Refutation Of Idealism

[koganbot]

Descartes inferred from his cogito argument that mind and body were separate in substance, which meant that the first could exist apart from the second. Bound up with this was the view that I am immediately aware of myself as a mind, but need to infer the existence of material things, which is in principle open to doubt. A great many philosophers have subscribed to this opinion, but Kant thought he could show it to be definitively false. In order to say that my inner experiences come one before another I need to observe them against a permanent background, and this can only be a background of external objects, for there is nothing permanent in the flow of inner experience. As Kant put it in the second edition [of Critique Of Pure Reason], in which he transposed the argument to the discussion of existence in connection with the postulates of empirical thought, "The mere, but empirically determined, consciousness of my own existence proves the existence of objects in space outside me."
--W.H. Walsh, Kant, Immanuel, The Encyclopedia Of Philosophy (Collier-Macmillan)

I bolded what I think is the crucial passage. I'm not sure I understand either half of its argument, or why I should find the argument persuasive, though I don't have a clear objection to it either. Why does time need a background of permanence? And why can't inner experience contain anything permanent? And also, what's "external" and what's "internal"? While Descartes would say that initially (until we've gone through his own arguments) we can't know that the objects we observe are actually outside the mind (rather than being inventions or hallucinations or dreams etc.), Kant seems to be arguing that because the objects are permanent, they must be outside the mind; but that seems circular. Why can't you just say that some of what's "in" the mind can be "permanent"? And what does "permanent" mean here?

The Critique is online, and I went to this section late at night a couple of nights ago and wasn't making headway, which is why I ran to the Encyclopedia for a paraphrase. Maybe I'll try again. Or go to Strawson. The reason I'm looking at it in the first place is to make sense of a couple of passages in Chapter 1, "The Invention Of The Mind," in Richard Rorty's Philosophy And The Mirror Of Nature (pp 20-23):

Kant and Strawson have given convincing arguments that we can only identify mental states as states of spatially located persons.* Since we have given up "mind-stuff," we are bound to take these arguments seriously. This brings us almost full-circle, for now we want to know what sense it makes to say that some states of a spatial entity are spatial and some are not. It is no help to be told that these are its functional states - for a person's beauty and his build and his fame and his health are functional states, yet intuition tells us that they are not mental states either.

. . .

The notion of mental entities as nonspatial and of physical entities as spatial, if it makes any sense at all, makes sense for particulars, for subjects of predication, rather than for the possession of properties by such subjects. We can make some dim sort of pre-Kantian sense out of bits of matter and bits of mind-stuff, but we cannot make any post-Kantian sense out of spatial and nonspatial states of spatial particulars. We get a vague sense of explanatory power when we are told that human bodies move as they do because they are inhabited by ghosts, but none at all when we are told that persons have nonspatial states.

(I don't think Rorty is arguing here that it makes more sense to say that persons have spatial states. What he's doing is trying to make us doubt the idea that there's some intuitive way that everybody naturally divides out the mental from the physical and that the latter's being "spatial" and the former's being "nonspatial" are where we make the divide. He says that we only start dividing in this "intuitive" way if we join a philosophical tradition that started with Descartes and that he sees as now [1979] thoroughly unraveling.)

*Rorty cites Kant's "Refutation of Idealism" in Critique Of Pure Reason and P.F. Strawson's Individuals chap. 2 and Strawson's The Bounds Of Sense pp 162ff.

Comments

[koganbot]

Wiki:

Defining self-consciousness as a determination of the self in time, Kant argues that all determinations of time presuppose something permanent in perception and that this permanence cannot be in the self, since it is only through the permanence that one's existence in time can itself be determined.

<----------!!!

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

kant is the only philosopher i specifically studied at college -- the rest of what i did was either frantic catch-up (i switched courses after a year and had to speedread descartes, locke, berkeley and hume on my own time), or bitty reading centred round specific questions

i: kant is a monumentally crappy writer stylistically -- and also (i think) more or less impossible to just dip into; you have to read critique from the start to see where he's coming from and going to (there's an over-reaching logical structure which gradually embeds more and more quite large claims -- which have earlier been explored and perhaps proved -- into a very subtle and elaborate argument)

ii: so his argument about what needs to be permanent, and "outside" the mind -- though actually i think inside vs outside is a bit of a misleading way to think of what he's getting at -- is something he has spent a lot of earlier time demonstrating in CoPR; i'll rack my brains over the weekend to re-animate what i recall and try and make the point clearer

Re: <----------!!!

[koganbot]

Well, he used the word "external," I think. But I doubt that he means it to be the "thing in itself" degree of external, because my secondary reading tells me that that's unknowable.

"Refutation of Idealism" wasn't added until the 2nd edition, if that makes any difference.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

I think we have to begin with the question marks over what kant means when he says "inside/outside" and "permanent"

1: "inside/outside" [I think Walsh isn't as clear as he needs to be on this]
a: There's a trivial spatial-physiological meaning which is part of what he's saying: "The Space Needle is outside Frank; his skeleton is inside Frank."
b: Distinct from this is the meaning of "inside/outside" as an absolute that's particular to dogmatic or problematic idealism: "The idea of the Space Needle is inside Frank's mind; can we know if there is a Space Needle outside Frank"
c: Kant has to use "inside/outside" as per meaning b, but nevertheless he rejects it: it's precisely the idea he's refuting. When he uses it in this sense, he's speaking from inside idealism, in order (susequenrtly) to dispense with it.
d: the refutation is based on the establishment of something "permanent" that is neither "inside" nor "outside" in the idealist sense: it's both, you could say, but this means the idealist claim falls, so you could also say "it's neither" (because the idealist sense of inside/outside fails...)


2: "permanent"
a: by "permanent", kant doesn't mean lasting through all time -- he simply means lasting through the immediate moment (it's convenient to the force of his argument if it lasts for a significant while; but all it means is non-fleeting, non-instant, sustained -- the fact that we know how to distinguish an instant from a significant while is in fact a key element in his argument...
b: his thesis for the refutation of idealism declares the "permanence" (and the equivalence, or anyway inextricable intertwinedness) of two seemingly distinct things -- the existence "outside" myself of objects that are non-fleeting, non-instant; my "inner" awareness of myself as a non-fleeting, non-instant state (or whatever)... "in/out" here in the idealist sense, and demolished by the proof (if it is a proof) of equivalence... if an "inside" thing can only exist through an "outside" thing's existence, then this particular "in/out" distinction fails (obviously the trivial spatial-physiological at 1a remains standing)
c: my "inner" awareness of myself as a non-fleeting, non-instant state is impossible without a sense of time
d: in the earlier sections "the transcendental aesthetic: space" and the "the transcendental aesthetic: time", kant has established (at some length, and with a multiplicity of types of argument" that our concepts* of time and space are necessary for consciousness and understanding; and (at the same time) are not merely empirically apperceived qualities of "things in themselves"... we need the generalised concepts of time and space before our flood of varied sense data can begin to cohere, and long before we can begin to sort and categorise it
e: the determination of time's passing presupposes something be perceived as not-instant, not-fleeting
f: the determination of time's passing presupposes my sense of myself as not-instant, not-fleeting has been (can be) established
g: e&f combine to require that this something being perceived is not merely an unmoored inner not-instant, not-fleeting fancy, because contrast has to be determined between my sense of myself as not-instant, not-fleeting and my sense of the perceived something as not-instant, not-fleeting (which is why we're able to distinguish waking perceptions from dreamt perceptions)
h: my sense of the sustained reality of myself and the existence of objects not myself are intertwined to the point of being equilavent (hence problematic idealism falls)

[g is *i think* what kant is getting at... it's definitely the handwaving moment in this particular argument]

[koganbot]

d: the refutation is based on the establishment of something "permanent" that is neither "inside" nor "outside" in the idealist sense: it's both, you could say, but this means the idealist claim falls, so you could also say "it's neither" (because the idealist sense of inside/outside fails...)

But why must it be the same thing that's "permanent"? For Descartes what's "outer" has extension and what's "inner" doesn't (and this is full of problems, of course, e.g., how does the fact that something is taller than something else have extension?) but we make mistakes about what has extension - e.g., whether it's round or square, whether we're dreaming it or not, even whether it really does have extension - and we can't posit in advance of inquiry that it even exists. But what we can't doubt is that we sense it as being round or we sense it as being square or as having extension etc. So one place Descartes draws a line is between the sensation (in our mind) and where it comes from (possibly outside). (And he not so consciously draws an inner line between the self and the sensations that the self observes, and yes there are more problems, e.g., just how does one know what "circular" and "square" and "extension" mean, where does the mind come up with meaning?) So I take it that where Kant is going to start is by asserting that a subject can't have consciousness of itself without a sense of one thing following another, and he's saying, first, that a mind [or self, or whatever] can't have this sense without a backdrop of semipermanence. And this is what I'm not sure I understand: For us to notice something change we also have notice something else not change. (Does Kant give examples?) We can't have everything change. OK, why not? And second, he'll say that this thing with semipermanence must be spatial or have extension or something like that. Semipermanence and spatiality are inextricable, maybe are one and the same. I suppose if the dinner plates were consistently reforming and deforming and disintegrating and reintegrating, we couldn't tell that they had either permanence or extension, and the fact that they do have some permanence means they must have extension. But why can't a formula or an idea also be permanent, without having extension? Or maybe Kant isn't denying this, just saying that the things that appear to have extension actually do have extension, even if we don't always get the extension right, e.g., sometimes see two-dimensions as three and vice versa. But what I think Kant is veering towards is the (good) argument that things that appear by sight and touch to have extension do have extension, because that's what we mean by extension, by having a body, etc. So he's almost making an argument about word usage. So he's (sort of?) making that particular Cartesian division between inner and outer moot, saying the in effect we can call all this "inner" if we want, but in this instance there's no practical difference between calling something that appears to have extension inner or outer, and that dreams and hallucinations are a different issue. (But then Kant goes and screws up this achievement by creating the difference between concepts and intuitions, which is just another offspring of mind-body dualism.)

[koganbot]

Btw, Descartes' argument seems to go (if I'm remembering it right), "Let's start with what's indubitable, that I doubt, that I think, since I can't doubt that I doubt or that I think. And then there's all this stuff that's in the mind" - stuff that one might think is very heterogenous, e.g., beliefs, thoughts, 1 + 1 = 2, judgments, desires, sense impressions - "and we can't doubt any of these either, whereas we can doubt that which is external and has extension. So, we can doubt that the sun moves, but we can't doubt that we had the impression of it moving." But Rorty's hypothesis is that what really Descartes is doing is the reverse: he takes everything that he can't really imagine doubting under any circumstances (e.g., the thought can be wrong, but I can't imagine that I don't have it) and puts all those in the mind. So it's really absolute indubitability that is Descartes' criterion for the "mental"; so he doesn't say "if it's indubitable, it's inner, it's mental," but rather says it the other way around, nonetheless, that's how this grab-bag of stuff all ends up "in the mind."

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

3: things-in-themselves
a: the question arise, what is the existential status of space and time if not apprehendable qualities in things-in-themselves?
b: kant's answer is highly original and highly weird -- time and space are necessary artefacts of consciousness (and understanding); they have no separate "outside" existence, but are not "inner representations" either...
c: hence transcendental

2h is what you might call the speculative foundation of biopsychology -- the study of the mind-and-body as a machinery for producing consciousness; kant is attempting to answer the question "how does this production of consciousness happen? what are the conditions of its possiblity?" -- and there's maybe a strong case for the argument that kant lays the ground for the question migrating out of "philosophy" (in the sense of metaphysical speculation) towards the modern sciences (relatively in their infancy in kant's day); is this how a question that physiology, biochemistry and psychology combne to answer?

is rortyan pragmatism saying "leave the how to the credentialed body-science experts - we can take for granted that consciousness IS reliably produced and get on with more interesting questions...?

[koganbot]

is rortyan pragmatism saying...

Well, if you think of the everyday use of "pragmatic" (e.g., in the sense that Roosevelt and Obama are considered to be pragmatic) it usually has something to do with flexibility and improvisation and impermanence. This doesn't mean that you don't have longer term goals, but you're more immediately concerned with keeping the game going in the near term. So, you know that global warming is a long-term problem that you have to start to work on now, but that doesn't necessarily mean you have a permanent solution or even a once-and-for-all understanding of the problem now but nonetheless you start now with the situation you've got and what you can achieve now, at this time, while assuming that both means and goals may well vary over time. So "pragmatism" mushes up means and ends. Another way of putting this is that "means" and "ends" are a pragmatic distinction, not an ontological one. This is very Deweyan.

So saying "Rorty is a pragmatist and pragmatism is _______" is misleading, unless you fill the blank in with something that obviously will get elaborated differently from situation to situation. Such as "Usefulness." But in particular what Rorty is doing in Philosophy And The Mirror Of Nature (which is a fun read, by the way) is to challenge the idea that philosophy has, or needs to have, an altogether consistent subject matter with a set of ongoing questions that all philosophers from the Greeks onward. He's nominalist on the subject of what "philosophy" is. So he'll see particular philosophers facing particular problems (some of which we might think of being as much social as philosophical; e.g., "how do we get out from under Church doctrine?") and then universalizing their responses by rereading the past so that it will seem as if all past philosophers were addressing the very questions that they themselves are addressing (and those who aren't, well, they're not doing philosophy). You can see why he'd like Kuhn and Foucault. In Mirror, he has Descartes and Locke setting the stage for Kant to basically define philosophy both forward and backward, and then Rorty jumps to postwar analytic philosophy where and Sellars tears up one aspect of what Kant wrought and Quine another (and Davidson and Kuhn are also part of the tearing, and of course Wittgenstein and before him Dewey, with Heidegger a continental analogue doing the same thing to phenomenology, but W and D and H aren't dealt with extensively in Mirror) and Rorty synthesizes those two so as to tear up the whole thing. In particular, he wants to get rid of the idea that the good question "which sentences are better than others?" means "which sentences better represent something nonlinguistic?"

[koganbot]

a set of ongoing questions that all philosophers from the Greeks onward

a set of ongoing questions that are addressed by all philosophers from the Greeks onward

[koganbot]

Rorty jumps to postwar analytic philosophy where and Sellars tears up one aspect of what Kant wrought and Quine another

my science-fictiony gloss on the weirdness of ding-an-sich

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

timewise:
the thing-in-itself is "outside" time: a four-dimensional "object", the 3D spatial thing with its timeline manifested (as it were spatially)

we can't "know" a thing-in-itself because we don't experience time as a "spatial" dimension for us

spacewise:
similarly, we are creature bounded in space -- the ding-an-sich exhibits all the thing's features from every angle, at every size-perspective, in every light spectrum blah blah

to know a thing-in-itself we would have to know how it can be perceived from every standpoint at every scale, simultaenously, including from everywhere within it

human sense organs -- presumably all sense organs -- operate by selection; non-selective organs would overwhlem us (as beings bounded in time, space and capability) with sense-data... and even then we wouldn't be getting the totality of data that "knowing" a ding-an-sich would entail

(so it's not that the thing-in-itself has a mystical otherness we can't comprehend; it;s that we have very practical limits of apperceptive capacity, and that these limits are required for apperception to occur...)

(we can enhance them technologically: science uses microscopes and telescopes and infra-red camaras and slowed-down sound and etc etc -- but the enhancements are always going to be bound in time and space...)

Re: my science-fictiony gloss on the weirdness of ding-an-sich

[koganbot]

so it's not that the thing-in-itself has a mystical otherness we can't comprehend; it's that we have very practical limits of apperceptive capacity, and that these limits are required for apperception to occur...

This doesn't seem right to me, though I'm not clear here, not having read - or mastered - the Critique. But "we have very practical limits of apperceptive capacity" and "these limits are required for apperception to occur" seem like very different statements. E.g., "we can only see three spatial dimensions" and "three spatial dimensions are required for apperception to occur" aren't saying the same thing, and there's no reason to assume the second unless we add to it "in the way that it does for us," which would make the idea trivial or tautological. And the phrase "in itself" does seem, if not mystical, then inscrutable. It'd be like saying that the number "17" could exist in itself, even if there were no number system for it to belong to - which isn't the same as saying that there can be other numeric systems that we haven't thought of that work differently from the one we know. (And I don't know enough about mathematics to know this, but aren't there alternatives that we can think of?)

Kant seems to be insisting on an absolute division between "necessary" and "contingent" while simultaneously saying that necessity is only necessary for us, not for, like, things as they really are. Whereas we can challenge his original absolute division. Which is to say we can challenge the division between matters of meaning and matters of fact by saying simply that what people mean by things are facts in the world like any other, we can challenge the division between scheme and content by trying different schemes and seeing what happens (therefore schemes are as testable as content, therefore schemes are content), and so forth.

[The "17" example is from Rorty, the "scheme" vs. "content" dogma is one that Davidson attacks, and I don't know if I'm using those examples in quite the way that Rorty or Davidson would have approved.]

Three-dimensional creatures can test for whether there are more dimensions - at least in principle we can, though perhaps we may not in practice be able to build accelerators large enough or computers big enough to conduct the tests and analyze the results.