Yes, the limits of objectivity (in several senses of “limit”) is perhaps the most important question. Most of what I’ve been posting was just in response to your saying that science does succeed in showing us “things as they truly are,” whereas our everyday existence doesn’t present us with the conditions to do that. But it sounds like we agree that this is a very porous and moveable border.
What we see is a stick/oar in water. Only a philosopher would think it looked bent.
1 Like
Phenomenologist will say, “The stick looks bent.”
Scientists will say, “The stick is straight, even if it looks bent.”
Kant would have said, “Your sense tells stick looks bent, but your reason tells you stick looks bent because it is in water.”
2 Likes
And I would say you’re not looking at a stick. You’re looking at a stick in (a glass of) water.
2 Likes
Interesting. Your emphasis at transcendental illusion?
Pace Kant, transcendental illusion belongs to pure reason alone, and has but three forms hence manifests in only one of three ways per incidence.
Which form justifies the statement that the fact one exceeds the other meets the criteria of what counts as illusion?
Or are you saying the creation of transcendental philosophy is itself a transcendental illusion?
Should he have recognized contradiction because the scope/limit of one exceeds the other? Not sure how there could be one to recognize.
Trying to make sense of it, is all.
I never said a thing. I just inferred what some other folks would have said.
I presume that they were looking at the stick through the glass of water. It was only Kant who would have said to use your blooming reason. Where is the stick you are seeing?
Well, my point is simply that I’m not looking (just) at a stick. I’m looking
at a glass of water someone put a stick in for some reason.
John Bruce
920-901-7185
Kant was proud, rightly so, for having unified rationalism with empiricism, compared it to Copernicus’ tour de force, viz. heliocentrism.
Was he talking about synthetic apriori truths?
1 Like
Not yet.
In order for the experiment to work, there must be something thought is based on, for its certainty. By proving mathematical propositions are synthetic a priori cognitions, he proved the validity of them and had what he needed to support the notion we tell things what they are, they do not tell us, merely from being perceived, which is the experiment related to Copernicus’ celestial system.
1 Like
Kant is a deep well, so I only share a partial prejudiced appropriation here. I also take the liberty of “updating” what is basically already great.
We meet the future with beliefs — primarily enacted in a non-verbal way — about how things are connected, what they will do.
I read “apriori” in terms of strong conditional expectations of what we will perceive (suffer/enjoy) as a “function” of what we choose to do now.
I read “synthetic” in terms of empirical expectations that are more than my sense of the norms that govern sign use in my tribe. I expect planets to “obey” the “law” of gravity. So I expect a continuity in my future experiences, and I act in the present in terms of this “synthesis.” I take the trouble to build a bridge because I expect it to last at least 100 years.
What are we therefore already also assuming ? Things as the “syntheses” of their perceptual re-presentations. I also assume the “temporal synthesis” of what becomes a chain of “my experiences.” I enact a “story about the world” that I prune and embellish toward the coherence and economy of this future-meeting tool.
As a sort-of-neo-pragmatist, I’d say that our actually building the bridge at great cost is the core of the expectation. Our theoretical talk is secondary, but in this case it points us back at our non-verbal conduct. “Know thyself” — as an expectant practical creature in an environment —as a primate who enacts a belief in an empirical world shared with others.
1 Like
Gasp! I’ll never trust my senses again!
Maybe one that’s really bent will appear straight in water.
John Bruce
920-901-7185
1 Like
Kant was tackling hard problems in epistemology. He seems to have known about mathematics in the sciences, the nature of math, and the epistemological demands imposed by the rationalism-empiricism dichotomy. He would’ve been a good mathematician.
His ideas seem transferable to other, more relatable, more concrete domains, which is good.
1 Like
Nahhhhh…..all things considered, methinks being more interested in how pure mathematics was possible would have prevented him from being a mere practitioner of it.
1 Like
Early in his career at the University of Königsberg, and during his time working as a private tutor, Kant regularly lectured on and taught mathematics alongside physics, logic, metaphysics, and physical geography. His deep familiarity with mathematical practice heavily influenced his philosophical views on space, time, and synthetic a priori judgments.
1 Like
I want to rein in the speculation a little. The key understanding I’m trying to home in on is the seminal philosophical insight ‘seeing what is’.
I’m going to take rather a Buddhist tack on that question. In Buddhism, there is a term from the early texts, ‘prapañca’, meaning ‘conceptual proliferation’.
prapañca is the tendency of the mind to spread out from and elaborate upon any sense object that arises in experience, smothering it with wave after wave of mental elaboration, much of which is illusory, repetitive, and even obsessive, which effectively blocks any sort of mental calm or clarity of mind.
In saying this, I fully acknowledge that we’re all like that, myself included, my sitting here composing this reply is an example, so I’m not trying to talk down or depict myself as being above it all. But from a philosophical perspective, you could say the antidote to prapañca is mindfulness. In insight meditation for example the practice is to observe these waves of thoughts arising, and then to let them pass — neither suppressing them nor following them but recognising their transient nature (anicca, impermanent).
And that converges on something very like the phenomenological epochē. Turning to the IEP entry on The Phenomenological Reduction, which begins:
There is an experience in which it is possible for us to come to the world with no knowledge or preconceptions in hand; it is the experience of astonishment. The “knowing” we have in this experience stands in stark contrast to the “knowing” we have in our everyday lives, where we come to the world with theory and “knowledge” in hand, our minds already made up before we ever engage the world. However, in the experience of astonishment, our everyday “knowing,” when compared to the “knowing” that we experience in astonishment, is shown up as a pale epistemological imposter and is reduced to mere opinion by comparison.
The entry goes on to say:
In scientific inquiry, what scientists take as being given is the natural world and the things in that world; consequently, those things and the world itself are never questioned but taken to be the logical bedrock upon which the subsequent scientific investigations are based. In other words, scientists take the world to be their axioms; and it is this axiomatic status that Husserl throws into question when he shows that the results of scientific investigation are a function of both the architectonics of scientific hypotheses and the psychological coloring of the investigating scientist. For this reason, Husserl says that if we are ever to be able to access the pure world so that it can act as a proper foundation, we must strip away both of these qualifications and return to the “things themselves” [die Sache selbst]. That is, we must return to the world as it is before it is contaminated by either the categories of scientific inquiry or the psychological assumptions of the scientist.
Bolds added. This I understand to mean the ‘seeing of what is’, which while it might seem obvious, is rarely accomplished.
The point I am making is about how modern scientific method grew in the soil of prior religious discipline and practice. In that context, self-abnegation or self-abeyance was an essential discipline. ‘Not my will but thine’. Early modern science inherited the attitude, but to a very different end, namely, the mastery of and control over nature (via Francis Bacon). That’s where context comes in. The genius of modern science is in excluding every factor other than the measurable and observable or what can be inferred therefrom. Physics is the ideal paradigm for that, hence the pervasiveness of physicalism, the quest for scientific certainty!
That discipline is what enables scientific detachment, which is also a way of ‘seeing what is’ but in very specific contexts. Whereas in day to day life, context is all important, and we’re entangled with it through habit, through attachment, affection, commitment, etc. Again, not writing as a detached monastic but as a householder with all the above! But I hope it can be appreciated as a philosophical and historical perspective.
1 Like
True enough, but I doubt his heart would have been in it, after being given the chair in logic and metaphysics. Night and day/critical and pre-critical.
I don’t think he’d have been a good mathematician, when he was already studying things no one else had ever thought about.
1 Like
I think philosophy excavates prejudice, allowing for a less prejudiced appropriation of the situation. So I’m quite “for” ( of course ) peeping around the “buried axioms” of “naive scientism.”
“Contamination” is problematic here. It seems that an “uncontaminated objective reality” is hidden under the “wrong” approach to that “uncontaminated objective reality.”
This is a daring claim. It promises a “mute objectivity.” A “pure spectator” who doesn’t care or expect anything but is yet “astonished.”
I’m all for wonder though. And I think we are more likely to get there through the excavation of our numbing prejudices.
But I also think that the anti-historicism in Husserl prevents him from getting out of scientism altogether. “Culture” is the communal prejudice of social animals. Personality is “prejudice” — a distinct manner of encountering the world.
The human world is “for a personality,” so any “objective true world” is at best a relatively-sharable and battle-tested “prejudice.”
1 Like
Yes, that’s where we begin.
But the problem here is that, as a proposition, this has no more claim to be free of prejudice than a scientific-realist account. “Prejudice,” that is, in the sense I think you mean it, which is not a pejorative sense but simply an acknowledgment that we must “pre-judge” or pre-conceptualize any experience.
So our question becomes, given the equal epistemological footing of all such prejudices, is there any way to normatively distinguish one perspective from another, in terms of @Wayfarer’s “seeing what is”? You seem to discover some such path when you speak of how “philosophy excavates prejudice, allowing for a less prejudiced appropriation of the situation.” What do you have in mind here?
You are correct. Like Gadamer, I am not using “prejudice” in a pejorative sense. Our best science is battled-tested prejudice. Our prejudice for the battle-tested looks too “deep” for us to modify. We viscerally pre-suppose that things will be — essentially if somethings elusively — as they have been.
It’s amazing that Hume could excavate this prejudice !
I agree that I am pointing at a “fore-interpretation” or “self-blind framing” of a situation. I would like to add the antilogo-centric point that this “blind vector” is “visceral.” The basis of the breath we shape is a bag of burning water with jellyballs on top that scan for fuel. The terrible glory of this lovely monster is the temporal depth of the signs it trades with others of its kind.
I understand your concern, but you meet my signs ( as I meet yours) with prejudice. I am trying to point out that objectivity understood as the absence of all prejudice is a confusion.
“Prejudice as fundamental” is of course another prejudice.
The “realist” enacts the prejudice, mostly blindly, that the marks and noises used in “empirical analogies” for the prediction of other oncoming empirical situations somehow “mirror” an “objective reality.” This “objective reality” is tacitly a trans-empirical reality, because “empirical” refers to the experienced world. To put it playfully, the “realist” denies “pre-theoretical empirical reality” in pursuit of vision grounded in a tacit mathematical platonism.
A huge part of this is the mostly blindly enacted “mirror” metaphor. Signs (words) are “taken as” vessels that contain an “immaterial meaning stuff.” This “immaterial signified” can “mirror” or “fail to mirror” an “external” or “true” “reality” that is “behind” or “above” experience in terms of another spatial metaphor.
From my POV, the pointing of “meaning is use” has mostly failed. Signs have their “meaning” in care-structured practical life, more like machine-parts than vessels of “pure mind stuff.” A particular “signifier” plays a visceral role in the survival of the aforementioned burning bags of water on calcium sticks. A blotch of blink on a monitor plays the role of a “numeral” that itself plays the co-enacted role of a “number.” A cannon is tilted and fired. Elsewhere the walls of a fort crumble. “Meaning” is (primarily) visceral-“physical.”
How does one make a case for this prejudice ? One approach is to point out the “self-alienation” of “floating mouth belief.” Another related approach is the excavation of metaphors. A person can try to “point” at the dominance of an unquestioned “mirror” metaphor, at the somewhat sentimental-political “inversion” that derives belief from truth rather than “truth” as an indicator of situated belief as fundamental. The “regime of truth” is the regime of the pretense that the speaking located-caring-biased primate “really speaks from above the scene.”
The “metaphysical prejudice” will read my chain of signs here as “obviously an attempt to mirror a true reality” or as “pretending to speak from above the scene.” But instead I am a primate advertising the merits of my own self-consciously situated prejudice as a risky poetic act. I don’t believe ( can’t make sense of ) a “true reality” or “higher authority” that “nullifies” the risk of offering this chain of signs. I also “confess” that I self-assertively enact the belief that my prejudice is “worth sharing” or “better for some people than their current prejudices.”
“Justification” bottoms out. The problem of the criterion is only a problem for those who dream of an absolute calculus. But Hume showed (pointing not proving ) that we can’t deduct-o-magically justify the prejudice that is perhaps deepest in our meat, the prejudice for the battle-tested, for what has worked so far.
1 Like