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

Comments

[dubdobdee]

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

[dubdobdee]

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

[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?

wild guesswork

[dubdobdee]

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