Kant

Kant’s Synthesis 

‘Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.’

With this thought, Kant attempts to bring together the apparently opposed ideas of empiricism and rationalism. He synthesises their views in the claim that empiricism was right to say that experience, in the form of sensory perception (intuitions to Kant) is essential to knowledge, but the rationalists were right to say that the mind’s ‘rational’ structures make our understanding of those sensory perceptions possible by imposing the (‘pure intuitions’ of time and space and the ‘categories’ of: 

quantity: (unity, plurality and totality); 

quality: (reality, negation, limitation); 

relation: (inherence and subsistence, causality and dependence, and reprocity): 

modality: (possibility and impossibility, existence and nonexistence, and necessity and contingency) 

Without these organising structures experience itself would not be possible. We are so built, he thinks, that we have to experience the world outside ourselves as spatial and temporal (flowing through time) not because the outer world is spatial and temporal, but because we impose spatiality and temporality on the 'intuitions' we have of it.

Copernican Turn

It is in this sense that Kant’s philosophy represents a ‘Copernican turn’, rather than the world somehow imposing understanding of itself on our minds, our minds impose our understanding on the world - our minds give the the world the form we perceive it as having.

However, according to Kant, it is not the actual world 'in itself' that we perceive, this is beyond our perception; what we experience is the world of 'phenomena', the underlying reality behind the world we experience the world of 'noumena' is forever hidden to us. 

Kant’s Synthetic a Priori

Kant believed that claims about the world could be both 'synthetic' in that they could tell us something about the world that isn't contained in their own terms, and 'a priori' because they can be known independent of experience of the world. 

This is a response to Hume who had denied such a possibility. 'Hume's fork' (see previous entry) made a strict separation between synthetic propositions, which for him could only be known 'a posteriori' and 'analytic' propositions which could be known a priori, but told us nothing about the world that was not already contained in their terms. 

To understand this we have to look at the way the sentences we use to make propositions and claims about the world work. Sentences consist of subjects (the thing the sentence is about) and predicates (the words that say something about the subject). So, the sentence ‘Some frogs are green’ has ‘Some frogs’ as its subject and ‘are green’ as its predicate. 

Both Kant and Hume thought that 'analytic' statements are those in which the subject contains the predicate and consequently they don't add any information about the world: an example of this would be the sentence ‘green frogs are green’, or to push it a little further, 'kangaroos are animals', because we could claim that the concept of 'kangaroo' contains the concept of 'animal', so if we already have the concept of 'kangaroo' we already have the concept of 'animal' and we know this independent of (further) experience', we know it 'a priori'. 

On the other hand the predicates of 'synthetic' statements are not contained in the subject, so they do give us additional information about the world; for example ‘This frog is green’ or 'this kangaroo has a stamp collection.'

But Kant thought that statements like '7 + 5 = 12' were both 'synthetic' and 'a priori', in fact he thought that 'Mathematical judgments are all, without exception, synthetic.' For Kant, there is nothing contained in the concept of '7' and '5'  that makes the knowledge that adding them together will result in '12' immediately obvious or ineluctable. What he was getting at is perhaps easier to see if we consider larger numbers like for example, 38976 and 45204; their sum 84180 certainly does leap out at me, but I'm v. poor at maths. I think this gives an inkling of what Kant meant, but an awful lot of reading is really required to work your way into his idea. 

Kant also thought that science could come up with synthetic a priori statements. He claimed that the statement, 'In all changes in the physical world the quantity of matter remains unchanged.' was such an example; he said;

Now, in  thinking the concept of matter I do not think its permanence but only its presence in the space that it fills. Thinking that matter is permanent isn’t like thinking that women are female, or that tigers are animals. In judging that matter is permanent, therefore, I go beyond the concept of matter in order to add to it something that I didn’t think in it. So the proposition isn’t analytic but synthetic; yet it is thought a priori. He also claimed that the statement, 'When one body collides with another, action and reaction must always be equal' was synthetic and a priori. 

Again it is not obvious (not to most mortals anyway) exactly what he meant, but if we consider his ideas about the 'categories': how we experience the world in the way we do because time, space and cause and effect are built in to the way our minds are set up to experience the world, then we begin to see how we might know 'a priori' the stuff above about action and reaction, and such 'knowledge' certainly seems to add to our information about the world and is therefore 'synthetic'. Hume, of course denied that ideas about cause and effect, action and reaction etc. were anything other than the product of experience and as such, although synthetic, could only be known 'a posteriori'.

Causation is another example of synthetic a priori knowledge Kant claims that ‘Every event has a cause’ can be known a priori and is synthetic because it tells you something that isn’t contained in the terms: event is not synonymous with cause - depends how you think about it really!?:/ 

So, I hope that's clear, now. Another Saturday afternoon bites the dust of metaphysical speculation. 

R.F. Holland ('e durnt loike them ol' empiricist fellas!)

We read a 'characterisation' of empiricism by R. F. Holland from his book Against Empiricism: on Education, Epistemology, and Value, in which he alludes to three potential problems with empiricism. He believes that the empiricist account of the origin of ideas involves 'raw materials' entering the 'factory' of the mind in which they are 'processed and emerge cut and dried.' 

The notion of the 'mind 'processing' ideas seems to be beyond the explanations of empiricist theory; neither Locke nor Hume offer any detail on this 'process', but then how could they? Why would they? What does Holland want? Mmm..?

Holland also, perhaps more importantly, brings up what we might call the 'homunculus problem'. He characterises the empiricist theory of the way ideas spring from sense data as requiring a 'mind's eye' that 'surveys the products of its own efforts', as if a little man (homunculus) is required to look at the 'processed' sense impressions in order to make sense of them. This of course suggests another homunculus inside the first and so on into infinite regress. 

I think Holland is probably missing the point, but this is not the time to say why. His criticism is powerful. 

Holland also gently mocks Hume's notion of the 'pre-established harmony'  by which 'we find that our thoughts and conceptions have occurred in an order matching the order of events in the other works of nature.'  Holland is here referring to the apparent flaws in empiricist thinking that seem to lead to 'solipsism'. If we never 'advance a step beyond ourselves' as Hume suggests then how come we can reach agreement about the contents of our own minds?

Empiricism, Solipsism, Beatles, Boxes and Wittgenstein. Oh! and the Private Language argument too.

Some catching up is required - apologies - sometimes life gets in the way. 


So I've lumped together several things, all of which are very important and your grasp of them will be crucial to your success. They are quite difficult ideas because they are counter-intuitive - we're not used to thinking them, and so they tend to slip away if you don't keep going over the ideas in your mind. If my explanations aren't good enough for you there are lots of excellent resources on the internet, in particular the podcasts available at .......


Lets start with Wittgenstein. 


Wittgenstein asks us to imagine that everybody has a matchbox with a beetle in it (init?). No-one can see inside anybody else's box, but we all agree that what's in the box is 'beetle'. The point is that it doesn't actually matter what's in the box, we could all have different things, or nothing at all, as long as we 'play' the language game referring  to the things in the boxes as 'beetle' it doesn't matter. The meaning of the word exists in the 'language use' about the things in the boxes; the meaning is dependent on this community of language users. The meaning of the word does not depend on what's in the box, but on the language use in which it is referred to. The meaning is not in the 'label' that the mind attaches to the sense impression, it is in the 'negotiation' and interaction with other language users that the meaning comes about. 

This is most relevant for us because it sheds light on the empiricist idea that words name sense impressions that are 'sealed' inside the heads of individual observers, hidden away from everyone else just like the beetles. Because we cannot share the sense impressions, but we clearly share meaning, the meaning must be outside our heads in the use of language within our language community. 


The idea that we all name the same ideas inside our heads - that all our beetles just happen to be identical is clearly absurd. (well, when I say 'clearly' ...) Nigel Warburton in his excellent book Philosophy the Classics describes it like this;  

I have privileged access to the contents of my own mind that does not extend to the contents of yours. It is as if I have special access to a private cinema in which my thoughts and feelings are displayed; no one else has any idea of what happens within my private cinema. My experience is private to me, and yours to you. No one can really know my pain or my thoughts. I can describe my inner experience to myself, and no one else is able to judge whether or not my descriptions are accurate.

SOLIPSISM

Once you have fully grasped the notion of ‘sense impressions’ as things that exist inside the mind then it’s not difficult to see how empiricism falls into solipsism. 

Be certain you really get what is implied when Hume says,‘The mind never has anything present to it except the perceptions, and can’t possibly experience their connection with objects.’ 


Although Hume has little in common with him, it might be useful to think of this as a little like Plato’s ‘cave’ analogy. All the prisoners had were the shadows on the wall, they could not turn their heads or leave the cave to check the status of the shadows; it would never occur to them to do so because, to them, the shadows were reality. Similarly we cannot leave our heads to check how fully sense impressions mirror reality. 

Hume didn’t see this as problematic, but the kind of philosophers who want to find some objective ground, some ‘certainty’ beyond the particular circumstances of time and chance do. The kind of philosophers who want to escape the ‘cave’ and see the ‘reality’ behind the appearance, do. But Hume insists that, ‘We never really advance a step beyond ourselves, nor can conceive any kind of existence, but those perceptions, which have appeared in that narrow compass.’  For Hume, we just are inside our heads with the ideas that are ‘dimmer’ copies of the original sense impressions. 

So if we are locked into our heads with our own individual sense impressions then how do we come to attach any meaning to the ‘ideas’ that the sense impressions leave us with? 

PRIVATE LANGUAGE

Wittgenstein's so called 'private Language Argument' makes  the point that a language that attempts to 'name' or give meaning to private sensations is impossible because it has no 'touchstone', no point of reference to keep its meaning consistent. This argument seems to rely on the very concept of 'meaning ' being almost synonymous (meaning the same thing) with 'sharing'.  If it isn't then you wouldn't need a 'touchstone'.  

If language is an intrinsically public phenomenon, and language sets the limits of our thoughts then the contents of our minds don’t seem as private as we might have believed.  Certainly it seems to make the notion of solipsism illogical. How can we define ourselves as solitary and locked in when the very use of the word shows us to be part of a language community.

If a private language is impossible then simply knowing a language refutes solipsism. We cannot be locked in if we are part of a language community and simply knowing a language confirms us as members of a language community. 

I'm beginning to repeat myself, so I'll stop.

You should be aware that this interpretation of Wittgenstein's views is known as the 'community view' for obvious reasons, it is not the only view, but it is the one that makes the most sense to me. (And Nigel, I believe.)

Descartes, Locke & the Story of Epistemology

I wanted to remind you of the point of the stuff we'd looked at - why did Descartes bother to sit in his oven searching for certainty? What was the story? So we wrote  a little note that was similar to what follows except I've tried to improve and clarify it. And I've added a long rambling introduction. 

Descartes was working in a difficult period, (aren't we all?), he was very keen on the new scientific thinking or 'natural philosophy' as it was called, which had begun to question the dominant religious ideology of the time. It was only 100 years since Copernicus had rather upset the church by demonstrating the 'revolutionary' idea that the Earth revolved around the sun, thus shifting 'man' from the centre of the universe where God had apparently put him. 

Descartes himself was big on maths inventing Cartesian coordinates by which you can identify the precise spot at which a fly is located on a ceiling!  Anyway, he wanted to apply the new 'scientific' way of thinking to the most fundamental questions like 'is Scott right about the Matrix?'  He wanted to turn the rigour of rational thought inward and examine the contents of his mind. But we could also read his Meditations as a program for rebuilding society: Descartes wanted to sweep away superstition and received wisdom and replace it with rationally constructed principles.  He also wanted to show that he could prove a) the power of 'men' to use rational thought and b) that God existed. If he could use the power of rational thought to prove that God existed then he hoped the church might see the rational enquiring mind as less threatening and more helpful.

So, if Descartes was to challenge all the strange ideas of his time he had to have a strong foundation for his own knowledge claims. that foundation is of course provided by his 'cogito', and on this point of certainty that he 'grounds' his epistemology. The cogito is thus 'foundational'. 

Having established beyond any scepticism the certainty of his existence as a thinking thing, Descartes can claim epistemological grounds for his subsequent ideas about the nature of the physical world that he perceives through his senses, (like the wax) but knows and understands through his faculty of Reason.

John Locke, some 50 years later, rejects Descartesʼ ideas as to how to ground knowledge. For Locke the mind is a blank slate - a tabula rasa, and all the ideas, all the knowledge that we come to possess comes to us through our senses. 

This dispute sets up a philosophical debate that has, in various forms, rumbled on into contemporary philosophy. 

The argument can be summed up in basic terms as a dispute about how the kinds of things that seem to go on inside our heads relate to the kinds of things that seem to go on outside our heads. Do we have accurate representational knowledge of the world? Is that even a sensible question?