Richard Rorty 2: Propositions and stuff

[koganbot]

For a person to form a predicative judgment is for him to come to believe a sentence to be true. For a Kantian transcendental ego to come to believe a sentence to be true is for it to relate representations (Vorstellungen) to one another: two radically distinct sorts of representations, concepts on the one hand and intuitions on the other. Kant provided a framework for understanding the confusing seventeenth-century intellectual scene when he said that "Leibniz intellectualized appearances, just as Locke... sensualized all concepts of the understanding." He thereby created the standard version of "the history of modern philosophy" according to which pre-Kantian philosophy was a struggle between "rationalism," which wanted to reduce sensations to concepts, and "empiricism," which wanted the inverse reduction. Had Kant instead said that the rationalists wanted to find a way of replacing propositions about secondary qualities with propositions which somehow did the same job but were known with certainty, and that the empiricists opposed this project, the next two centuries of philosophical thought might have been very different. For if the "problem of knowledge" had been stated in terms of the relations between propositions and the degree of certainty attaching to them, rather than the terms of putative components of propositions, we might not have inherited our present notion of "the history of philosophy." According to standard neo-Kantian historiography, from the time of the Phaedo and Metaphysics Z through Abelard and Anselm, Locke and Leibniz, and right down to Quine and Strawson reflection which was distinctively philosophical has concerned the relation between universals and particulars. Without this unifying theme, we might not have been able to see a continuous problematic, discovered by the Greeks and worried at continuously down to our own day, and thus might never have had the notion of "philosophy" as something with a twenty-five-hundred-year history. Greek thought and seventeenth-century thought might have seemed as distinct both from each other and from our present concerns as, say, Hindu theology and Mayan numerology.
--Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 1979, pp 148-149.

I'm rereading chapters 3 and 4 of Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature with the intention of trying to master them. My difficulty isn't the complexity of the ideas, since he's trying to be clear and not overcomplex, but that he assumes familiarity with various writers not all of whom I've read much of, and he'll use terms of art that I'm not all that familiar with; he also can be fast with his reasons (coming a sentence or two short, so you have to fill them in yourself) and vague and glib in presenting his own ideas, though the ideas are rarely glib themselves. So he often doesn't do right by his own complexities, doesn't come up with the detail and precision that he needs, doesn't have the fierce search for the best word that a Wittgenstein has, will futz along with tired old vocabulary that doesn't do the job. That said, he's got a broad historical and cultural view that Wittgenstein doesn't even try for. He gets Wittgenstein's challenge to philosophy - the import of Wittgenstein's complaint that language goes on holiday in philosophy is that philosophy isn't addressing the questions its vocabulary cons itself into thinking it's addressing - but Rorty goes on to ask why intelligent people thought (and maybe still think) the issues mattered, asks what assumptions they were making, what they thought was at stake. For better or worse I've not only bought into Rorty's narrative of modern philosophy - which at least to undereducated me clarifies and puts into perspective a whole lot of material - but I've also copped the questions he asks: what's at stake, what do people think is at stake, what do I think is at stake, what assumptions are they making, what assumptions am I making, what else might be at issue if we stepped aside from this issue, and so forth.

About the passage I quoted: it comes in the middle of chapter 3; I'm going to circle back, but I liked this quote for its long view, its implied questions (what's going on in Plato and Descartes and Locke that Kant didn't teach us to look for, and that gets obscured if seen through Kantian eyes? what's going on with us that our Kantian heritage gets in the way of our seeing?). Some semi-random thoughts:

(1) "...the rationalists wanted to find a way of replacing propositions about secondary qualities with propositions which somehow did the same job but were known with certainty, and... the empiricists opposed this project." Rorty clearly thinks that this is a better way than Kant's of describing what the "rationalists" and the "empiricists" were up to. But he's not claiming that this is how the "rationalists" and "empiricists" would have described it themselves.

(2) "Predicative" may be a key word - the subsection is entitled "Kant's Confusion of Predication with Synthesis" - but I don't immediately see its import, actually. In a sentence, a predicate gives us an attribute of a subject (e.g., "You are sad") or tells us something a subject does ("You ran to the store crying") or something that is done to a subject ("You were mistreated, by me"). A "predicative judgment" means a judgment put in sentence form, but so what? What's so interesting about sentence form?

(3) I think that Rorty considers Kant to be making a mistake in relating the components of a sentence, rather than affirming or disconfirming the sentence as a whole. But I'm also certain that Rorty would follow Quine and Kuhn and Wittgenstein in taking sentences not to stand alone but to only be true (or make sense) in the context of a whole lot of other stuff, so again, what's the big deal about a sentence? Or conversely, what's a problem with a component?

(4) Throughout the chapter, the words "sentence" and, especially, "proposition" function as buzzwords. They're continually brought up; also brought up is that there are "relations" to and between propositions; but I have no idea why Rorty thinks sentences and propositions are more relevant here than are notions, ideas, formulas, theories, paragraphs, chapters, rants, spiels, arguments, contentions, social practices, language games, conventions, behaviors, events, and so forth. In fact, given that Rorty endorses Quine's holism (Quine said that statements can be neither confirmed nor disconfirmed in isolation from their fellows), I'm not getting why Rorty thinks that propositions and sentences, and subjects and predicates, are particularly at issue, as opposed to the overall behavior of sociolinguistic creatures, i.e., human beings. And the "relations" at issue would be social relations, I'd think, not merely relations among propositions. "Proposition" seems just as reductive as "sense impression" and the Kantian "concept" and "intuition." In any event, while Locke's and Kant's ideas get carefully examined in this chapter, phrases like "relations between propositions" just kind of show up, without explication or elaboration. To understand, I may have to translate into different or better terminology. Obviously Rorty chose "sentences" and "propositions" for reasons that matter to him and it would be good if I could work out what those are; and he's read scads on the subject of "propositions" that I haven't by Moore, Carnap, Ayer et al. Presumably Locke and Kant talked about "propositions," though I don't know what they said on the subject. But honestly I don't get why Rorty is using those words here, since his basic point as far as I can tell doesn't have to do with "sentences"/"propositions" in particular. Rather, it's that inquiry and justification are fundamentally social and conversational. "Stuff people say and write that they can argue about" would be more accurate, would better reflect what Rorty is trying to say; whereas "sentence," "proposition," and "predicate" sound linguistically precise and all, but in fact I don't think he's being technical or precise with them. EDIT: Oh yeah, as Mark and I talk about in the comments, when Kant defines "analytic" and "synthetic" it's in relation to subject and predicates, which implies sentence form. But since Rorty is talking about concepts and intuitions, I still don't get why sentences/propositions are particularly at issue or, even if they were a bit at issue for Kant, why Rorty should go along with this.

(5) The phrase "relations between propositions and the degree of certainty attaching to them" is ambiguous. It could mean relations between (a) propositions and (b) other propositions, some being more certain than others, which is what I'm pretty sure Rorty means (given what he'd said earlier in the paragraph about propositions concerning secondary qualities versus those somehow known with more certainty). But it could mean relations between (a) propositions and (b) degrees of certainty, though "degrees of certainty" would seem to be a judgment, not something you relate to. Earlier in the chapter he'd used the phrase "relations between persons and propositions," which I'd also found baffling.

(6) "Representations" is a key word too, though Rorty believes the confusion here is Locke's and Kant's, and Rorty is trying to disentangle it. A representative is an emissary, but of what?

(7) "For if the 'problem of knowledge' had been stated in terms of the relations between propositions and the degree of certainty attaching to them, rather than the terms of putative components of propositions, we might not have inherited our present notion of 'the history of philosophy.'" Not quite getting this, either. For Kant, the relation between "intuitions" (a.k.a. "sense impressions," right?) and "concepts" is that the intuitions are never known directly but only as "synthesized" by concepts - intuitions being many, hence in need of synthesis. (I don't remember my Kant: are the concepts embodied by the intuitions? If you never get the intuitions directly, how do you know if the concepts are embodied, or that they even exist? Did Kant feel he'd laid Hume's skepticism to rest?) Are intuitions components of propositions? How could they be? I'd think that only concepts could be, and I'm not even sure of that. Can't there be a concept that needs to be expressed in more than one proposition? How is a concept a component of a proposition? Words and clauses and the like are components, but concepts? Kant thinks he's describing the components of experience, right? Well, someone who's read more of Kant than I have needs to help me here. A sentence "synthesizes" a subject and an attribute, but neither the subject nor the attribute are intuitions. They've been pre-synthesized, as it were. Right? [EDIT: Well, I'm confused by the word "synthesis" here. Such defects arise when I haven't read the relevant Kant material for 34 years. Would Kant reserve "synthesis" for what a predicate does for a "synthetic" statement's subject (it adds info not already part of the subject's concept), or does he also use it for what concepts do for intuitions, which Rorty's text leads me to believe? Or are they somehow the same thing? See my inconsistent comments about this in the comment thread.]

(8) Whenever Rorty says "If we think in terms of A rather than B, we will ______," I see red flags and hear warning sirens. Such statements always oversimplify his own ideas, and in making them he's casually asserting what he I think he intends to be challenging, that philosophical suppositions are fundamental to life ("philosophical" pertaining to "philosophy" as its definition and history was narrowed owing to Kant).

(9) Why don't we just say, "The rationalists wanted to derive secondary qualities of stuff from stuff that was known with certainty, and the empiricists opposed this project"? And we can say, "If the 'problem of knowledge' had been stated in terms of how to give good reasons for the stuff you believe and the degree of certainty attaching to your reasons, rather than in terms of how our mind supposedly constitutes stuff, we might not have inherited our present notion of 'the history of philosophy'"? I absolutely don't see any value in adding the word "proposition" to the thought, or what we lose by its absence - whereas its presence creates confusion, by adding the very unclear (to me, anyway) idea that "intuitions" and "concepts" (as Kant uses those terms) are components of propositions, as well as the mystifying talk of relations to or between propositions. I suppose its presence would correctly allude to the fact that when we give reasons we tend to do so through speech or writing, which often includes sentences. But so what? And why sentences as opposed to longer utterances?

(10) Despite what one might infer from the final sentence of the quoted passage, Rorty doesn't think that Greek philosophy and 17th century philosophy are unrelated. In the previous subsection he presents Locke as having one foot in Aristotle and one foot not, and in the next he talks of the ocular metaphor that Locke and Kant carry forward from Plato. What Rorty is attacking is the idea that you can discover within all of Western philosophy (and Western life) a distinction between what is given to us in experience and what is added by the mind - the distinction can also be thought of as a distinction between particulars and universals - and a concern with such a distinction. (The meaning of "philosophy" is also at issue here, since, if no one can find that distinction in your thought, post-Kant you might not get called a philosopher, or so Rorty claims. [I'm pretty sure he's speaking of what you might get called in philosophy departments, as opposed to, say, in politics, or used bookstores.])

(11) Even though I've been picking at it, I like the quoted passage very much.

(12) I'm calling this post "Richard Rorty 2"; I've ex post facto gone and called this one "1." For other Rorty-relevant stuff (esp. this one) click the Rorty tab.

Comments

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

The actual word "proposition" doesn't appear as such in the index to the Critique of Pure Reason. I wouldn't be astonished if a word Kant used had been translated as "proposition"; but I also wouldn't be astonished if translator Norman Kemp Smith, working in the 1920s, the zenith of Bertrand Russell's era, deliberately avoided it (as somewhat anachronistic and misleading). It doesn't get grabbed as an official concept-tool until the emergence of modern propositional logic, and algebras of logic, with George Boole, Charles Peirce and others.

This isn't to say that Aristotelian logic doesn't have similarities -- logic being explained via examples and model sentences in propositional form ("therefore socrates is a man" etc) (haha in greek these examplar setennces would be called PARADIGMS) but I suspect that the actual algebraicisation is important to the momentum of the tendency Rorty is criticising.

I would also (intuitively)* suggest that Kant and Hegel would have been suspicious of algebraic logic not as a tool (they both had high regard for mathematics) but as a master-too. That it doesn't develop as a problem for the discussion of philsophy unti lthe emergence of departments of philosophy* defending the boundaries of their specific discipline which also require students to have mastered the relevant logical calculus as a basic technique (very likely before entirely understanding its uses and limits)

*ie from a general sense of the kinds of errors they attacked and understanding they were attempting to inculcate: i have no passages to cite, not least because the notion may never have occurred to either to discuss (will expand on this if needed)
**Philosophy as an academic discipline more or less invented by Kant and Hegel, in the sense that they were key to its having departmental offices in the modern university as it emerged in Germany in the late 18th century

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

That's a long answer to a single -- possibly not central! -- sentence in 4.

I will try and gin up a crash course in Kant over the next few days! He did indeed believe he'd laid Hume's scepticism to rest.

(I imagine I explained* some Kantian stuff before -- I shall go back and have a look.)

*"explained"

[koganbot]

"Proposition" not in the Prolegomena index either (Carus translation); nor is "sentence." Neither is in the index to Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, which Kant read; neither is in the index to A Treatise of Human Nature, which Kant didn't read, but which has, in the Selby-Bigge edition, an awesome 69-page index, small type (seems to be 8 pt.).

Jumping ahead of myself, Rorty says, a few pages later (p. 154), the first sentence being Kant's idea, not his:

[W]e are never conscious of unsynthesized intuitions, nor of concepts apart from their application to intuitions. The doctrine that we are not so conscious is precisely Kant's advance in the direction of taking knowledge to be of propositions rather than of objects - his step away from the attempts of Aristotle and Locke to model knowing on perceiving.

Obv., Rorty doesn't think that Kant got all the way there. "Knowledge to be of propositions" just means that you can take your "knowledge" to be the sum total of the true propositions that you believe, which can be put in the form of "I know that..." (I know that kittens are fun, Rihanna is fun, there are three sides in a triangle, I hit my thumb with a hammer, etc.); "knowledge to be of objects" means what you know because you've perceived it directly (knowledge of rather than knowledge that*). I'm not ready yet with an explanation of why Rorty thinks Kant's claim that we're unconscious of concepts on their own and intuitions on their own brings us closer to the idea that knowledge is of (of?) propositions rather than of objects. It might be that, if we're unconscious of concepts on their own and intuitions on their own, we're just as unconscious of the former having synthesized the latter (is that the right way to put it? the concepts organize - synthesize, pull together - what had been a manifold of disparate intuitions?). And so we can ignore synthesis. Instead of thinking of "synthesis," we can think of assertions, i.e., propositions. So, instead of thinking of "The car goes fast" (or "the world contains cars, including the one we're talking about, and it can go fast") as a collection of synthesized intuitions, pulling together intuitions into the concept "cars" and further pulling together intuitions into an attribute of that car, we can simply think of "the car goes fast" as a statement/claim/assertion/proposition that one can assent to or challenge, if one has reason to challenge it. I think that's what's on Rorty's mind, but as I said I'm getting ahead of myself.

The chapter opens with an account of how, in the mid 1800s, a "back to Kant" movement in philosophy was laying Hegel to rest and putting philosophy on a more "professional" level. Someone named Zeller seems to be a prime culprit here.

*And yeah, Rorty seems to have forgotten all about knowledge how, which is an odd omission for a pragmatist.

[koganbot]

For a Kantian transcendental ego to come to believe a sentence to be true is for it to relate representations (Vorstellungen) to one another: two radically distinct sorts of representations, concepts on the one hand and intuitions on the other.

What do you suppose this sentence means? Doesn't Kant think we do the relating unconsciously, since we don't have direct access to either the intuitions or the concepts independently of one another? Or am I wrong about that - we do have direct access to the intuitions and the concepts? Or is the "transcendental ego" different from the "we" of my second sentence? The fact that I haven't read this stuff in 34 years is perhaps a drawback.

But more crucially, how, according to Kant (or according to Rorty's take on Kant) does our relating a concept to an intuition result in our believing something to be true much less believing a sentence to be true?

Any thoughts on this?

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

after a quick glance thru critique of pure reason before i went to bed last night, i concluded that
(a) the word "sentence" does not itself appear in the index
(b) the word "ego" appears in the index, immediately redirecting us to the word "self"
(c) the "transcedental self" is indeed distinct from the (normal?) self -- i couldn't find it explicitly defined (though by then i was feeling drowsy) but yes, i take it that it is the constitutive but to us hidden underlying operation which allows our aware self to exist and function as we know it does
(d) hence "to relate" in that extract is not a conscious deliberative act, but a preconscious necessity prior to any possible thought or act

kant doesn't talk about "believing sentences to be true" in so many words -- this i think is back-formation from the later reaches of this history -- but he does for example discuss analytic and synthetic judgments in terms of subjects and predicates (which kept together would always form sentences).

I still have to re-remember kant's particular distinction between concepts and intutions before i can master the last section of that quote, however -- bright morning and strong coffee not yet enough!
(my suspicion is that there's a terminological anachronism here which rorty would justify by noting that he is describing the continuous history of an error: since the neo-kantians argued X, and derived it from kant, then kant must also to all intents and purposes have believed X, albeit in different types of phrasing)

Lousy index

[koganbot]

but he does for example discuss analytic and synthetic judgments in terms of subjects and predicates (which kept together would always form sentences)

Yes, of course, I should have thought of this: the analytic-synthetic thing is put in terms of subjects and predicates; a statement is analytic if the predicate adds nothing that isn't already thought in the statement's subject; the statement is synthetic if the predicate does add something that can't be derived from the subject.

Unless I'm missing something (well, I certainly am, not having read the Prolegomena in 34 years, and never having read the Critique), an immediate problem with the idea of "analysis" jumps out at me; a question would be whether this problem also jumped out at Kant and he took care of it, or whether it jumps out at me because lots of people have spent time since Kant attacking Kant's notion of analysis. Whereas people in Kant's time wouldn't have thought to attack it in this way.

The problem is that what's "in" the subject of a sentence - what the subject is - is there by way of the meaning of the words that present the subject to us. But "meaning" is a matter of experience and convention (and our learning the conventions is a matter of experience). And anything based on convention and on consensus experience can be challenged or disagreed with, so what's already contained within a subject can be challenged and disagreed with. Once we've decided that all bodies must have extension and decided what we mean by the word "contradiction," it's contradictory to say that a body doesn't have extension. But what if someone doesn't choose to play by these rules? "All analytical judgments are a priori even when the concepts are empirical, as for example, Gold is a yellow metal; for to know this I require no experience beyond my concept of gold as a yellow metal." (Prolegomena §2.) But what if someone comes at us with a different concept of gold, say based on atomic structure, or something not yet thought of? It might turn out that nonetheless all gold is yellow, but this is no longer part of the concept. Of course, "anything can be challenged and disagreed with" doesn't mean that everything can be challenged and disagreed with at once, since the challenges and disagreements depend on assumptions too; just that what will or won't get challenged and disagreed with isn't determined in advance; even if we believe that the vast majority of our concepts won't get challenged, we won't be able to predict with certainty which will and which won't. Kant's question in the Critique is "How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?" But I don't see how analytic a priori judgments are possible, since an "analytic" statement here seems to simply consist of "at the moment no one I know of has come up with a good reason to rework or find an alternative to the concept."

E.g., for an Aristotelian, a man's returning from sickness to health was an example of motion, since change in quality or state was contained in Aristotle's concept of motion. But it wasn't contained in Newton's concept, hence would have been "analytic" for an Aristotelian but not even synthetic for a Newtonian, just wrong.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. We don't get to Quine's attack on the analytic-synthetic divide until chapter four. But what I wrote in the previous paragraph seems to border on being a platitude, that different people can use words differently. Was it really only in the middle of the 20th century that this became a big deal for philosophers? Or were Dewey and James and Nietzsche already there? Marx? Montaigne? Or does Kant himself deal with this at some point? I've only now read about three pages.

Index to the Carus edit of the Prolegomena is lousy. It says that "predicate" only appears on pp 43 and 99, and here I am on pp 14 and 15 and it's all over the place.

[koganbot]

In #7 above and in yesterday's response I'm screwing up the word "synthesis" terribly; I'm using it to apply to what concepts do for intuitions, whereas I think that Kant would reserve the word for what predicates add to concepts. Does Kant have a word for what concepts do for intuitions, given that Kant thinks we don't know intuitions directly but only mediated by concepts? (If that is what he thinks.)

[koganbot]

(c) the "transcedental self" is indeed distinct from the (normal?) self -- i couldn't find it explicitly defined (though by then i was feeling drowsy) but yes, i take it that it is the constitutive but to us hidden underlying operation which allows our aware self to exist and function as we know it does
(d) hence "to relate" in that extract is not a conscious deliberative act, but a preconscious necessity prior to any possible thought or act

But how would a preconscious necessity prior to a thought or an act have anything to do with coming to believe something is true, which is what Rorty is claiming that a Kantian transcendental ego is doing when it (preconsciously) relates a concept and an intuition?

[koganbot]

"Intuitions" = sensations or sense impressions (a loaded term, one of the points of chapter three being to show just how loaded) as they exist in the inner space of our mind, as representatives of what's out (which can never be experieced directly, "experience" also being a loaded term, since for Locke and Kant(?) it doesn't include what you say and do, just what your five senses sense), but our "sensations" as we actually live them aren't the intuitions themselves but the intuitions as organized by our concepts, or something (and this muddies up my definition of "experience" in the previous parenthesis, so I don't know)

"Concepts" = you know, like, concepts, like, "gold" is a concept and includes the thought that gold is a yellow metal, and "bodies" include the thought that bodies have extension (according to Kant), and space and time are concepts; intuitions are "given" to us, whereas our concepts organize and create the conditions for how we experience our intuitions; so how we experience what's "out there" is really through how we organize (conceptualize?) our intuitions "in here," including how we constitute space and time and our ideas of extension etc. (so in effect Kant moves "out there" into "in here" and calls it "phenomena," while asserting that "noumena" nonetheless are truly out there (why?) with intuitions functioning as their emissaries)

Intuitions are given to us and our concepts organize and structure The Given. Concepts are a priori while intuitions are a posteriori, I guess, though I don't quite get this, since we can learn concepts (and what about concepts that turn out to be wrong, like phlogiston, or imaginary, like centaurs?). What I've written in this comment isn't even from my lost memories of reading Kant but from memories of secondary sources I've run into since then, including Philosophy And The Mirror Of Nature.

It's the distinction between what's Given versus How It's Organized By Our Mind that Rorty is saying that Kant and Kantian historiographers incorrectly project back onto earlier philosophy - I think there's some analogy (or stronger) between universals and concepts, though I'm not so sure about particulars and intuitions, and again Kant believes that intuitions only are experienced by us pre-organized by concepts, and in chapter four Rorty is saying that Sellars demolishes this distinction at the same time that Quine is demolishing the analytic-synthetic distinction, but neither is quite comprehending the demolition effected by the other.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

FUCK! i just spent 40 minutes writing a reply to this, which was too long for the post and i pressed the wrong button and lost it all >:(

Things that are slightly wrong here, Kant-wise (i)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

(Dredged from fallible memory and speed-reading on the bus -- then ett by computer and painfully reconstructed)

Concepts are a priori while intuitions are a posteriori
No, plenty of -- most? -- concepts are also a posteriori, in Kant's scheme of things. He is on the hunt for concepts that are a priori, because they are the key to his proof that inside and outside -- in the schemes conjured up by his proto-modern predecessors (from Descartes via Locke and Berkley to Hume and Leibniz), these seem to have been sundered from one another. He amplifies the division in order to bridge it more successfully and completely -- at least, that's the intention of his project, though this rhetorical amplification ends up with a far greater role in subsequent "philosophy as it should be practiced" than it ought to, if he had indeed successfully built the bridge. (Because what was adopted was the technique?)
The concepts Kant concludes are a priori are cap-T Time and cap-S Space -- my caps, to be clearer shortly. Small t-time and small-s space are of course given us via intuitions: cf such sentences as "Look, there's still space in this cupboard" and "The train is on time". Kant's argument is that Space and Time the a priori concepts do NOT simply emerge as conceptualised aggregates of all the spca-and-time intuitions we're given., Because we need them in advance, as conditions of possibility of consciousness at all. Without a pre-constituted armature of structure through which our experiences, intuitions, perceptions and a posteriori concepts all pass, consciousness as we experience simply couldn't happen.
He goes further. Cap-t Time and Cap-s Space are not given to us, as such. They're NOT inherent Iin the great out there. They're what we bring to the experience picnic, to structure our experiences. The hard-wired bridging mechanism, if you like, between living thought and not-necessarily living matter. These seems very peculiar -- and I believe (as he did) entirely original to Kant. The corollary of this is his science-fictional nightmare: the noumenal vs the phenomenal. Which again seems hugely to stress a separation, the very separation he is urgently striving to overcome.
It's a little unjust to say he just asserts, re the nature of the noumenon. (I'm tempted to argue he confuses matters by discussing noumena plural, since plurlity is surely a phenomenal quality...) Basically he defines it -- as that which we can perhaps understand (in the abstract) to exist, and the forms it must take, but can't imagine viewing or really grasp. I think the noumenon seems less peculiar if we get down to cases (but what follows is me trying to firm up his idea, not him).
Right, so we are hairless mammals in a hostile world. We are yea-high and to orientate ourselves and judge what is to hand that's dangerous or good for us, we use an evolved perceptual machinery which is highly selective. We can see an object's front as it presents to us, for example -- but not the entirely of its insides, or (without optical aids) whatever parts are facing away from us. We encounter a moving or changing object as a succession of intuitions -- we do not and cannot see its whole, from beginning to end, in one go, complete with all in-between stages. Both these ideas are comprehensible -- the idea of them is imaginable -- but the machineries of our perception prevent us (or have not evoled to allow us?) from "seeing" in this manner. (Mathematics -- geometry especially -- allows us other ways to explore such notions, of course.)

correction a

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

they are the key to his proof that inside and outside
s/b
they are the key to his proof that inside and outside are inextricably and necessarily linked

Re: Things that are slightly wrong here, Kant-wise (i)

[koganbot]

No, plenty of -- most? -- concepts are also a posteriori, in Kant's scheme of things.

So, would it be right to say that while many - most - concepts are a posteriori, their analysis is a priori? In other words (?), whatever the concept's origin, once we analyze the concept, our analysis is a priori. That doesn't make immediate sense, but it could be that he's saying that it is how we analyze that is a priori, even if what we analyze isn't ("analyze" here specifically meaning only our extrapolating from what's already in ("in") the concept). And "analysis" means applying the law of contradiction.

The relevant Kant sentence is:

All analytical judgments depend wholly on the law of Contradiction, and are in their nature a priori cognitions, whether the concepts that supply them with matter be empirical or not.

My question for Kant would have been, "What is the difference between analyzing a concept and making it up?" E.g., Kant can (and did) say that "Bodies have extension" is analytic whereas "Bodies have weight" is not, since extension is already contained within the concept "body," whereas weight is not. But can't someone else say, "Well, weight is within my conception of body"? And can't a third say "According to my concept of body, bodies only need to appear to have extension, even if they don't"?

Re: Things that are slightly wrong here, Kant-wise (i)

[koganbot]

Quick cryptic comment before I run off to a meeting:

For Kant, not all intuitions are a posteriori! That's what Kant is trying to explain. How are a priori intuitions possible, if intuitions are sense impressions of objects in experience? Well, Kant is saying mathematical intuitions function like sense impressions in that they are combined with concepts, but [something or other] with certainty, 'cause they're not sense impressions but are comprehended in the mind (perhaps).

Things that are slightly wrong here, Kant-wise (ii)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

The all-in-one-go at-every-stage front-back-and-insides object is a noumenon, by Kant's definition. It is beyond us to perceive in this manner, yet -- in his argument -- this is how the world "out there" actually exists. For whatever reasons (Darwinian, perhaps: but of course Darwin came many decades later) our actual physical bodies and their workings decline to grasp the "whole" (the noumenon) in one go. We vastly prioritise the facing side of things nearby, right now. We -- as conscious entities -- pass across or through the noumenon in a particular, limited, filtered, finite way.
Berkeley -- for example -- argued that "outside" didn't exist at all (this Kant refers to as dogmatic idealism). Descartes proposed non-existence in order to focus on what he considered an infallible judgment (this Kant refers to as problematic idealism). Kant's argument is that the noumenon has to exist, and "outside" any given consciousness, because there has to be something that anchors and keeps distinct the "movie-images" to come together to give us the sense of time passing, which is a necessary ground for consciousness-as-we-experience-it. But ff cap-T Time inhered in the noumenon -- rather than arriving as a consequence of the machineries of our perceptual porocesses -- outside and inside would collapse together; Berkeley's idealism might as well be true, and consciousness as we know it -- including ourself the existing self -- would not be possible (oof: something like that, anyway...)
Kant and Kantian historiographers incorrectly project back onto earlier philosophy
This is true if a little unfair: in a book of 700 pages, Kant devotes three and a bit to a sketchy restatement of the entire history of philosophy, insofaras it pertains to his object of interest. So yes, he does somewhat recruit his predecessors to one or other side of the argument he is resolving. But he isn't claiming that everything they said boils down to this -- even if his professionalising successors decided that's what he meant. My assumption is that he hoped, with the Critique of Pure Reason, to DISPENSE once and for all with a particular annoying distraction of a conundrum, raised implicitly by Descartes and explicitly and provocatively by Hume. So that we could go back to eg Plato and Epicurus and Aristotle and etc, and strip out this small annoying section -- as a problem solved by Kant by Copernican means -- and concentrate on everything ELSE they discussed.

(ok i still haven't got to any of the actual puzzling questions you asked about, re sentences and etc)

Re: Things that are slightly wrong here, Kant-wise (ii)

[koganbot]

Well, what is incorrectly projected backwards, according to Rorty, is Kant's belief that "Leibniz intellectualized appearances, just as Locke... sensualized all concepts of the understanding." And according to Rorty, "[Kant] thereby created the standard version of 'the history of modern philosophy' according to which pre-Kantian philosophy was a struggle between 'rationalism,' which wanted to reduce sensations to concepts, and 'empiricism,' which wanted the inverse reduction."

Don't think Rorty is saying that Kant thought that this was all that the rationalists and the empiricists were doing. But - Rorty is implying - this is how, after Kant, they get written into the story of philosophy. These are their crucial philosophical contributions to the story of philosophy (whereas mathematical coordinates and life, liberty, and property aren't).

And you're right that it isn't Kant's fault that subsequent historians and philosophers were gripped by the first Critique more than by anything else of Kant's, and historiography favored what led up to the first Critique. I will - very ignorantly, based on hints I got from reading Rorty - say that Kant is still coming at the tail end of philosophy's need to get out from under religion and make the world safe for science, but he's at the start of philosophy's narrowing itself into a profession that's distinct from, say, physics and psychology, and in need of something to do that physics and psychology can't, which is to ground and justify and pass judgment on the validity of what the sciences do in a way that the sciences themselves don't.

Btw, supposing Mirror is in your local library, it's easy to read, if not easy to understand.

mama's gonna takes us to the noo tomorrow

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

Ooh I forgot this little bit in my reconstruction of my original lost answer: Kant does use the word "empiricists"; however his word for members of the opposing camp is not "rationalists" but "noologists"

Re: Things that are slightly wrong here, Kant-wise (ii)

[koganbot]

But anyway, my task in this investigation is to move myself onto Rorty's ground and off my own - that's the reason for a close reading of the text - and to take Rorty's interpretation of Kant as given (except Rorty doesn't give enough of it), even if the interpretation turns out to be wrong. But that doesn't mean it isn't important to know if it is wrong.

Rorty's basic targets are:

(a) Locke makes a basic mistake in believing that a semi-mechanical causal explanation of how we come to believe something can be used as a basis for saying we are justified in believing it.

(b) Locke did this because he was committed to knowledge being of something (rather than taking the form "I know that..."), so knowledge is based on direct acquaintance, except he creatively tangled this up by sometimes treating our perception as taking something of the object into our minds and other times treating what we take in as merely representing what is out there.

(c) Hume having disentangled Locke for him, Kant nonetheless carries forward both the predilection for "knowledge of" rather than "knowledge that" (though Kant's deciding that we are not conscious of intuitions or concepts on their own but only as they are combined is a step away from "knowledge of," says Rorty), and also carries forward the confusion between explanation and justification [but I will have to read more attentively and think harder before understanding Rorty's argument here].*

(d) Rorty's ultimate targets are two: the first is Kant's idea that you can distinguish between what is "given" and what is "added by the mind."

(e) The second is between (i) what's "contingent" because influenced by the the given and (ii) what's "necessary" because entirely within the mind and under its control. Chapter four is about how the first distinction (the given versus mental additives) is stomped to death by Sellars and the second (contingent versus necessary) is stomped to death by Quine (though those guys aren't the only two stompers, just the two he concentrates on). And I'm not sure how you distinguish between the two distinctions, to tell you the truth. They both seem to be variations on the content-form distinction, and both try to make "form" philosophy's special province.

*Rorty, p. 161: Kant did not, however, free us from Locke's confusion between justification and causal explanation, the basic confusion contained in the idea of a "theory of knowledge." For the notion that our freedom depends on an idealistic epistemology - that to see ourselves as "rising above mechanism" we have to go transcendental and claim to have "constituted" atoms and the void ourselves - is just Locke's mistake all over again. It is to assume that the logical space of giving reasons - of justifying our utterances and our other actions - needs to stand in some special relationship to the logical space of causal explanation so as to insure either an accord between the two (Locke) or the inability of the one to interfere with the other (Kant). Kant was right in thinking accord was senseless and interference impossible, but wrong in thinking that establishing the latter point required the notion of the "constitution" of nature by the knowing subject. Kant's advance in the direction of a propositional rather than a perceptual view of knowledge went only halfway because it was contained within the framework of causal metaphors - "constitution," "making," "shaping," "synthesizing," and the like.

I'd put "social" and "conversational" in place of "logical" and "propositional."

Re: Things that are slightly wrong here, Kant-wise (ii)

[koganbot]

Your account of a Kantian noumenon appears to be the direct opposite of Rorty's account of Kantian synthesis, but maybe that's because you and he are talking about two different things. I don't know. In your account there's an all-in-one-go at-every-stage front-back-and-insides whole that our time-and-space conceptual consciousness as we experience it slices up.

Here's Rorty's account of synthesis (not synthetic statements, I don't think, but the synthesis that concepts force on intuitions, and that intuitions undergo; or is that synthesis and the synthesis that subjects and predicates undergo in a non-analytic statement somehow the same thing?). In Rorty's account, the concepts are what unify what had been disparate. Rorty, pp 152-153:

[T]he Kantian "synthesis" required for a judgment differs from the Humean "association of ideas" in being a relation which can hold only between ideas of two different sorts - general ideas and particular ideas. The notions of "synthesis" and the concept-intuition distinction are thus tailor-made for one another, both being invented to make sense of the paradoxical but unquestioned assumption which runs through the first Critique - the assumption that manifoldness is "given" and that unity is made. That assumption is spelled out in the claim that inner space does contain something like what Hume found there, a collection of "singular presentations to sense," but that these "intuitions" cannot be "brought to consciousness" unless "synthesized" by a second set of representations (unnoticed by Hume) - the concepts - which enter into one-many relations with batches of intuitions.

Any idea why concepts are considered "representations"? I can see that intuitions represent what is "out there." But do concepts merely "represent" something else that's also "in here," rather than simply being in here?

Re: Things that are slightly wrong here, Kant-wise (ii)

[koganbot]

Rorty's ultimate targets are two: the first is Kant's idea that you can distinguish between what is "given" and what is "added by the mind."

Well, the word "added" may be misleading, because "added" implies "something that isn't there," whereas we can argue that in organizing what is "given," the mind gives us a better understanding of what's there than if we'd just let it impinge on us chaotically. (Not that I accept the intuitions-are-given-and-mind-organizes-them model.)

[koganbot]

By the way, to not make a mystery out of this, Rorty ends up at the end of the subsection saying:

What we want to know is whether concepts are synthesizers, and it is no help to be told that they couldn't be unless there were a lot of intuitions awaiting synthesis. At this point, I think, we must confess that "intuition" and "concept," in their Kantian senses, are susceptible only of contextual definitions; like "electron" and "proton," they have sense only as elements in a theory which hopes to explain something. But with that admission, of course, we snap the last links to Locke's and Descartes's appeals to that special certainty with which we are aware of "what is closest to our minds" and "easiest for us to know." The assumption that diversity is found and unity made turns out to have its sole justification in the claim that only such a "Copernican" theory will explain our ability to have synthetic a priori knowledge.

But if we view the whole Kantian story about synthesis as only postulated to explain the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge, if we accept the claim that the quasi-psychological goings-on described in the "Deduction" have no introspective ground, we shall no longer be tempted by the "Copernican" strategy. For the claim that knowledge of necessary truths about made ("constituted") objects is more intelligible than about found objects depends upon the Cartesian assumption that we have privileged access to our activity of making. But on the interpretation of Kant just given, there is no such access to our constituting activities. Any mystery which attaches to our knowledge of necessary truths will remain. For postulated theoretical entities in inner space are not, by being inner, any more useful than such entities in outer space for explaining how such knowledge can occur.

And now Rorty is using "synthesis" in the way I used it up in #7, which I subsequently said seemed not to be Kantian, so now I'm more confused about my term, though I think I get Rorty's argument. Either we're conscious of synthesis [as Rorty is using the term], or we're not. If we are, the whole phenomena-noumena distinction collapses and we are aware of what we're doing and can critique it and come up with alternatives etc.; if we're not, then there's no reason to care about "synthesis," 'cause it doesn't tell us anything; it's a spinning wheel that doesn't find ground.

wild guesswork

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

The abolition of social relations as a vital element in thought, understanding and reason probably arrives with Descartes, whose tool was to dispense with all fallible claims, which takes him inside his own head communing with a God who can maybe lie to him.

But actually i suspect the empiricists also downgrade the social dimension -- however I haven't reread Locke for 30 years (I always found him a big far bore); and Hume -- while chatty and clubbable in tone -- is cheerfully derisive about what people merely say and think. (Marxist phlilosophers would make a lot at this point of the centrality to Locke's and Hume's politics of the property-owning individual as the "atom of right" or some such)

Kant was focused on defanging Hume in Critique of Pure Reason; his later works -- about for example morality and aesthetics -- pay far more attention on the social world, albeit sometimes in a somewhat abstracted form; but reason (for Kant) puts the social world at bay.

Hegel explicitly brings it back in: the role of history in the development of reason is a reintroduction of the idea that understanding is always social -- and hence, since all so-far-exisiting societies are flawed, always flawed. (Marx of course brings the material relation of understanding with the social right to the forefront: there's a -- much-contested! -- reading of Marx which is surprsingly close to the pragmatists; certainly Marx himself regarded philosophy as a filibuster, a secular reaffirmation of churchly and reactionary values)