosophy to govern morality, for the most part. Easier to comprehend than CPR, but nonetheless contentious for a book half the size.
In passing, I also hold disagreements with respect to the elucidations of noumena stated above.
It's not entirely clear to me which elucidations you are referring to here, Mww, but I presume that you were referring to the ones presented by @Theorem?
Ok. I mean, I've tried to back up my interpretation with textual evidence and reasoned argument. I'd be happy to discuss it further with you, but if we've reached in impasse then I'll let it go.
Yes, those. Sorry.
Considering the unresolved, and perhaps unresolvable, controversies among Kant scholars around whether Kant intended the distinction to be a "dual worlds' thesis or a "dual aspects" thesis, I think there would be better ways to spend our time than to try to resolve the question here. :smile:
Oh, for sure. esp. Wittgenstein.
That this aspect of noumenality cuts both ways (outward to the world, inward to the subject) is not a flaw, but a feature. The soul, for Kant, is unknowable - hence the paralogism .All we have access to is the form of transcendental subjectivity. (If this were not the case, we'd find ourselves caught in an infinite regress,)
Thank you both for your replies. I have to admit that I'm a bit puzzled by your responses. With regards to noumena, you both seem satisfied with Kant's treatment of them in the Critique. This seems to hinge on his "apophatic" approach, a kind-of "via negativa" that keeps Kant safe from contradiction.
While I don't deny that apophatic treatments have their place within philosophy (and perhaps theology), I'm not sure Kant's appeal works. This is because Kant is not simply denying epistemic access to noumena, he's denying conceptual access. Since all of our claims are mediated by concepts, and since concepts cannot apply to noumena, the implication is that we should not even be capable of making claims about noumena, even just to say that they are the kinds of things about which claims cannot be made. Because in order to utter such a claim, we will have had to have conceptualized noumena, per impossible.
Kant cannot have it both ways. One the one hand he says:
[quote=Critique of Pure Reason]
For by no means do I require, nor am I warranted in requiring, cognition of this object of my idea as to what it might be in itself; for I have no concepts for that, and even the concepts of reality, substance, causality, indeed even necessity in existence, lose all meaning and are empty titles for concepts without any content when with them I venture outside the field of sense.
[/quote]
And yet all of his talk about noumena necessarily employs concepts. When he claims that they exist, he applies the category of existence. When he claims that they are the cause of phenomena, he applies the category of causality. When he claims that they are not in space or time, he applies the category of negation. Even when he claims that the categories cannot apply to noumena he applies the category of possibility and/or necessity!
The medievals ran into similar problems when making claims about God, but whereas they worked out sophisticated theories of analogy in order to deal with it, Kant hardly bothers to acknowledge that there's a problem. Kant's claim that we must postulate noumena in order that our appearances be appearances of something should have been a clue that he had made a false assumption somewhere along the way.
Again, I think this goes back to his faulty concept of representation/appearance. For what is the meaning of saying that we can know only the appearances? How should we know that they are appearances if we have no means of comparing them against what they are appearances of? The very concepts of appearance and representation seem to demand that we have some positive conception of what it is that appears or what it is that is thereby represented.
Anyway, I apologize for the length of this post, but I really don't see how Kant's appeal to a "purely negative" conception of noumena saves him from contradiction, and I'm tempted to say that his concept of representation is downright incoherent, though I'm not as certain about that.
Now, you guys may say that I've still failed to convince, and that's fine. We can leave it at that.
Thanks Theorem, for your well-considered response. I think this passage gives the clue to where our differences lie. If we can form regarding any thing no positive conception that is not given to us in terms of our experiences of that thing, and we also know (or at least cannot but remain convinced) that our experiences of things do not, and cannot ever, exhaust their nature, then we are inexorably lead to conceive the idea of that of which we cannot conceive. So, as I see it, we have not "conceptualized noumena, per impossible", but conceptualized the idea of noumena, which is not impossible and involves no contradiction.
Where I think Kant does go astray, is with his analysis of the Transcendental Subject. In saying that the Transcendental Subject constitutes the empirical world, he says something positive about the noumenal which is indeed unwarranted.
The topic is dead, so I don’t mind bringing this up now.
For the longest time, it escaped me where I had previously found something relating to what you said about Kant saying something positive about noumena. it’s not in CPR; it’s in CpR, pure practical reason, and has to do with the ability to construct a non-contradictory notion of freedom.
“....By this also I can understand why the most considerable objections which I have as yet met with against the Critique turn about these two points, namely, on the one side, the objective reality of the categories as applied to noumena, which is in the theoretical department of knowledge denied, in the practical affirmed; and on the other side, the paradoxical demand to regard oneself qua subject of freedom as a noumenon, and at the same time from the point of view of physical nature as a phenomenon in one's own empirical consciousness; for as long as one has formed no definite notions of morality and freedom, one could not conjecture on the one side what was intended to be the noumenon, the basis of the alleged phenomenon, and on the other side it seemed doubtful whether it was at all possible to form any notion of it, seeing that we had previously assigned all the notions of the pure understanding in its theoretical use exclusively to phenomena. Nothing but a detailed criticism of the practical reason can remove all this misapprehension and set in a clear light the consistency which constitutes its greatest merit....”
Removing misapprehension being, of course, a quite loaded assertion. Apparently, the conception of freedom permits noumena as an idea, and having no need of anything further from that idea. Odd though, that the derivation of the possibility of freedom from the predicates of natural cause and effect given in CPR doesn’t even mention noumena at all.
Oh well........maybe it’s what you meant, maybe not. Either way, I found what I was looking for.