[!Important]
Anaxagoras and his Nous (Cosmic Intellect); Hinduism’s rta (Cosmic ordering principle); The Dao; The Logos (In principio erat verbum, et verbum erat apud Deum, et verbum erat Deus); The Wakan Tanka (Great Spirit)
I can’t answer those questions
What remains reasonable if its not true?
What remains objective if it’s not mind independent?
I’ll have to get back to you…
Bear in mind Kant says we can’t know reality in itself. So the question as to whether reality ‘in itself’ is rational would be close to one of Kant’s amphibolies ‘logical error where the mind confuses a concept of reflection (how pure concepts relate to the power of knowledge) with a real property of things in themselves.’
Quite right! As Schopenhauer comments ‘the world is idea’, that is cognitive gestalts that have been synthesized through the combining of sense data with the categories of the understanding.
The question I have is why their ‘independence’ must be a criterion of their reality?
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Didn’t he mean that we can know what enters into our experience. But reason has its limits on knowing the objects in thing-in-itself. The objects in TII results in the antinomy of reasoning, because they are not present in our senses, but we still talk about them.
Yeah, Kant himself would probably not have engaged with my question here and point out where I am going wrong according to him - I have admitted so in the post. But stances similar to his are still stances and not the full picture. I simply wanted to see how one would argue for Reason as “tracking something out there” rather than being only a faculty. On that note, after having looked into it a little more; Peirce, Frege and Russel seem to have defended positions akin to what I am asking for. So I will probably have to do further reading on them.
The question I have is why their ‘independence’ must be a criterion of their reality?
It isn’t, really. If I have made any comment hinting that reason cannot be real if it is a dependent faculty, then I have err’ed in presenting my case somewhat. For example, I would say color perception is completely dependent on us, and meanwhile maintain that “color” is completely real. Something being mind/human-dependent does not hinder its reality for me.
Reason’s “independence” in my case, is that it seems more natural to consider something as fundamental as reason as being grounded - somehow - “out there”. If every person lacked vision, I don’t think it makes much sense to still claim the apple as red. But if every person was wrong on some mathematical issue, or if every person somehow made the same logical mistakes - it looks to me as if the truth of the matter would remain the same. And I do not think this is as simple as us having defined truth to be what we seem to be producing with our current faculty of reason. The results seem to be genuinely tracking reality and different/opposite results would conflict with reality given proper circumstances.
Ooo, doesn’t that mean that “reason” is something that is at least partly outside our ken? By mixing it with “objective” — and confirming our meaning of “objective” to be the metaphysical one of, that which actually is, mind-independently — you seem to have made reason less useful, maybe even useless? 
A transcendental deduction, as opposed to an empirical. The latter shows acquisition of concepts through experience, the former shows, not the origination which a deduction proper might imply, but the lawfulness of the application, of pure concepts to experience. (A86/B118)
Shapes our understanding, which is probably supposed to be synonymous with “reality”. Reality proper doesn’t have a shape, only the things which appears to us as constituents of it, do.
It isn’t, iff universe here indicates a thing which contains the totality of all existents; reason isn’t applied to any thing or experience, or possibility thereof. (B329)
If it is meant that building blocks are constituent aggregates, then for the faculties said to constitute the human intellect, reason is not a building block of understanding, insofar as reason is the faculty of the unity of the rules of understanding under principles. (B359)
The building blocks of understanding, on the other hand, in its pure cognitions a priori regarding experience in general, are provided by the principles originating in reason.
Understanding employs principles a priori but doesn’t have any of its own; reason conditions every cognition, but doesn’t cognize things on its own.
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Existence is a category, the use of which belongs to appearances alone. To say reason exists, is to apply a category to that which never appears.
The idea of reason, insofar as it serves as the conclusive faculty in a speculative account of human intelligence with respect to a methodology for knowledge a posteriori, can and does provide to empirical cognition in general, the lawfulness according to principles a priori, of the relation of its judgements to each other.
It follows, that insofar as the universe is never an appearance, the sense of universality in reason’s usefulness, has nothing to to with the totality of all possible real things, but only with the sum of all that as understanding, represents them.
So to say reason must have objective/universal authority, it must be understood both the objects and the universality are non-empirical conceptions. The objects are what understanding thinks, re: representations that are conceptions; universality is of the totality of all possibilities understanding thinks, re: that there are no exceptions to the force of rule; and, authority concerns only logical consistency understanding with regard to its judgements.
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All that being given, the query, do truths about reason exit, itself quite unintelligible, is affirmed insofar as truths are merely valid logical propositions, but valid only metaphysically, and that only “…..in this narrower sense of transcendental philosophy and (….) considers only the understanding and reason itself in a system of all concepts and principles that are related to objects in general, without assuming objects that would be given…..” (A845/B873)
Ahhhhh…..another Sunday funday. Latch on to something, run with it, dodge tomatoes, loose shoes and brown paper bags on the fly.
Thanks for the lesson on Kant, but I think it was clear in the post that I was sacrificing some clarity to get a point across. That Kant’s position on this issue is one possible answer to the question.
But, even trying to be more precise, I don’t think I was wrong in claiming Kant’s idea is that the understanding itself does shape our “reality” in the way I claim in the post. The entire concept of “Unity of Apperception” is about that very thing. So I am kind of unconvinced as to whether I said something so off the mark in that regard.
The categories, or the understanding itself are not shaped - I am pretty sure - and are considered a priori for Kant. It is the “single, coherent, self-conscious experience” that gets shaped/structured, which is what I referred to as “reality”.
And while it is true that for Kant “Reason” and “Understanding” are different faculties and it is wrong to call one the “building block” of the other - I wasn’t really using Kant’s definition of “Reason” in the post or in this discussion in general. I am thinking of reason as how we tend to understand it in contemporary discussions (how Nagel used it, for example). In fact, Kant was merely supposed to be an example at a different kind of answer to the question, acknowledging that different approaches are possible. I even acknowledge that for Kant, the question would be meaningless/misaligned in the post itself. The post itself though is not about Kant at all. So I’d say I can indeed pose the question.
Understood.
My only reason for being here, is to vote for reason being a faculty.
You brought up CPR; I just used it for affirming my vote.
Anyway……carry on.
I wouldn’t say “mind independent” implies “inaccessible to the mind”. I don’t see how it would make it useless.
It would indeed make it so that there might be “truths” that we fail to recognize as we might fail to track this “mind-independent” structure in some places. Which seems to already happen anyways, when we fail to be reasonable.
If this mind independent structure is separate amd additional to the objects that constitute the Universe what does it do and how did it get there?
I am not sure if calling it “additional” is the correct idea. It is not as if on one side, objects exist - and there is this alien realm in which “reason” exists. That is not what I have in mind. For this reason, I would say it also doesn’t “do” anything.
I imagine it more like an intrinsic limit on what kinds of things can exist in the first place. Or maybe “existence” has this intrinsic structure in that it must be intelligible to some extent.
If there is indeed this constraint upon reality such that it need be reasonable - then our faculty of reason would be universal due to it tracking this underlying limit.
One can ask “Why would a faculty belonging to a random animal somehow also be a feature of reality itself? It seems arbitrary.”, but I think the doubt dissolves when we look at it the other way around. Perhaps “Reason” or “Intelligibility” was first a feature of reality, which an animal then learned to recognize through a faculty.
The question is sometimes pressed this way: If there is a “mind-independent reality” that we can be aware of, this presents two problems. First, since we are aware of it, it is not “mind-independent” in that sense, so how can we know the extent to which our minds do affect our awareness of it? And second, a similar question, what is the marker or evidence that’s supposed to be available to our awareness that shows that mind-independent reality is “real” or “basic” or “the way things are” or even “mind-independent”? Is mind-independence something that can be perceived or demonstrated empirically?
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I’m interested in the expression ‘out there’. As I read it, it denotes the idea of something that truly exists and so might be encountered if you were ever to reach ‘there’. But the facts of mathematics, which you cite, don’t exist ‘out there’, although certainly maths can be used to facilitate exploration of what is out there. So an idea I’ve been pursuing is that mathematical ideas (such as the natural numbers) don’t exist in the same sense that empirical objects do; they’re not ‘out there’. But then, it’s our ability to apply mathematical ideas to empirical objects that accounts for much of the power of scientific method. I suppose you can then say that because ideas are able to capture the essential features of empirical objects, then the order that obtains between ideas can also be brought to bear on empirical objects — something which bears a strong resemblance to Kant’s idea of the synthetic a priori.
Agreed.
Me neither. I commented because you, talking about reason, had introduced the bugbear of Objectivity (capital “O”):
By applying Objectivity to Reason — i.e. by saying that Reason is Objective — you have diminished its use. For Objectivity cannot be verified (to an Objective standard) by a human being. So, to apply the adjective “Objective” to anything, you make a statement that cannot be verified or confirmed. And our waters are very thoroughly muddied — the value of reason is diminished thereby. This is what I meant by “useless”.
Reason is reason, and is (IMO) best considered on its own merits, and not saddled with the burden of Objectivity.
To me, reason is a tool that returns results, according to how it is used. It has no “authority”, and it is not “universal” either. Its use, and the results we get from it, are highly dependent on context, and rarely if ever “universal”. I think such results are more often specific and local, local to the context of the discussion to which reason is being applied.
All IMO, of course. 
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Are you saying here that reason and intelligibility are synonymous?
Let’s remember that mind-independence is a bit of a misnomer. It means that there are things, or truths, that exist independently of our thoughts, beliefs, ideas, etc., and those of any other being. It refers to things that exist independently of us humans, and our ideas etc.
So such a thing, a mind-independent thing, is not actually independent of 'mind’ , but only independent of our minds, or others like them.
A core point, well-described by your question.