Kant on Error and Correction

Sep 17, 2011 14:01

This is another attempt at understanding and articulating Kant’s philosophy of science ( Read more... )

philosophy of science, kant, transcendental arguments

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4inquiries September 19 2011, 22:30:00 UTC
I thought validity applied to the form of an argument (i.e. when the truth of the premises entails the truth of the conclusion), not a judgment.

I'll try to articulate my understanding here. Judgments have a syllogistic form which we reference for the validity of a judgment. So, iirc, for Kant validity of a judgment requires that it have a major and minor premise; so my judgment that Caius is mortal is valid because it is composed of the argument that all humans are mortal (major) and Caius is human (minor). These premises achieve validity as judgments likewise - all humans are animals, animals are mortal, etc. And reason, to unify its reflections on experience, tends to the unconditioned of judgments (the ideas of reason, God, world, and soul, which ground theology, cosmology, and anthropology). And I think this is why we need an account of dialectical logic as well as analytic logic... but this is getting off topic.

I don't understand why "experience obliges us to consider our appearances as subsumed under the limits of our understanding."

Since in experience we run up against the limits of our understanding, we must consider appearances not only formed by the limits of our sensibility (spatio-temporality), but also formed by the limits of our understanding. So I can't help but understand my experience in causal terms, though cause isn't an object of possible experience (as Hume showed), so I am obliged to consider my appearances as subsumed under the limits of my understanding - i.e. causality is transcendental category.

How things really are is also the way they appear to us? How does that happen?

We can't know that things really are the way they appear to us, since things-in-themselves aren't a possible object of experience against which we might test our appearances of things. But since things as they appear to us are subsumed under the limits of our understanding, we are obliged to think of things as if they are exactly as they appear. I think this is Kant's position as empirical realism.

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ayoungjovian September 21 2011, 12:10:44 UTC
But since things as they appear to us are subsumed under the limits of our understanding, we are obliged to think of things as if they are exactly as they appear.

Expand on this? I don't see the logical path. Why does the subsumption of things as they appear to us under the limits of our understanding oblige us to think of things as if they are as they appear?

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4inquiries September 21 2011, 22:49:04 UTC
Because our understanding is obliged to judge about things within its own limits, and its limits are constitutive of the way things appear to us (e.g. causal), we can only regard things as they appear as the relevant things in themselves to judge about.

Consider, if you were to deny a plainly causal event, for example in billiards, we would consider you unreasonable, even if you in fact are right to judge that no cause is in the appearance of one ball coming up against another and stopping whilst the other ball began to move (as Hume showed). Thus to be reasonable is to judge with respect to the obligations of your understanding, even though we can't know (i.e. we don't have any sense confirming) that these obligations actually correspond to things in themselves.

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ayoungjovian September 21 2011, 23:08:39 UTC
So its kinda.. a moral choice? A logically unsupported decision to act as if we know things as they are in themselves? Kant doesn't defend action like that any more than to say we're better off (more 'reasonable') accepting the 'obligation' rather than just admitting the unbridgable epistemic disparity between phenomena and noumena and learning to converse in terms that respect the consequences of that distinction (saying 'I think that's an apple' rather than 'I know that's an apple')?

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