tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post4888349953839617236..comments2023-05-13T07:41:26.217-05:00Comments on SOH-Dan: Kant's Transcendental Proof of Realism sans phraseDaniel Lindquisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05443116324301716578noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post-73480839011437862072007-12-13T07:50:00.000-06:002007-12-13T07:50:00.000-06:00A quick response to note that I haven't responded ...A quick response to note that I haven't responded yet: My knee is not so purple anymore, but my right calf and right thigh are now burgandy/black. And the knee hurts like all hell; I was pretty much bedridden after I had to get to the law school and back for my first final. Getting up to go to the bathroom was only accomplished through great effort (and much profanity). Suffice to say, it's not been my favorite week ever, and I've scheduled a doctor's appointment for monday to make sure I have not managed to get gangrene or something.<BR/><BR/>Working on apps has been fun, since I've found I do not have anything lying around which is suitable to be used for a writing sample. The closest I've found is an eight-page blog comment on Davidson and a twelve-page compare/contrast paper on Kant and Catholicism on the issue of faith & reason. I'm pretty sure some version of the latter is going to end up being submitted as my writing sample. So uh, I'm hoping my GRE scores make a good impression, and that the recommendations I'm getting make me sound like a Greek god. (Another fun thing: One of the profs I asked for a recommendation has serious e-mail problems. Luckily he's friends with my dad (they're both on the school foundation board), so I've been able to get into contact with him, so the problem <I>should</I> be solved before that monday deadline. But it's going to be close.)<BR/><BR/>But yeah, your comment will be responded to at some point!<BR/><BR/>also I read Tossie's comment as saying that Hume was "pissing on our collective feces".Daniel Lindquisthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05443116324301716578noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post-24616216811537775382007-12-10T17:18:00.000-06:002007-12-10T17:18:00.000-06:00Wow Weltanschauung Poker! A CPU disproves transce...Wow Weltanschauung Poker! A CPU disproves transcendental idealism, if not metaphysics as a whole. Hume, who rarely if ever made sweeping ontological pronouncements (even "Skepticism") pisses on your collective faces--as do real thinkers such as Russell or Carnap, who actually made some arguments, instead of pronouncements or classifications.Jhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11567400697675996283noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post-2855282257326402952007-12-10T16:33:00.000-06:002007-12-10T16:33:00.000-06:00Clearly our (my) confusion here is partly terminol...Clearly our (my) confusion here is partly terminological (without, of course, that making it trivial). As we sort of said the other day, what matters is what you say, not how you put it, as long as it's clear. I'm not wedded to "transcendental idealism" either, for the reasons Kant eventually admits, but I can also see the appeal of the analogy he's making (and of "transcendental realism" as the target, given the strictly redundant nature of "metaphysical realism"). But I have an Allison-heavy background here, so YMMV.<BR/><BR/>We may agree about "empiricism." "Hume without the corrosive part" is indeed no small achievement; but maybe I should have said "without the imminent threat of epistemic nihilism", as the empiricism that remains I see as, well, still corrosive. And you agree that "empiricism" is insufficient (relative to K and H), even for the purposes you name (which are fine purposes). Yet even for the latter the nature of the appeal to "posslble experience" has a bit more of a classical empiricist feel to it than I'm comfortable with. Again, my concerns are less with those particular traditional metaphysical issues which Kant exposes as meaningless in the Antinomies and Paralogisms, but more generally (like Davidson and McDowell, right?) with the way "reason trips over itself" (or, with Wittgenstein, the way <B>language</B> trips over itself) in our contemporary context – the residual unrooted-out Cartesianism inherent in, well, a lot of philosophy nowadays, including some which takes itself to have put that (or "metaphysics") behind us. You know what I mean, I think. Most of the time I call that "realism." I don't know what you call it. In any case I think a suitably qualified version of something called "transcendental idealism" could be a key ally. Or maybe we will make those qualifications instead by *rejecting* "transcendental idealism". Like we said, it doesn't really matter.<BR/><BR/>Yes, at the end of the day, we are some sort of "realists". We have secure knowledge of the one and only objective world. But the utopia in which calling that position "realism" <I>tout court</I> is not at all misleading bears no resemblance to the world we live in. And securing "realism" by rejecting "empirical idealism" ( = the intersection of Hume and Descartes) seems to me like treating a symptom (or, as I said before, like plucking the dandelion). What causes the retreat to metaphysical idealism? Epistemological skepticism. And what causes that? Metaphysical realism. Our task is to diagnose and exterminate that weed, not (merely) its bitter fruit. The trick is to do it while preserving the truism which is the second sentence of this paragraph. We haven't managed it yet (or at least made it clear that we have). How can Kant and Hegel help us? Not (as you agree) by making us "empiricists", however appropriate that position is for certain purposes (empirical ones, naturally!). Nor (simply) by rejecting "idealism". But now I'm repeating myself.<BR/><BR/>We'll come back to Davidson some other time.<BR/><BR/>I never thought I would say this, but I hope your knees are no longer purple. Take it easy (but get those apps in!).Duckhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11349267352262603510noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post-11498944441705979762007-12-10T04:37:00.000-06:002007-12-10T04:37:00.000-06:00Lot to address here. I'll have to think about some...Lot to address here. I'll have to think about some of this some more. But for now, a few scattered comments:<BR/><BR/>"Hume without the corrosive part" is not such a bad position to be in, I'd say. That corrosive part was pretty darned corrosive, and it's not so easy to trim it out.<BR/><BR/>I'm not inclined to maintain "transcendental idealism" as a positive term, and so I'm not terribly inclined to accuse anyone of sinning by way of "transcendental realism". The latter is a mongrel notion, and the bad parts of it are more easily pinpointed with the charge of "empirical idealism" that Kant weds it to, or with (empiricist-like) criticisms of the use of concepts outside the range of possible experience.<BR/><BR/>I'm actually inclined to say that Kant's (and Hegel's) condemnations of such "speculative" use of the categories are stronger than those of the empiricists; it is not merely a skepticism about whether we can reach any firm conclusions on such matters as whether space and time are limited or infinitely extended, whether there is a necessary being or if all beings are contingent, whether there are uncaused causes or if there is an infinitely extended causal chain, whether the soul is simple or complex, material or immortal, substantial or accidental etc. Kant and Hegel do not hold that we cannot <I>know</I> whether any of these are the case (because experience does not decide the matter), but hold that we <I>can</I> know that <I>none of them are</I>. The false appearance that in these cases <I>one or the other</I> would have to be true is the result of the "transcendent" use of the categories of the understanding, the attempt to employ Kant's categories outside of objects in space and time. Kant's categories only have a use within possible experience; the attempt to use them beyond these limits is not merely hubristic, but leads to antinomies, paralogisms, and other places where reason trips over itself (or in Hegel, where the categories of the understanding must be <I>aufgehoben</I>). It's a stronger result than the empiricists reached.<BR/><BR/>I'm not inclined to throw out "mind-dependent"/"mind-independent" just because the terms are prone to ambiguity. If they're ambiguous, then they also admit of clear uses (otherwise they couldn't be ambiguous between the uses). The "good" use is a truistic one, but truisms are prone to being forgotten when philosophizing. Or even denied, in which case a truism may warrant arguing for.<BR/><BR/>It occurs to me that my hostility to "transcendental idealism/realism" and your hostility to "mind-dependence/independence" may share a common trait: each of us is inclined to say that the dyad in question is too much of a mess to use either part as a slogan, though there is a sense in which a viable slogan can be made out of a part of it, if one is careful; it's just that this doesn't seem worth the effort it would take. But if there are cases where the slogan would be useful, then the dyad is useful there too. I think that TI as Kant understood it is false, but if by denying "transcendental realism" all one wants to deny is that we can know objects in abstraction from the ways in which objects can be given to us, then transcendental realism is indeed false and TI is therefore true (because the pair are an either-or deal). I certainly don't want to strip anyone of useful ways of talking, and I can't say ahead of time whether a way of talking will be useful or not.<BR/><BR/>I think Davidson's simply right that "correspondence" is an idea which can't be made sense of, in the context from which I quoted. He's discussing theories of truth in that lecture, and he's already argued that any version of a "correspondence" theory of truth will fall to the slingshot argument. They all end up with every fact collapsing into a single fact, like Frege's "The True". So I don't think he's just giving up a point to Rorty here. I think he could've held onto the slogan that "reality and truth are independent of our beliefs" if he'd seen that the slogan can be rendered palatable to his Tarski-style understanding of truth (which is not a "correspondence" theory if "correspondence" is to mean more than '"P" IFF P'), but that he didn't because he made the slip-up I mentioned in my footnote.<BR/><BR/>I'm not sure what to make of your last points. In what sense is the condemnation of empirical idealism "boring"? Empirical, or skeptical, idealism just is the shared position of Descartes and Hume, as Kant understands it. If Westphal's reading of Kant gives us reasons to reject empirical idealism as false, then I'm not sure why this isn't as good an anti-Cartesian gimmick as any.<BR/><BR/>I'm not sure what to make of your last point (after the second '3') at all. I'm not sure why a rejection of the thesis that objects are "in themselves" not as we intuit them to be can't just be a "realism": a holding that, contra Descartes and Hume, in spatio-temporal intuition we directly perceive objects in our shared world, as opposed to perceiving clear/unclear ideas or Humean impressions from which we can then infer the existence of shared objects. I'm not seeing what return to "square one" might be envisaged here. It's just to repeat Kant's condemnations of "empirical idealism", but <I>that</I> part of the condemnation of "transcendental realism" is as much a part of Westphal's "realism sans phrase" Kant as anyone's.<BR/><BR/>That ended up longer than I thought it'd be.Daniel Lindquisthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05443116324301716578noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post-33967057774828273822007-12-09T20:27:00.000-06:002007-12-09T20:27:00.000-06:00Thanks for this post (I asked for it, didn't I). ...Thanks for this post (I asked for it, didn't I). You (and KW) may be right that this reading is the one most "faithful to Kant's texts"; but now *I'm* confused about what Kant so construed is supposed to be doing for me. (And no, "setting the table for Hegel" is not a sufficient answer.)<BR/><BR/>Here's what I don't understand. <BR/><BR/>1. If the only sin of which we can convict "transcendental realists" is that they think we can speak intelligibly about things "beyond experience" – where this means traditional metaphysical topics <I>like immortality and the soul and whatnot</I> – then this doesn't help me. (In fact it just sounds like traditional empiricism – Hume without the corrosive part.) What about (what we now call) the "metaphysical realist"? When you take <I>him</I> as Kant's target I get interested. (And I remain unconvinced that this is a misreading, but I can't be sure that it isn't – especially given, as you point out, what he says elsewhere; but it's a problem for *everyone* that Kant is inconsistent to *some* degree, isn't it?) I don't see why "realism <I>sans phrase</I>" (nice paradoxical name there, eh?) does any more than strip me of idealist ways of talking which might otherwise be useful (e.g. as a "bad cop" in the battle against realism). Of course there's a sense in which we do indeed know empirical objects "as they are in themselves" – but we knew that already, didn't we? What was the point of this whole exercise if that's where we end up?<BR/><BR/>2. I read what Bader said about "epistemological" and "metaphysical" readings of the phenomena/noumena distinction, but I still don't get it. Maybe Allison puts too much weight on the "one-world" move (but I don't exactly how what Bader's hero Van Cleve helps here either). As I always say, all moving from two worlds to one does *by itself* is to change the natural question from "why can't we know this mysterious 'noumenal' world?" to "why can't we know the one world as it is in itself?". Not like that's a well-motivated question exactly; but we don't show why *simply* by adopting one-worldism (although I do think it helps). So maybe another way of saying this is to say (as Allison's critics apparently do) that you can't dismiss the two-world view as "metaphysical" in favor of an "epistemological" (or "methodological") view. My Kant <B>definitely</B> has some metaphysics going on – and he has to, in order to put the hurt on the Cartesian conception of objectivity. Cartesian metaphysics is <B>incorrect</B>. (After all, Descartes was a "one-worlder" too, as well as a supporter of the epistemological thesis that we couldn't know that world as it is in itself; so if there's a difference between D and K, it has to be something else.)<BR/><BR/>I know there's a "non-metaphysical" interpretation of Hegel too, but surely the same consideration applies here; if Hegel's not doing "metaphysics," then I don't know what the word means (which of course I might not by some lights). It just doesn't have to be the "bad" kind. But I don't know the details of that interpretation, which might be right otherwise (but I doubt it). I know we have to say something bad about "metaphysics" at some point, but it can't be too early in the game or we can't take out the trash like we need to.<BR/><BR/>3. Count me as someone who never wants to see the phrase "mind-independent" ever again. It's completely useless (by being hopelessly ambiguous). I think Davidson helps us see how; but I don't like the way he puts it (as you quote him). It's not that "correspondence" "can't be made intelligible" (that sounds like Rorty talking, and indeed it may be Davidson's way of getting Rorty off his back). It's that (like "mind-independence") it's fatally ambiguous between a mere truism, on the one hand, and a tendentious metaphysical construal of that truism on the other. So we carefully limit its use to the truism; now I can "intelligibly affirm" it. But what would be the point of so doing? Beliefs can be false (a better thing to say anyway, as truisms go, given the use Davidson makes of that concept), yes. But again, I knew that already. And it won't help to make "realism" another term with that same property. If the ability to dodge accusations of idealism is all I get from Kant – or a Kant-interpretation – then I'm not interested. You need to do it <I>while also getting me what I really want</I> (that is, to the extent possible given what Kant actually says).<BR/><BR/>What does KW's Kant give us?<BR/><BR/>1. condemnation of empirical idealism (good), <BR/>2. condemnation of the use of the categories outside the boundaries of possible experience (good)<BR/><BR/>He says "good," I say "boring." If the latter result is construed so narrowly as to leave in place the sort of realism I want to get rid of, then this dandelion-plucking is of no use to me. And it can't help to construe "realism" as truistic. That just leaves us without a name for the real target, which is now invisible as well as untouched.<BR/><BR/>The third thing, again, was <BR/><BR/>3. condemnation of the notion that objects are in themselves as we intuit them to be (bad).<BR/><BR/>It is of course possible to construe this idea (that is, the condemnation of the notion in question) as false; and then, so it is. But what have you got to replace it? It can't just be "realism": that just *is* the position that the condemnation was wrong. We're back to square one.Duckhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11349267352262603510noreply@blogger.com