Jerry the Anthropologist kindly responds to my recent post on Brassier and Correlationism:
Let me see if I can come back to two or three things.
First, I’m a good deal less convinced that string theory is a well formed scientific theory than apparently you are. Einstein’s work has been experiementally vindicated, so too has much of quantum mechanics. Huxley was able to make powerful arguments in favor of Darwin’s theories within 4 years (more or less) of the publication of On the Origin of Species, see his Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature published in 1863, on the basis of comparative anatomy alone; nor should we forget the fabulous intuitions (reimaginings) of Alfred Russel-Wallace. But as I understand matters, its been twenty years more or less for string theory and nada. So I do not have to accept the if-then nature of the argument; I really should leave aside the ethnographic fact that not all forms of human reason and human language allow if-then statements as grammatically well formed or linguistically fluent, but I can’t resist. So maybe you are right and I’ve over read an argument.
Nonetheless on this basis I do not have to accept the premises of what follows from Brassier’s invocation of string theory (perhaps better the string hypothesis). Nor do I am right about mathematics, do I have to accept the reading of moving beyond the image of the world.
I take mathematical objects to be extant in thought and not in the proportions of (especially) living things. Indeed mathematical objects seem to me an extremely good example of myth, understood in anthropological sense and not a colloquial one; I said as much in an earlier comment.
I simply do not agree with you about Copernicus or Darwin. We ask questions for reasons at particular times, but we ask them given oddities in what we perceive; this is not ethnographically insignificant as can be understood if we think about why mayans did not use wheels on carts or the classical Mediterrean folks did not use steam engines to power looms. This is why I think your dismissal of the question of the calculation of Easter is a bit premature. It is also why I think we need to come back to the movement of the planets. These motions has been known of for a very long time and by a variety of sciences not all of which are western. The point however for Copernicus is not just that the planets move forward against the apparent background of stars, they also move backwards, and in the case of Venus move from evening to morning and back to evening with periods of being unobservable between. If we do not attend to these sorts of movements, so be it, why should we. Hence the sense many have of the moving of the sun, moon and the so-called fixed stars, which if I understand you you equate with some sort of common sense (forgive me, but as you know any idea of common sense just gets anthropologists’ juices going–what is common about this or that sense?). But the backwards movements are still there in the heavens and in the image of the world (I suppose this is an example of what you mean by correlationism??). These movements are precisely the sort of detail which leads to a reimagining of the image of the world in the sense I’ve spoken of, and not the other way round as some sort of suspension. Indeed, if I’m right about mathematics (and yes in English of our era if-then statements are grammatically well formed) then then mathematics is not such a suspension but rather a way or means of reimagining the world.
What disturbs me about the cultural constructionists in anthropology (I won’t speak of other disciplines) is that they often seem to forget that there is a world out there being thought by someone, individually and collectively. What I find disturbing in the sort of materialism Brassier puts forth in those few pages is what I take to be a forgetting of the conditions of and for thought or maybe even a contempt for those who seek to explore these matters, of certain types of psychology and anthropology; he says of those forms of knowing that they are repugnant, and in that sense misunderstands how Darwin’s thought has entered into neurology, psychology and anthropology in ways that makes these three disciplines potentially unitary. What I’m also saying here is that he is ethnographically mistaken or put another way that his choice between Darwin and Husserl (or at least phenomenology as it has come to influence certain strands of psychology and anthropology) is a false choice. Its because I see this as a false choice (my notes refer to the top of his page 18 but without going back and rereading I can’t reconstruct this further) that I see Basskar as dreaming of a transparent language, shall we say mathematics??, without seeing this, apparently, as a reimagining of the image of the world.
I’ll grant that we can describe that we can describe human beings as “a carbon based information processing system” but that description also applies to marmosets, earthworms, my cats and the trees outside in that all of these living entities respond to events around them; this is what I mean, at least in part, when I speak about form the way that I do. The difference that makes a difference would be, I think, that we tell stories about the world as a part of thinking the world whereas my cats tell less complicated stories, if you will; I take mathematics to be a profound example of such a story, and in Husserl’s version as articulated in the quote, Nature is also a profound example.
I would agree that on its face Husserl’s quote is nonsense, that is until we take Husserl (my variable or term for phenomenology as it enters psychology and anthropology where I assure you it has been helpful because knowledge, even false knowledge, has conditions as well) to be talking about the conditions of knowing and Nature as myth; I’ve not read alot of Husserl and I’m not a philosopher, so nothing in my argument depends upon extensive exegesis of Husserl as such or in the problems facing western (continental?)philosophy as such.
I’m not claiming that there isn’t more in heaven and earth than is encompassed in my philosophy (if I even engage in philosophy), but in my discipline and those related to it we have had to try to take the circumstances of the thinker (human or otherwise, individually and collective) rather more seriously that Bashkar appears to me to do. Indeed I seem to think (ah, Bali and the distinction between niskala and sekal which I mentioned in an earlier comment) that any time a thinker arises so will correlationsism as a phenom,enological event, if I understand you correctly.
As to the last point you make (1) all thinkers find themselves at the center in that they have points of view from which they look out even if they are not at some mystical center, but please unless one wants to enter into lengthy attempts to understand centuries of Asian capitalism spare me getting over this myth of subjective interiority as Brassier puts it as a way of getting over capitalism (2) any trauma depends, it seems to me, upon some notion of special creation (and yes you and I live at the buckle of the Bible Belt where such notions are prevalent) but this (special creation) is not a universally human form of common sense, so (3) any comment about a policing mechanism refers to a provincial event, meaning of a time and place and not of the human condition (whatever the fullness of that may be) or the structure of ordinary lived experience (whatever the fullness of that may be) more generally.
I don’t think the soundness of my argument depends on whether or not superstring theory is confirmed as the issue revolves around whether or not the objects science can talk about are constrained to the structure of experience. Consequently, if one likes, you can just substitute subatomic physics for superstring theory. In either case we’re talking about entities that are wildly different than the mid-range objects of phenomenological experience that, were we to treat this structure of our experience as the measure, would render these objects of subatomic physics completely incoherent.
read on!
I am not dismissing the sorts of issues Jerry cite as prompting questions among folks like Copernicus. This is what the distinction between the intransitive and the transitive is all about. Copernicus’ interest in the calendar belongs to the transitive dimension of science, which is composed of historically shifting theories, politics, social relations, issues, etc., that might prompt us to investigate a certain region of the universe. For example, similar extra-scientific concerns have prompted contemporary research into the dynamics of climate. My reason for setting this aside is not because it is unimportant or not worthy of study– it is –but because the issue I’m dealing with is rather different and unrelated to this particular issue.
I suspect that part of the miscommunication here stems from how Jerry and I are respectively using the term “perception”. It seems to me that Jerry is using the term “perception” as a sort of all-purpose word to denote “noticing something”. Hence Jerry speaks of Copernicus perceiving discrepancies in the movement of the planets in relation to his desire to accurately calculate Easter.
By contrast, I am using “perception” to denote a formal structure of how a lived body encounters the world, somewhat similar to the formal structures explored by the Gestalt theorists (the Gestalt theorists and phenomenologists being close on many points). I’ll give an analogy to illustrate what I’m getting at. Suppose you were to look through the bottom of a stemless wine glass while looking at the world. Because of the properties of the glass, when you look through it everything takes on a radial pattern of bending or distortion. Now, suppose we take this experiment one step further and hypothesize that we only see the world through such a wine glass and never see it in any other way. In this analogy, what appears through the bottom of the glass is the “given”, while the glass itself is “givenness” or the mechanism by which the given is given or bestowed.
At this point questions of ontology and epistemology merge. The correlationist or transcendental philosopher, recognizing that it is not the world itself that displays this radial pattern but our own cognition or perception of the world that contains contributes this radial curving pattern. The correlationist or transcendental philosopher will then make three claims:
First, the correlationist will argue that while we are limited by this formal structure of perception, we can nonetheless analyze this structure of our perception, e.g., we can precisely discuss the structure of the radial curvature, etc.
Second, the correlationist will claim that any object we perceive will be structured in and through this radial curvature. For example, when I look through the bottom of my glass the door to my living room closet is bowed along the outside, with a bit of a blind circular spot in the middle. The mode or mechanisms of givenness systematically structures what appears as given.
Finally, third (and most importantly), the correlationist will claim that we can know nothing of objects as they are independent of these mechanisms of givenness because we have no access to objects beyond this field of presentation.
This formal structure is what I have in mind when I talk about perception. It is this third claim that divides the correlationist and the [hopefully not naive!] realist. The correlationist elides the distinction between the ontological and the epistemological, claiming that we only ever know the being of objects as they are for us or within the formal constraints of either cognition or perception. Consequently, Alexei (a correlationist), in response to one of my posts, writes:
I suppose I’m not terribly clear on the difference between ‘epistemic’ and ‘epistemological’ either, Levi. But I seem to recall that Mikhail once pointed out that these two terms seem to have the same kind of relationship as ‘ontic’ and ‘ontological’ do.
Should that be the case, any knowledge claim would be an epistemic claim, and any claim about the framework in which that knowledge claim is coherent would be an epistemological claim. Given that distinction, Kant avoids the epistemic fallacy, since he’s committed to saying only that any judgment (an epistemic claim) is possible on the grounds of the pure forms of intuition, the categories, the schematism, and the transcendental unity of apperception (a series of epistemological claims). And that says nothing about the thing in-itself or the speculative use of reason — nor does it say that there is no such thing as a thing in-itself, etc. it’s a rather deflationary claim, really. So when you say,
this would be summed up in the Kantian aphorism that the conditions for the possibility of experience are identical to the conditions for the possibility of the objects of experience.
(which strikes me as a tautology actually — what else do we experience besides the objects of experience?)
is an epistemological claim that makes certain kinds of epistemic claims coherent. But it doesn’t say anything about ontology — we’re still talking of objects-of-experience, and not objects as such.Viz. science, just because I’m feeling nit-picky: regardless of how unintuitible the object itself might be, science always revolves around intuition in the form of indirect observation (hence Hacking’s ontological principle: if you can spray it, it’s real). So I don’t think anyone is really licensed to talk about objects independent of experience. The real issue — so it seems to me — is the priority given to experience.
In fact, within a Kantian correlationist framework this is not what is said at all. In fact, were Alexei correct, then it would spell the ruin of the entire second half of the first Critique. Here Alexei is trading on an ambiguity in the term “experience”. Within a Kantian framework, experience has a very precise meaning. Kant’s claim is that experience consists of the synthesis of concepts and intuitions organized by reason. Paraphrasing Kant’s famous declaration: “concepts without intuitions are empty, intuitions without thought blind.” According to Kant, those philosophies that work entirely at the conceptual level without a corresponding dimension of intuition are, according to Kant, dogmatic speculation. This would apply mutatis mutandis to entities discussed by the sciences that are beyond the scope of any human intuition.
Here, then, we get what I’m referring to when I evoke the “epistemic fallacy” or the reduction of the ontological to the requirements of the epistemological. The consistent correlationist can only claim that these entities are dogmatic fictions that have no existence apart from our relationship to the world vis a vis the structure of our cognition and perception. Alexei declares “No! We register these differences and it is through this that we come to know these objects!” But no, this is not the case at all. The differences we register are effects of these objects. They are differences we register on a piece of graph paper printed out on a machine, detected by instruments, etc. From here we infer the structure of these objects. Yet this structure that we infer is, in many instances, in no way analogous to anything that could, under any conditions, be intuited by a human being. As such, the real logical outcome of the correlationist position is to smugly claim that these objects don’t exist at all or that if they do we certainly can’t know anything about them. Husserl makes this point most honestly when he claims that the natural world can’t be a condition of consciousness because consciousness is the condition of these objects. This thesis is implicit in every and all forms of correlationism regardless of whether or not the correlationism in question is Husserlian.
Larval Subjects . 
February 22, 2009 at 1:19 am
Hi Levi
See, in my view, this gets Kant totally, unhelpfully backward. Your reading implies that the order of explanation in Kant’s work runs like this: there’s first a subject, and then there’s the application of a transcendental framework to something, and then there’s an empirical experience. But that makes the transcendental subject — which is ideal (i.e. only explanatory), along with the transcendental object — into a metaphysically real one (That would be Fichte). It’s only if you ontologize Kant that you can assert the things you do. But Kant is no metaphysician. With respect to Kant, that’s totally backward.
In fact, I think you fail to see Kant’s work as metatheoretical — he accepts the universality of al the sciences, and simply wants to delineate philosophy’s contributions to it; he’s a handmaid to science, as the positivists would say — and hence seem to conflate yourself the actual order of explanation in his work.
Take, for instance, your remark concerning concepts and inuitions, Without going into the details, the relationship between intuitions and concepts is far from straightforward (and no interpreter is particularly happy with Kant’s remarks about it); the consensus, however, is that intuitions are ‘proleptic concepts’ — that is, the synthetic unity of intuitions and concepts in a judgment isn’t structurally different than the synthetic unity of phenomena themselves (That’s why Kant distinguishes between intuition, appearance and phenomena). You can’t talk about intuition independently of concepts, or concepts independently of intuitions precisely because their ‘fitness’ is derived from phenomena (and not, as you keep saying, applied to them).
Nor am I trading on any ambiguity of the word ‘experience.’ If anything, I think the fact that Kant distinguishes between empirical and transcendental forms of experiences (i.e. the various forms of a posteriori experience verses a priori) is quite in line with what I’ve said. Moreover, Kant just happens to have a rather stratified sense of experience, and I don’t think you’re doing it justice.
All this said, we can disagree over how to read Kant. That’s fine. But, for the sake of clarity, maybe we should mark this feature. For at least here, a fair bit seems to depend on the interpretation. If I, for instance, reject your interpretation of Kant, which I do, everything following ceases to have any bite. Insofar as it follows from the Kant-example, it too is false. However that may be, I don’t actually think it actually answers my intial question. Assuming that thee’s a difference between the epsitemic and the epistemological, how does that effect your claims concerning the epistemic fallacy (for surely reducing ontology to a knowledge claim doesn’t sound right; but reducing a knowledge claim to an epistemological framework seems fine to me)
So, if an epistemic fallacy = the reduction of ontological questions to epistemological ones, then how could Kant be guilty of it? If he reduces empirical experience to the conditions of possible experience — i.e. he reduces epistemic claims to epistemological ones, leaving ontology totally undetermined, how does he reduce ontology to epistemology.
I’m not saying there’s no such thing as an epistemic fallacy. I’m just not sure anyone has ever committed it (save for the logical Positivists).
Finally, you wrote,
I admit, this passage annoys me a bit, especially since i rarely declare anything (I argue, give reasons, and question stuff; ‘declarations’ are for those seeking ungrounded legitimacy or more attention), and since I’ve never intimated anything like what you’re attributing to me in this passage, I’m a little dismayed to see my position reduced to the absurd.
I acknowledge, for instance, that there may be a difference between an object and the effect of an object. My point was simply that an intuitiable effect is a sufficient condition for claiming that a cause exists. Moreover, given enough intuitable data, we can in fact characterize an unintuitable object. Now, to draw the conclusion: the only way to (responsibly) discuss an object is via what is intuitable. Otherwise, I might as well start invoking the 108 gods of voodoo every time I want to do ontology.
February 22, 2009 at 3:44 am
Before I get any further (and with many apologies for my dyslexia, bad spelling etc)
Levi’s ” Hence Jerry speaks of Copernicus perceiving discrepancies in the movement of the planets in relation to his desire to accurately calculate Easter.
By contrast, I am using “perception” to denote a formal structure of how a lived body encounters the world, somewhat similar to the formal structures explored by the Gestalt theorists (the Gestalt theorists and phenomenologists being close on many points.
is simply not correct. I too am using perception (or apperception) in that gestalt way. I do not see Levi has having a difference that makes a difference.
I’ll come back to the rest of this in a little while.
February 22, 2009 at 3:49 am
At a second point, no I do not think, given the Balinese distinction betewwn niskala and sekala, that the following necessary follows:
The correlationist elides the distinction between the ontological and the epistemological
rather if the Balinese distinction follows, the opposite is true.
February 22, 2009 at 4:17 am
Levi wrote,
They are differences we register on a piece of graph paper printed out on a machine, detected by instruments, etc. From here we infer the structure of these objects. Yet this structure that we infer is, in many instances, in no way analogous to anything that could, under any conditions, be intuited by a human being.
You write this as if you wish me to take you literally. Excuse me, that is exactly what the folks with nothing besides the piece of graph paper want me and you and eveyone else to accept as intuited. Are you ignoring the notion of axiom that much? Are you saying that they looking at the graph paper aree not reimagining the world? Are you saying that the machines which read whatever to produce the lines on the graph paper are not extensions of human senses?
Before you and I, my very good friend decide, say we both have just got to punch each other, my very lovely friend, shall I remind you that if I am to take that man whose name I apparently can not spell consistently correctly (dyslexia not Freud) at his word than he seems to think that most of my science is just about stuff which is repugnant. Why bother, if he is right, to come and know anything about knowing and the knower? Its all just carbon based information processing systems, even if that is really not very dispositive about why folks kill pigs now instead of then or Copernicus has a reason to try and figure out the movement of the planets now instead of then–Easter is very much at issue, and no, I don’t find your dinstiction between transitive knowing and the intransitive (but not changeable?) entirely convincing.
I’ll reread everything in the morning. No worries.
February 22, 2009 at 6:03 pm
And I think this is based on a very loose reading of Kant. The paralogisms, antonomies, and ideas of the transcendental dialectic all arise from employing concepts independent of intuition. Now, if we take Kant at his word, all those scientists doing work on super colliders are in violation of, for example, the second antinomy because they take themselves to be looking for the ultimate constituents of matter. Yet, as Kant argues in the second antinomy, this enterprise is futile. Similarly, you make the claim that an intuitible effect is a sufficient condition for claiming that a cause exists. Well it seems to me that this would violate Kant’s critique of teleological arguments for the existence of God for, under your reading, we would be able to infer a designer from order in nature. I, of course, agree that Kant is striving to ground science in his critique but believe his correlationist approach cuts too deeply. The consistent Kantian is committed to claiming that the scientist working on a super-collider is evoking the equivalent of 108 gods of voodoo whenever he makes his claims.
February 22, 2009 at 6:24 pm
Alright, levi. As I said, we can disagree about how to read Kant. However, when you write,
I’m compelled to say: No, that’s just wrong. Scientists get to construct intuitions. Philosophers don’t. Again, you’re mistaking Kant’s philosophical project with the first order scientific practices he fully accepts. You’re not finishing Kant’s 1st Critique, and you are misreading the Dialectic.
Same with your teleological response. Teleology simply isn’t the same as causation. The former begins with the Speculatively used Idea of God or the universe (some ‘whole’ that transcends the limits of possible experience) and then tries to track things back to it. The latter has no use for the transcendental idea of god, or the world, and simply begins with a (set of) caused phenomena. Again, you’re misreading the Dialectic
I suggest you go back to the CPR and look at what Kant actually has to say on the subject (in particular, you need to look at what Kant has to say about discipline in the Doctrine of Method).
But honestly, this is a staid debate, which initially took place when Rymanian geometry first became public. Your claim concerning super-colliders is structurally identical to the ones made over a hundred years ago by non-euclidean geometry. (Kant’s philosophy is just Wrong, Wrong, Wrong, Wrong!!!!) You might as well argue by thumping the table harder than the other guy at this point, cuz the whole debate is based on a misunderstanding.
Regardless, I would still very much like to hear what you have to say concerning the epistemic/epistemological distinction, since it seems to undercut the force of the epistemic fallacy (as Jerry seems to have noticed).
February 22, 2009 at 6:31 pm
Jerry,
I’m not sure what you’re getting at here:
I’m just underlining that it’s the graph paper that is perceived or intuited, not the object that produces that difference. When two particles collide in a supercollider all the researcher intuits or perceives are lines and data on a computer screen, not the particles themselves. Indeed, they never directly intuit the particles themselves. But, of course, I agree that these results on graph paper, computer screens, etc., lead to re-imagining the nature of the world.
I don’t see why any of this would lead us to suppose there’s nothing worthwhile in seeking to know things about knowers and knowing. The page references from Brassier I threw up here were responding to a very specific claim among phenomenologists (and more broadly Continentalists) who tend to reject any discussion of physical and biological science at all) along correlationists lines that I’ve outlined in my last two posts.
February 22, 2009 at 6:37 pm
ah, forgot to include this:
I think you’re failing to see how the various sense of Intuition in Kant’s CPR work in concert with one another. There’s three: there’s empirical intuition (this sense corresponds to phenomena), there’s pure (or formal) intuition, which is abstracted from the empirical intuition, and then there’s the pure form of intuition as such, which is the condition for the possibility of an empirical intuition (and by proxy a pure one). Rymanian geometry, doesn’t challenge this at all. It simply challenges the mistaken idea that intuition = euclidean geometry.
Same thing with you super-collider example. You’ve mistaken what can be seen with the naked eye for intuition. That surely a part of intuition, but it’s not the whole of it. IN fact, intuition is fundamentally orientational, rather than (ap)perceptive. And as Jerry said, we can technologically extend what can be intuited. But that hardly means we’re not intuiting something, or that the technological extensions don’t presuppose the conditions of possible experience.
February 22, 2009 at 6:58 pm
Alexei, you write:
I find this to be a very strange line of argument. You seem to be claiming– correct me if I’m wrong –that because Kant accepts first order scientific practices (and we should add, within the scope of 18th century science) Kant’s philosophy is therefore consistent with first order scientific practices. As someone deeply familiar with Hegel you should know that this is a poor line of argument because, as Hegel continuously shows throughout the Phenomenology, the manner in which a position understands itself and what it does can be deeply at odds with one another. Your claim here is similar to the suggestion that because a politician says he accepts first order democratic practices his actions are consistent with democracy. The issue is whether the transcendental aesthetic and analytic is consistent with these first order scientific practices or not, and my claim is that it is not. Your argument seems premised on taking Kant at his word with respect to what he says he’s doing. From there you conclude that I’m misreading Kant because Kant says he accepts these first order scientific practices. Rather, I would say that I’m reading Kant more carefully than you, distinguishing between what Kant would like to establish and the consequences that follow from how he attempts to establish this.
Here I think you have things backwards. The person making a teleological claim does not begin with an Idea of God and then trace things back to it, but begins by discerning order in nature, concluding it is an effect, and inferring the cause of that effect based on this order. Your characterization of inference from differences in nature would entail the legitimacy of the teleological argument within the scope of Kant’s critical philosophy. The issue here is that of why an inference to the existence of a designer is somehow more speculative to the inference of a subatomic particle that can never be a direct object of intuition for subjects such as ourselves. It seems that you want to have your cake and eat it too.
As I originally said when you asked me this, I don’t draw a distinction between the epistemic and the epistemological, but rather it’s purely a matter of sentence construction. The epistemic fallacy (which could just as easily be called the epistemological fallacy) consists in the view that questions of ontology can be reduced to questions of epistemology. Since I draw the fallacy from Roy Bhaskar’s Realist Theory of Science, I’ll allow him to explain it:
Hope this clarifies things somewhat.
February 22, 2009 at 7:04 pm
I accept the thesis that our intuition (or rather access… we’re not intuiting but inferring based on these technologies) can be extended through technical means, while rejecting your thesis that Riemannian geometry doesn’t fundamentally challenge Kant’s understanding of intuition. To see this one need only examine what Kant actually says about intuition in the aesthetic, the axioms and analogies, and his philosophy of material nature. Kant’s pure intuition is clearly modeled on empirical intuition or the constraints of our sensibility. This comes out in his claims about succession and simultaneity. The point about the super-collider isn’t about what can be seen with the naked eye, but that the nature of the entities disclosed by the super-collider do not exist in a way prescribed by the pure forms of intuition and are therefore violations of the conditions of experience.
February 22, 2009 at 8:33 pm
Let’s not complicate things by introducing Hegel here, Levi. Let’s stick with Kant. Let’s stop switching topics and changing the parameters of the conversation. Kant is one thing, Hegel another, and Hegel’s criticisms of Kant something different in turn.
This said, my major criticism of everything you’ve said so far about Kant is the following: you flatten out — obliterate in fact — the difference between theory and metatheory in Kant’s work (i.e. the very difference you try to introduce by appeal to Hegel). You consistently fail to register the various levels of analysis Kant employs (e.g. how subjective validity operates, what objective validity means, etc, which account for the differences between how a practicioner takes herself to be doing and how a practice in fact operates). And you effectively mistake — or misrepresent — what Kant is up to.
So of course Kant’s aesthetic and analytic look bizarre, when you take them to be metaphysical, when you put them on the same explanatory level as scientific investigation, when you measure them against the results of cutting edge science. But that is precisely the wrong level of analysis.
You read Kant uncharitably, Levi. And that’s fine, I guess, so long as you signal this fact to your readers.
And, as I’ve said already, if you choose to assert that Kant epistemological framework fails to achieve a consistent relationship with scientific practices, that’s OK. For my part, I would like to see an argument for that claim. To date, I haven’t seen that. so far, I’ve only seen hand waving and table-top banging.
As for what you’ve said about my views on Kant’s Dialectic, let me reiterate: You’re misreading Kant. The Dialectic applies only to philosophical reasoning from Transcendental ideas, not scientific reasoning, precisely because the latter can construct its intuitions and concepts (Kant’s example is geometry and math — eg: although you can’t visualize a transfinite mathematical series, but you can intuit it; you can construct it, and thereby construct a new concept for it), whereas the latter only ever inherits concepts and analyzes them. The Dialectic deals with the various attempts of philosophy — not science — to extend its concepts, which it can’t do . My advice, Levi, is to Read the Doctrine of Method, then go back to the Dialectic, and this point will be clearer.
Put differently. (1) you collapse the difference between philosophy and scientific research, and then you misread the dialectic through this t(a)inted lense. The Effects are statements like these:
It’s more speculative because it’s philosophical rather than scientific; it’s based on a transcendent idea rather than on the construction of intuitions and concepts through scientific methods. I don’t know how else to impress upon you that Kant does differentiate between these levels of investigation, other than to refer you to the last third of CPR. For all its problems, Kant is pretty clear and consistent about this differentiation — regardless of your claims to the contrary.
I’ve said no such thing. I said that identifying an effect is a sufficient condition for claiming the existence of a cause. Since this doesn’t invoke any ‘global order in nature,’ it’s not teleological. My claim and the one you’re imputing to me are by no means co-extensive. See how Kant actually handles Causality and in CPR, and you’ll see what I mean.
Finally, viz. this:
Meh. I don’t think that’s the case. As I’ve said, your argument is exactly the same as the one made by the non-euclideans. That one was based on a deep misunderstanding (i.e. that intuition = euclidean geometry), and yours is based on something similar (i.e. intuition = directly observable phenomena, which is false). You deeply misunderstand what the conditions of possible experience are — in particular, what ‘intuition’ is and does — in Kant.
All this said, Levi, I’m not writing all of this simply to say, “I’m righter than you are.” That would be a total waste of my time (and I have more interesting things to write about — some stuff on Benjamin, actually). I’m writing (1) because I detect a serious confusion concerning Kant in what you’ve written (which may be a function of the medium) and because (2) people — students — read this stuff, and should be made aware of the fact that there seems to be a problem with what you’re saying; at the very least, they should be made aware that what you are saying is hardly a received idea, or the last word on the subject.
Finally, thanks for the quotation from Baskhar. It helps. Although it now sounds like a totally trivial point. As far as I know, no one has committed it — not even Kant or the positivists (Kant doesn’t commit it, because he’s not engaging in ontology, viz. the positivists because they dumped Verificationism super fast, because they saw that it was paradoxical and just dumb). I would also like to point out that Baskhar’s point is hardly unqualified. Notice:
So, there are some cases in which this is true. It’s not much of a fallacy, really, since it’s scope is far too restricted. It’s more like a category error.
February 22, 2009 at 9:05 pm
Missed this comment:
‘Modeled’ is the wrong word here, Levi. Like everywhere else that Kant employs a transcendental deduction, the structure of argument is regressive and abstractive. So it’s not a case of modeling.
Now, insofar as you think that Riemannian geometry really does challenge Kant’s conception of intuition, you’re really in the minority of Kant interpreters. I don’t think anyone seriously holds that position anymore, simply because the salient difference between euclidean and non-euclidean geometry is how to conceive of space, but to conceive of space still requires an inuition of it, etc. The original criticism, as I’ve said already, is based on a misunderstanding.
And viz sub-atomic phsyics: so long as I can construct a mathematical formula of something, I’m also capable of constructing a pure intuition it. So there’s no problem here. Again, you have far too narrow an understanding of what ‘intuition’ is in Kant’s work. ‘Access’ for Kant doesn’t preclude mathematical access, and hence doesn’t preclude particle physics.
February 23, 2009 at 12:17 am
Alexei,
I suppose we’ll have to agree to disagree. Your argument strikes me as being based completely on a circularity; viz. because Kant claims that he accepts scientific practice his position must necessarily be consistent with scientific practice. I do think you’re putting words in my mouth when you claim I’m confusing metatheory and theory. The point is not that Kant should have deduced something like Riemannian manifolds in his own account of space, but is quite different. The issue is whether Kant’s metatheoretical understanding of space can be consistent with something like Riemannian manifolds or eleven dimensional space-times. Take the example of transfinites. When Kant discusses intuition and mathematics he explicitly makes reference to the necessity of intuiting things like points in order to do arithmetic. Yet a transfinite number cannot be intuited in this number. This indicates– to me at least –that there is something deeply lacking in Kant’s intuition based account of mathematics. When Kant does discuss the structure of space he consistently refers to oridinary experiences of space in relation to the lived body and its orientation (for example, his famous example of the man walking through the streets of Konigsberg in his philosophy of material nature). We might also compare the A and B deduction, where Kant clearly draws organizes the A deduction around human recognition and then tries to hide this in the B deduction. However, to be fair, there is perhaps a sense in which you’re right about the conflation of metatheory and theory. Yet here it’s not the result of a “confusion”, but rather the result of how transcendental philosophies model metatheory on some datum that they take to be absolute and the same for all times and places, tracing their a priori conditions from the existing state of science and mathematics at that point in history. Such a transcendental approach then becomes deleterious because it restricts the domain of subsequent research by foreclosing, a priori, claims that don’t fit with that model.
The problem you seem to be missing is that anything can be identified as an effect and that in most instances of our relationship to effects, we possess no relationship to the cause. Now Kant, unfortunately, follows Hume in his understanding of what a cause and effect relation is. That is, he understands a cause and effect relation in terms of sense-data following one another. Kant’s differs from Hume in that he adds a category of the understanding in order gain necessity. However, a succession of events such as this is the exception rather than the rule where causal relations are concerned. In the vast majority of instances dealt with by the sciences, the cause isn’t directly observed as Hume or Kant would have it, but lies in the nature of the entity by virtue of its structure. From this standpoint, appeals to teleological causes would be on equal footing with appeals to other natural causes. Kant just has a rather poor understanding of causality.
You keep charging me with this, but I don’t think you understand what it is that I’m claiming. I am not making the claim that intuition is the same as directly observable phenomena. That would be a silly claim. As far as I’m concerned, for Kant all that is required is that claims about the world be consistent with the transcendental conditions of experience, regardless of whether the object is present (i.e., a sense-datum) or not. This is the force behind Kant’s defense of geometry and arithmetic in the Transcendental Aesthetic. We make the claim that arithmetic truths hold for all times and places despite not being able to experience all times and places because the structure of our pure intuition is the same for all times and places. It is like the home of a turtle carried about on our back. The issue about subatomic particles is not that we don’t directly perceive them (sense-data), but that they are not consistent with our a priori structures of time and space. Now, if Kant’s right, then these must be nonsense objects that should be banished from our speculation because we cannot intelligibly speak of things that cannot be intuited at all. You’re really making the claim that we have a priori intuitions of eleven dimensional manifolds according to Kant?
As for the epistemic fallacy, I would claim that nearly all of post-Kantian Continental philosophy has made this trivial error.
February 23, 2009 at 2:18 am
Perhaps we should let it be then, Levi. But just for clarification, you write:
.
Yes that’s exactly right. But circularity is not necessarily vicious. sometimes it’s actually virtuous. all transcednental deductions are circular, but the circle they build is “big enough” not to be vicious (i.e. they need more than two members, for vicious circularity occurs when member a is defined in terms of B, and B in terms of A. If you add a C, so that A defines B, and B defines C, and C defines A — you’re totally fine; look up the matter in any mathematical logic book; they usually offer a proof for the forms of induction and the least number principle that works this way).
viz. points and transfinite series. I think you’re mistaking an example/illustration for th real McCoy. Kant’s discussion of Quanta is a good example of how pure intuitions, which are not dependent upon a point/empirical intuition, are used in math to create mathematical objects and make synthetic a priori judgments possible.
Viz. Riemannian Geometry: again, the point is not consistency per se, but deriveability. Riemannian geometry has to be deriveable form the pure form of intution, it doesn’t have to be consistent with an empirical intuition.
Now, what you say about the structure of space is true, of course, but that hardly exhausts the intuition of space. That’s a manifestation of space, not the sum total of the intuition. So it’s not clear to me, in any case, that non-euclidean geometry isn’t consistent with its ground in inution. nor do i think that you’ve shown that it is in fact inconsistent.
Viz. the A and B deductions: yes, of course they both revolve around subjectivity, because they both have to do with the conditions for the posibility of judgment. I’ll let this be a slip.
Now, when you say this:
If we excise the ‘deleterious,’I agree — though perhaps I should also add that it only closes down certain forms of philosophical research. If you want to do ontology, says Kant, go do some science. I’m perfectly comfortable with that claim. Most of us say that already (e.g. Badiou, et al).
And yes, anything can be an effect. But that only means we can start doing science from anywhere and on any thing. I don’t think that’s a problem, unless you have some Hierarchy in mind.
Now, about this:
Penultimately,
if you can mathematize it, then you can intuit it. Again, see what Kant has to say on this matter in the Doctrine of Method.
Finally, I didn’t say the epistemic fallacy — which to reiterate isn’t a fallacy, but a category error — is trivial. I said that it’s application formulation is trivial, since it’s so weak. all it says, really, is that sometimes we can reduce ontological claims to epistemological ones, sometimes we can’t. It’s like me saying, “sometimes I’m right about Kant, sometimes I’m wrong.” It”s just uninformative. for it to be interesting, you would need to specify the conditions under which the reduction is legitimate and the conditions under which it is not, and then show that there’s a constitutive feature of a given philosophy that forces it to always assert the illegitimate conditions. Barring something liek that, the epistemic fallacy is about as worrisome as a banana peel (somebody will — commically — slip on it, but it’s rare, and hardly worth making central to a theory. Better just to avoid it and pick up the bloody peel!
February 23, 2009 at 2:35 am
Ouch, I screwed up a html bracket at the end of the first blockquote, and forgot to delete a blockquote (the random bit about Hume, which begins, ‘Now about this:” and ends with the word ‘necessity’.
Sorry for the ugliness of the last comment.
February 23, 2009 at 2:45 am
Thanks for the comment, Alexei (I cleaned it up as best I could). I do think it’s best to leave it here as I think we’ve made the points we can make at this point. I do, however, genuinely appreciate your criticisms as they help me to strengthen my own arguments; so many thanks for the time you’ve put into this. You’ll certainly get an acknowledgment in the book when/if it comes out so long as you don’t object.
February 24, 2009 at 2:56 pm
Pardon my interruption, if this is a finished debate. It just seems to me that there is something quite important here.
Is Kant really off the hook when it comes to developments in modern physics and mathematics? (As judged by the scholarly community, that is). Because I have to say, from what I’ve read, I have seen no such consensus. I’ll just mention two recently read books, “Kant’s Transcendental Psychology” by Patricia Kitcher, and “Kant and the Capacity to Judge” by Beatrice Longuenesse. Both of these express doubts concerning Kant’s claims about the Euclidian characteristics of space, though they express it differently. Kitcher finds Kant very prone indeed to proof or disproof coming from empirical science. And Longuenesse expresses doubts about Kant’s “concluding from the continuity of our synthetic apprehension of sensations to the continuity of the objects corresponding to those sensations” or something like that (I don’t have the book with me, but it’s referred to on the very last page of the conclusion). Which seems (to me at least) to be similar to what Levi is referring to here with the supercollider, that it might find ultimate, discrete constituents of matter (and space and time for that matter, if any of the quantum gravity approaches are onto something)…..
February 24, 2009 at 5:40 pm
To Jonas points, we might also add the implications of Einstein’s relativity. Now, I’m aware that most Kantians do not think Einstein’s relativity is a real challenge to Kant’s thought, but simply because an argument has been around for a while does not entail that it’s a bad argument or an argument based on a failure to properly interpret Kant. Aristotle’s Third Man argument has been around for a long time, but still remains a strong argument against the forms. Back to Einstein. Kant’s thesis is that time and space are forms of mind rather than things that belong to things themselves. However, what Einstein convincingly shows is that spatio-temporal relations pertain to the things themselves (resulting from differentials and speeds and mass) and that these differentials are variable depending on those velocities and masses. By contrast, Kant consistently suggests that time and space are always the same.
Now, throughout this discussion I’ve been accused of conflating theory and metatheory. I am not entirely sure what this charge means, but I think it misses the point of what’s being debated. I understand very well that Kant’s first Critique is a metatheory that, in and of itself, says nothing specific about the sciences. Rather, it aims to articulate the formal conditions necessary and sufficient for scientific practice. However, these formal conditions still have a specific structure that legislates over what is possible and what is impossible, as well as the limits of our knowledge. The question is whether there are scientific discoveries or assertions that are at odds with this metatheory. Now Alexei has argued that scientists construct intuitions and that there is nothing contradictory between, say, a transfinite set or an 11 dimensional mathematical space and Kant’s transcendental aesthetic or claims about space and time. Likewise, Alexei would probably claim that there is no contradiction between Kant’s conceptions of space and time and pathological functions in mathematics. Well if this is the case and Kant’s transcendental aesthetic really has the resources to account for these things rather than excluding them as dogmatic fictions, then Alexei and I really have no argument. However, it seems to me that this claim so evacuates Kant’s transcendental forms of space and time of content as to render these conditions meaningless catchalls that we can evoke in whatever way we might like without restriction or restraint. Moreover, the intuitionist school in philosophy of mathematics, largely inspired by Kant, has tended to reject these sorts of mathematical entities precisely because they aren’t constructable in intuition.
February 24, 2009 at 7:04 pm
What the hell, I’ll add my two cents here too.
Jonas: there are of course problems with what Kant has to say. I don’t deny that. But it strikes me as unproductive to simply say something like, ‘See there’s a problem with X, theefore X is (1) without merit and (2) false.’ In point of fact I don’t think that either of these follow from any given problem, for false things can have merit (be productive, and be remedied) just as true things can be utterly trivial. (I do want to point out, however, that Longuenesse’s point isn’t about intuition per se, but about whether the 3fold syntheses of Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception — the unifying feature of judgments — actually rule out something like occasionalism.)
Most of my efforts were really just oriented towards offering a standard reading of Kant in order to show that a number of Levi’s claims are highly contentious, and that a number of things he’s said about Kant strike me as rather profound misreadings.
Levi: here’s an example of you conflating theory and metatheory:
What Einstein is up to is not what Kant is up to. The former does physics (theory), the latter does philosophy (metatheory): whereas the former inquires into what manifests itself, the latter inquires into how that manifestation is possible. This is why Kant’s arguments are sometimes called ‘two-step’ arguments, and why I characterized his general strategy as a regressive, abstractive approach.
Now, what my charge of conflating theory and metatheory means is that you are continually making a rather serious category error (similar in a way, to what happens in Sense-Certainty”. And it vitiates many of your claims.
I’m also a little puzzled by your introduction of pathelogical functions here. I’m not very familiar with them, but I really don’t see how they would affect what I’ve said about anything. Unless, or course, you think that contradictions = aberration, and anything that is contradictory needs to be purged from existence.
This aside, Why can’t I intuit a triangle whose hypotenuse is the square root of two (i.e. irrationals are pathological for a theory that deals only with rationals)? Surely that’s meaningful. and so is the fact that imaginary numbers, which I can intuit because I can mathemetize them and use them in constructive proofs, break the ‘laws’ of communitivity and transitivity. I can intuit that, precisely because I can demonstrate it.
Viz. Intuitionism: in a nutshell, levi, yes I am something of an intuitionist when it comes to math (I’m also something of a dialetheist, and I need to figure out whether these two commitments are contradictory, but that’s another story). But that just means that I believe existence proofs are dumb, double negation (not-not-P) doesn’t necessarily — i.e. axiomatically — equal an affirmation (P), and the law of excluded-middle isn’t as universally applicable as it would seem. My Math is actually more disciplined than most. But I don’t see ho it excludes pathological functions.
So, for instance, when you claim,
I’m again compelled to say, No that’s not right. The conditions of possible experience range over three things: (1)What can I know, (2) what ought I to do, and (3) What may I hope for. Viz. (1) the limits imposed aren’t metaphysical limits (possibility and impossibility) but the normative limits on the use of reason (dogmatic uses of Speculative Reason).
So Kant’s answer to “What can I know” is actually, “an infinite number of things, so long as they are arrived at scientifically and not through the dogmatic, speculative — philosophically transcendent use of Reason.” Again because you collapse Kant’s metatheorical endeavour into a theory, you keep missing this point.
But that’s already more than two cents worth.
February 24, 2009 at 7:42 pm
I shortchanged myself in the last exchange, since I forgot to comment on this:
I find this emphasis on contradiction extraordinarily puzzling. If I claim that the pure forms of intuition are conditions of possibility for experience, and I can experience contraries, why shouldn’t these contraries be deriveable from the Pure forms of intuition (and hence be contradictory)?
This whole line of argument concerning contradiction seems specious to me, especially since it must ultimately concede the very point we are arguing about: If 11 dimensional space is a contradictory of the pure forms of intuition, then it must be implied by the pure forms of intuition themselves– you would need to be able to derive the 11D space from intuition. But that’s precisely what I’m asserting is in fact the case. That’s precisely why it’s not an objection. So, to claim that one must choose between either Kant’s pure forms of intuition or 11d, you need to assume that the 11d are derivable from the pure intuitions.
Now, Levi, you continue,
I’m really hoping that there’s no real argument between us. But again, contradiction isn’t the appropriate notion here. As I’ve said already, what is important is actually whether something is derivable from — i.e. constructible in — Kant’s pure forms of intuition.
February 24, 2009 at 9:12 pm
Alexei,
I think you are significantly misreading me with your criticism from the distinction between theory and metatheory. I understand this distinction and that Einstein is up to the question of what manifests itself, whereas Kant is up to the question of how this manifestation is possible. My point is rather different than the one you’re attributing to me. Kant restricts our knowledge to appearances and clearly states that things-as-they-are-in-themselves are beyond the scope of knowledge. That is, our knowledge is strictly restricted to the phenomena. This gives us two clear criteria for criticizing Kant. First, we can come up with an example of some form of knowledge that is not intelligible without reference to things as they-are-in-themselves. (This paper gives a good example of such a strategy: http://mypage.iu.edu/~hagara/Kant.pdf ). This is what I was trying to suggest with Einstein’s theory of relativity and the understanding of space and time within the scope of that theory. Now here you will claim that I am crossing wires between theory and metatheory, but that misses the point I’m making. The point here would be that the relations Einstein uncovers simply should not be possible within the constraints of time and space as Kant describes them. Now, this is premised, of course, on the thesis that Kant understands space in Euclidean terms. You’ve disagreed with this thesis, but I think there’s ample evidence from the Inaugural Dissertation, the Critique, the Prolegomena and The Philosophy of Material Nature to support this supposition.
Second, we can show that there are mathematical entities that simply do not fit Kant’s theory of intuition. Pathological functions are an example of such entities. The interesting thing about pathological functions is that you cannot construct these functions in intuition, yet they still work. This would be an example of an entity that violates Kant’s account of mathematics premised on intuition. Your admission that you are not familiar with pathological functions (and clearly ignorance of Riemann) is here significant. You seem to think that we can simply ignore these things as “what scientists do” (something you’ve repeated often in this exchange) because nothing a scientist does could ever be outside the scope of Kant’s particular metatheory. Kant understood better in that he recognized that he had to be deeply intimate with the maths and science of his day to construct an adequate metatheory (more on this in a moment). The subsequent history of German Idealism and most Continental philosophy was not similarly modest, believing it could compartmentalize without keeping abreast of new developments.
Now, you have made the claim that I am crossing circuits between metatheory and theory (what I referred to as a “contradiction” between the two). However, you’re missing the whole point. Returning to your points about “virtuous circles” before, the logic of a transcendental argument is that we take some body of knowledge as given or true (such as Euclidean Geometry and Newtonian Physics for Kant) and then proceed to ask after the conditions under which this knowledge is possible (the metatheory). This metatheory, of course, says nothing specific about the theory used as a launching point, but attempts to remain as abstract and general as possible so as to leave open future developments. The sufficiency of the metatheory will then be a function of how well it is able to account for the conditions of knowledge. This is why the metatheory cannot excuse itself from reference to theory. It is measured in terms of its adequacy to accounting for the conditions of possibility for that theory. Now, Kant fairs pretty well with arithmetic, Euclidean geometry, and Newtonian physics. The question is whether he fares as well with developments in contemporary mathematics and science or whether he is able to account for these findings within the scheme of his transcendental philosophy.
Suppose that we conclude that Kant’s conditions are inadequate to account for the conditions of possibility of these new developments. There are two options available to us at this point… A weak option and a strong option. The weak option would be to claim that Kant is wrong in detail and right in spirit. That is, the idea would be that correlationism or transcendental modes of argument are correct, but Kant got the details wrong. Our job would then be to figure out what the structure of mind must be to account for the possibility of knowledge of these kinds of knowledge. “What must intuition be like for transfinite numbers to be possible?” Note, nothing specific here about transfinite mathematics is being asserted, only the issue of what intuition must be like for it to be possible (for beings such as ourselves). Nonetheless, the dimension of theory cannot be divorced from the metatheory because the metatheory has to be grounding something.
The strong option would be to argue that correlationism or transcendental philosophy is fundamentally mistaken and incoherent and is a project that should be abandoned.
At any rate, it seems to me that only a deeply uncharitable reading would begin from the premise that I am confusing theory and metatheory or am somehow the victim of a mere interpretative error. This is a nasty habit among Continental philosophers, where it is concluded that any disagreement with a particular thinker indicates a failure to interpret that thinker correctly, rather than a real issue (no matter how misguided) with the claims of the thinker. The idea seems to be that if only one interpreted the thinker correctly they would endorse that thinker’s positions. The issue here isn’t over a confusion with theory and metatheory but with the ability of that metatheory to deal with subsequent developments in the sciences. You have made the argument that, in fact, these mathematical entities can be constructed within intuition as described by Kant. Now that’s a real argument and a legitimate rejoinder to what I’m claiming (though you haven’t shown how beyond pounding the table, and your argument has tended to rely on appeals to authority– “most Kantian scholars hold that Riemann is not inconsistent with Kant” or “standard readings hold”, etc –or taunting to the effect that because certain arguments were advanced a few decades ago they have ceased to be legitimate). The theory/metatheory argument indicates either a) that you don’t understand the relationship between theory and metatheory as it functions in transcendental arguments (the soundness of the theory functions as a premise in the transcendental argument), or b) that you’re simply attempting to dodge the issue by situating your interlocutor, me, in a position of ignorance as being too dense to understand this material (references to not having read certain material have abounded in this discussion).
February 24, 2009 at 10:55 pm
Levi, I’ve never claimed that you’re dense, nor that you’re ignorant, nor have I attempted to dodge issues. If I’ve decided not to discuss something, it’s only because I used my best judgment and decided that it’s not relevant to our discussion. I stand by these decisions. If you feel differently, please take one example and show me that it is in fact relevant. I’d be happy to elaborate on it.
Now, down to business. As I’ve said a few times, if you can mathematize something, you can intuit it. Since you can construct proofs for pathological functions (for how else would you know that they are pathological?), you can intuit them (they remain, of course, Objekte and not Gegenstände, in Husserl’s sense, but that doesn’t make them any less intuitable; they can be purely intuited, though not empirically intuited in Kant’s language).
And, as I’ve said several times too, you seem to insist on a false restriction on Kant’s conception of intuition to mere emprical intuition, to phenomenal Gegenstände. I’ve argued at least once that the pure form of space isn’t identical to the orientational functions it makes possible in structuring empirical space, nor is it identical to what can be directly observed, nor again to the pure intuitions (Objekte).
Now, as usual, we can disagree on this. But I find your claim to the effect that there’s ample evidence in Kant’s work ranging from his pre-critical writings to his lectures to his critical texts to justify your views on the limitedness of Kant’s intuition to be less than compelling. For in the first instance, it’s simply not an argument; you’ve just replaced your previous strategy of hand waving and tabletop banging with a new one: finger-pointing. Unfortunately I don’t find it any more convincing than the other strategy. Second, it’s not clear to me that Kant is actually consistent throughout his career on some points (e.g. his notion of concepts and their formation in the lectures on logic isn’t prima facie consistent with what he says in the CPR, nor is his account of analyticity in the prologomena obviously consistent with what he says in the CPR). So I stick to the CPR in order to avoid rather technical, laborious discussions that won’t actually advance our debate. If you feel otherwise, please cite somethign from Kant, and show me how it contradicts my statements.
Now, about this:
yes fine. But that’s hardly an objection to anything. For theory and metatheory don’t have to look like one another, use the same argumentative techniques, or even the same principles. The only relationship that must be there is one of derivability and explanation.
Hence my claims about metatheory and theory. I’m not starting out from the assumption that you don’t manage to maintain a clear difference between them. I conclude that that’s the case, based on your constant attempt to show that some scientific theory proves the metatheory wrong, because it’s results seem to be at odd with your reading of the metatheory.
The reason your arguments along these lines don’t work is as follows (I’m going to give an argument by analogy, and then somethign more technical).
To argue by analogy, it’s not that non-euclidean geometry is more true than euclidean geometry. They’re different conceptions — theories — of space altogether. Moreover, precisely because we can in fact think both of them requires a set of conditions from which both can be derived (metatheory).
Furthermore, even if it were true that non-euclidean geometry proved euclidean geometry to be false, it wouldn’t follow that the falseness of euclidean geometry proves the falseness of the metatheory (i.e. Pure forms of intuition). IN point of fact, the problem would still remain: you would still need to account for the conditions of both — and the more parsimonious the answer, the better.
INterlude: Again, I haven’t assumed that you’re making a mistake about the relationship between theory and metatheory — that would be dogmatic to say the least — but I have concluded that you keep falling into this trap. God knows why. but to compare say relativity and the pure forms of intuition requires them to be on the same level of analysis. What else can I say. It’s not that I’m uncharitible, it’s just that you keep making the same mistake over again.
Finally, for the more technical argument, consider this:
Ok Levi. you are of course free to take or leave anything that I am saying. I don’t have anything personally invested in it. And I’m sorry to frustrate you.
However I really need to point out that a premise can’t be sound/unsound — it can only be true/false; soundness applies only to arguments, taken as a whole (i.e. valid inferences drawn from true assertions).
NOw, an argument — or metatheory — is still valid, even when it’s not sound (supervenes upon a false theory). all you need, moreover, to get a sound argument is replace a bad (false) premise that allows for the same formal relationships/inferences to be drawn from it.
So the point I’ve been making still remains: simply because you disagree with what a metatheory supervenes on doesn’t mean that the metatheory is false. (To claim contrary involves some rather deep conflation of metatheory and theory: technically put, it fails to grasp the difference between and independence of a logical model and its valuation.) It just means that one particular — empirical, contingent — valuation of it happens to be incorrect. And it’s precisely because of this feature that the letter/spirit approach doesn’t really help here.
You seem to think that a false theory makes a metatheory false, and that is really not the case. that conflates metatheory and theory.
but anyway. I’ sorry you feel that I’ve been hectoring you. My point in all of this remains — as I’ve said before — simply to make you and others aware that there seems to be major flaws in what your saying. If you disagree, that’s fine. The value of what I’ve written doesn’t consist in its being right — and certainly not in its being more right than what you’ve written (we’re probably both wrong in the end) — but in the manner in which it foregrounds serious points for continued research.
February 25, 2009 at 1:31 am
Alexei, I think you’re still failing to understand this argument and that this is systematically evident in your remarks.
This statement, especially the first sentence, gets us to the crux of the matter. My claim is that there are mathematical objects that are not, in any way, based on or reliant upon intuition. Now, clearly we’re engaged in this argument because you are reasoning from a tautology or a circular argument: “if we can mathematize something we can intuit it”. That is, your argument runs “if it is mathematized then it is necessarily intuitable. If it can’t be intuited, it can’t be mathematized.” In short, you simply beg the question. From your standpoint it is simply dogmatically true or axiomatic that if it is mathematized then it is intuitable. My thesis, by contrast, that there is an entire range of things that are mathematizable without being intuitable. My motive for rejecting a Kantian philosophy of mathematics thus has to do with siding with mathematics over Kant. As is well known among philosophy of mathematics circles, intuitionist theories of mathematics require the surrender of vast aspects of mathematics such as the law of the excluded middle or uncountable infinite sets. In other words, far from grounding mathematical practice, intuitionism in the course of its history, came to legislate over mathematics, denying entire fields of mathematical thought because they couldn’t be constructed in intuition.
My position is that when faced with a dichotomy between sound theory and metatheory, we should side with the theory (in this case Cantor over the intuitionists) rather than the metatheory. Thus when you write,
I am completely perplexed as to where you should have gotten such a notion from anything that I’ve written in this exchange. My position is not that a false theory can make a metatheory false– that would be absurd. My position is that various true theories (in mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry, etc) can falsify a metatheory through the discovery of objects that cannot be elaborated in terms of the metatheory. So long as you begin with the premise that if a mathematician can do it then it must be constructable in intuition– as your tautologous mode of argumentation has proceeded so far –you merely beg the question because you begin from the premise that the metatheory cannot be mistaken. A legitimate, rather than tautologous, mode of argumentation on your part requires that you show precisely how such and such is constructable in intuition. For example, the burden is on you to show how uncountable infinite sets are constructable in intuition. Perhaps you have some whizbang theory that will allow you to do this, though it’s worth keeping in mind that those of the intuitionist school descended from Kant, such as Brouwer, believed that such things could not be constructed and that therefore they were meaningless. They therefore chose to side with the metatheory– intuitionism –and to reject Cantorian set theory (or the parts dealing with uncountable infinite sets, anyway. That is, they sided with the metatheory over the theory. Being the dense realist that I am, I instead choose to side with the mathematicians.
Given all of this, I cannot but side with Montoya ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2y8Sx4B2Sk ) when you say this:
Nothing could be further from the truth. I am not, in any way, restricting Kant’s conception of pure intuition to empirical intuition. Were I to do so you would be right in claiming that I have thoroughly failed to understand Kant’s argument. I have underlined, in a few posts now, that I am not making such a conflation, yet you still attributing it to me. Let’s put that to rest right now. What I am claiming is that pure intuition as formulated by Kant, has a particular form or structure. Put otherwise, it is not just nothing but is organized in a particular way. This is so independent of any particular empirical intuition. What else would the pure, a priori, form of intuition be were it not to have a particular structure. Given this, my thesis is that there are mathematical objects that are impossible (unconstructable) within this particular structure of pure intuition. Again, given the choice between mathematics and a particular metatheory, I side with the mathematics, just as given the choice between biology and neurology and Husserl’s claim that nature cannot be a condition for consciousness because nature is dependent on consciousness, not the reverse, I side with biology and neurology. I take it that when a metatheory begins legislates over science or mathematics in these ways, something is wrong with the metatheory, not the science.
You write:
I have never suggested that non-euclidean geometry proves euclidean geometry false (that’s an odd claim to say the least) or that the falseness of euclidean geometry disproves the metatheory (what conception of mathematics do you have that leads you to think that the emergence of a new type of mathematics delegetimates other forms of mathematics?). Again, what I have claimed is quite different: That there are mathematical entities that are not constructable within the scope of Kant’s account of the structure of pure intuition. I take it that the existence of these unconstructable mathematical entities indicates a pretty fatal flaw in Kant’s metatheory. Now, I could be wrong, and it could be that these mathematical entities are indeed constructable through pure intuition. However, once again, there is a long history of mathematical intuitionism coming from Kant that instead chose to claim that because these entities are not constructable by pure intuition they are meaningless and don’t exist. Once again, you are welcome to show how they are constructed– thereby making your career and making a significant contribution to intuitionist philosophies of mathematics –but so far all you’ve done is pound the table saying that if they do exist in mathematics then they are constructable.
At any rate, the claims you attribute to me with respect to false theory indicate to me that you’re arguing against someone else or don’t have the faintest clue as to what, exactly, I am claiming, as I have never suggested that the fact that a theory turns out to be false indicates that the metatheory must be false (such an idea wouldn’t even occur to me). My claim is not that Euclidean Geometry or Newtonian Physics are false– they’re not, even Newtonian Physics is true at the proper level of scale. My claim has always been that subsequent science and mathematics have discovered entities that cannot fit into the structure of Kant’s metatheory because they are structured in a way that does not fit with the transcendental conditions of experience asserted by Kant. As I said in the previous post (and you seemed to ignore this), this has one of two consequences: Either 1) it could mean that Kant is right in spirit and wrong in detail. If this first option is affirmed (and I assume you would endorse it) this would mean that we need to go back to the drawing board to determine what transcendental conditions are necessary in order for these things to be true and knowable. In other words, we would have to revise our transcendental metatheory. Or 2) it could be that transcendental metatheories are always doomed to failure because they’re based on a fundamentally flawed assumption. This, of course, is the route I take as a realist.
February 25, 2009 at 1:44 am
And as an addendum, I did not claim that you had called me dense (though you have consistently claimed I’m ignorant of Kant’s texts), but rather was claiming that this way of relating to one’s addressee is internal to the form of how Continental philosophy is conducted in the English speaking world. Because Continental thought restricts itself to the immanence of texts, bracketing, as it were, an extra-textual world, it is left with only texts to arbitrate disputes and texts become its object of investigation. Consequently, when one disputes a claim that a text is making, the Continental historian, steeped in years of training in how to interpret texts (not make arguments), interprets this dispute as a dispute over interpretation of the text, rather than over the claim the text is making. The subtext is that if one had properly interpreted the text then they would assent to the claim. By way of reference we might think of how Heideggerians interpret the Carnap/Heidegger debate. They don’t begin with the premise that Carnap might have had a substantial philosophical disagreement with Heidegger over an issue, but rather begin from the premise that Carnap– dense positivist that he was (and I don’t like positivists either) –did not understand Heidegger. Of course, there are a number of circumstances in which it is appropriate to point out that one hasn’t understood a claim or argument and is therefore arguing against a straw man. However, I think there’s a marked tendency among Continental historians (I won’t call them philosophers) to reduce all disputes to failures of interpretation. In other words, they begin with the premise that the person disputing the claim is in a state of ignorance with respect to the text. This comes out with special clarity in those cases where the person defending the text calls for a nuanced and elaborate textual analysis on the part of the person disputing the claim, as if it is not possible to take a key claim from a philosopher and show how that claim is mistaken, thereby entitling one to wave aside the rest that follows from that claim.
February 25, 2009 at 2:32 am
C’mon Levi, you’re last remarks are an attempt to change the Topic again (this time by way of a tedius history versus argument strategy. Look at any philosopher in any tradition and show me where they don’t interpret their predecessors, where the history is unimportant. Show me one scientist who doesn’t interpret previous scientists and ground her or his work on hat came before. this claim of yours is nothing but a kind of ideological cover that holds no water with me). Nothing productive is going to come of this if we don’t focus on one thing at a time. I’m going to ignore them, I hope you don’t mind.
1) ok, I now understand what you mean by intuition.
1a) my claim concerning mathematics is straighforward. if you can mathematize something (i.e. use a formal language and construct a non-trivial proof), you can intuit it. and yes it follows that if you can’t intuit it, then you can’t mathematize it. but that’s not a tautology, that’s a contraposition (a valid logical operation). There’s nothing circular, or tautologous about my claim. in fact, it’s falsifiable. show me something that can be mathematically proven that doesn’t involve some form of notation, and hence some constructive approach. If you can’t, then by force of reason you should accept the argument. Alternatively, should you think i’ve placed some kind of unfair buden on you, you need to argue that my sense of intuition is too wide. I’ve found no compelling argument along either lines. I’m not being tautologous or viciously circular, and my notion of intuition qua math, strikes me as just fine.
!b) my claims about the euclidean and non-euclidean geometry were counterfactual (as marked by the subjunction). You need to slow down and read what people are saying, Levi, lest you truly make our efforts to communicate pointless. I wasn’t claiming you said that non-euclidean geometry proves euclidean geometry false, I said that were that true, it wouldn’t make a lick of difference; I was demonstrating a point. so your countercritique of what I wrote concerning metatheory/theory is based on a misunderstanding. Your whole line of argument is far left of its mark (indeed, Montoya back atcha)
But honestly. If you think I’m just missing the point, perhaps we should call a truce. Or — novelties of novelties — explain yourself better so that I understand.
February 25, 2009 at 3:07 am
My last remarks are not an attempt to change the topic, but are outlining what my position is. It’s rather difficult to engage in a discussion with someone who won’t consider the claims you make in support of your position, and that’s what you’ve just done.
I am rather shocked by your suggestion in 1a. You’re making the claim that logical notation is what constitutes intuition? If this is the case then you’ve now entirely collapsed the dispute between intuitionists, constructivists, structuralists, and realists in philosophy of mathematics. All of these camps agree that we use mathematical notations in doing mathematics– you really think I’m denying this? –what they differ about is 1) the ontological status of mathematical entities, and 2) how we come to know mathematical entities. Remarks like me give me the distinct sense that you don’t have a clue as to what you’re talking about on these issues as the term “intuition” here becomes all but meaningless or trite and certainly falls outside the scope of what Kant is talking about. Look, for example, on the way Kant references enantiomorphs to illustrate his arguments about space as a pure intuition in the Prolegomena. Certainly Kant is talking about a great deal more than notation here.
In fact, contrary to what you claim in 1b (and yes I understand counterfactuals) you did claim that I was arguing that the falseness of a theory can discredit a metatheory (I even quoted you!). Someone certainly needs to slow down and read, but it certainly isn’t me. Notably you glide over the entire argument within those passages, concluding that I’m trying to refute the counterfactual when I’m clarifying just where I see science and mathematics as capable of showing that a metatheory is inadequate.
But yes, absolutely truce. Your remark about intuition as notation (I could let it slide when you couldn’t even spell Riemann’s name correctly, presuming it was perhaps a language difference, but subsequent comments have revealed you’re completely unfamiliar with the philosophy of mathematics and its debates, and therefore what’s at stake) and the tautologous form of your argument that doesn’t admit of any possibility of a metatheory being falsified says it all.
February 25, 2009 at 3:34 am
Sorry, I can’t suppress my guffaw at your reference to notation. Honestly, Alexei, where you have been for the last fifty years? What do you think a little book called Speech and Phenomena was all about, all this talk of the signifier has been about, or Lothar Eley’s critique of Husserl was about? Notation, writing, inscription, are not intuitions (though perhaps in the empirical sense, yet even then…). Constructions, yes, inscriptions no. All of this additionally raises the question of whether you’ve understood Kant’s arguments for non-conceptual difference in the first Critique as well. I mean, this point about notation/inscription versus intuition is so fundamental that it is grist for every Intro to Philosophy course in discussions of Plato’s Divided Line and the reason that mathematical reasoning is lower than dialectical reasoning. Minimally, in semiotic terms, you might be able to make an appeal to the use of icons in mathematics, but those are entirely absent in a number of different mathematical disciplines and simply impossible in other mathematical disciplines such as aspects of topology dealing with objects that can’t be diagrammed.
February 25, 2009 at 4:12 am
Levi, your remarks about history vs argument come at the endpoint of a discussion — which you initiated — about how to interpret Kant in relation to speculative realism and correlationism. You made the point central. TO say towards the end of it something like, “why can’t I just say what I want to say about Kant and move on” is juvenile.
Yes, of course you can say whatever you want to say about Kant. It doesn’t mean anyone is going to take you seriously. I have been reading you charitably, and taking your remarks seriously, and I find it truly disheartening that at the end of all this (how many thousands of words between us?) you come out and say something like, “well you history guys are the death of new, innovative thought, because you actually expect me to know what I’m talking about, and that’s getting in the way of my new innovations. PS you mustn’t know anything about mathematics or the philosophy of math, and I can say that because I’ve looked up a few terms on Wikipedia” Can you imagine Robert Brandom saying something like that? Deleuze? Badiou? Can you see Graham doing that?
So, if I take your penultiate comment seriously, I’m sort of at a loss to understand why you ever mention Kant — or any other historical figure — since what you’ve said about him only detracts from your argument. Or, perhaps more charitably, it doesn’t really further your argument. If it actually is important, however, then having something like an accurate account of him is — or at least should be — a top priority for you.
Now this said: Please tell me you are not rejecting what I’ve been writing because of typos and mispelling of someone’s name that I was too lazy too double check. That comes across as more than a little pompous, Levi. And at the very least, it’s not good argumentative form, and hardly conducive to any kind of discussion (even ones we would both like to close, however amicably).
Now, to something with a modicum of philosophical content. My suggestion in (1a) isn’t that a notational form is intuition. That would be dumb (and for someone who leans so heavily on Graham’s notion of access, I thought you would be more willing to agree on this point). Rather, it follows quite naturally from the idea that scientists get to create intuitions and concepts, that they mut use somethign to create them. Enter notation. To the extent that that’s true, I further claim that pure intuitions can be created through the use of a a given notation, just like an Objekt is created through a sentence (what the relationship between an intuition and the thing in itself is, meh — not interested). This doesn’t in any way collapse any of the mathy issues you’ve mentioned. (for instance, my view is obviously not realist or structuralist; nor is it constructivist, since the difference between it and intuitionism is a matter of how the notation operates).
I’m really trying hard to avoid cheap shots, Levi.I’m sure I haven’t been totally successful, but I tried. So please try not to throw any at me (if not out of respect for me as an interlocutor, then out of some kind of personal integrity). Even if you are convinced I don’t know what I’m talking about, what good does it do you to say it out loud?
Viz 1b) you’re right. I wrote too quickly. my mistake. The stress should have been on the relation of validity (derivability and truth-valuableness) between theory and metatheory, not on the truth-value vis a vis metatheory.
All things told, though, if you want to scoff at my position, that’s fine. I’m never offended by someone saying I think your position is dead wrong, and here’s why. I find it a little distasteful, however, to be told that I must have no knowledge about the philosophy of math, or what have you, because you think my idea is wrong. That’s some hysterical tabletop banging Levi, and it doesn’t become you.
February 25, 2009 at 5:20 am
Sighs, Alexei I am not suggesting that I should be able to say whatever I like about Kant but that your interpretation of Kant is mistaken. Additionally, while I am certainly no expert in the philosophy of mathematics, I have spent a great deal of time with philosophy of mathematics as well as mathematics both in my education and in my own research.
I am not sure how you discern what I’ve said as detracting from my position (and still believe you haven’t understood my position), but setting that aside a couple of points about 1b. First, if you were familiar with Graham’s philosophy you would know that it is not a philosophy of access (“philosophy of access” is Graham’s perjorative term for correlationism). Second, I do not lean on Graham’s position. I use the term “object-oriented philosophy” to name my position, yet that position is quite different from Graham’s while nonetheless being a realist philosophy.
Second, I am glad to hear that you do not conflate notation with intuition. However, that issue aside, you have a highly specific understanding of the relationship between notation and intuition that is far from being shared among philosophers of mathematics. I would agree that notation is absolutely necessary to any mathematical reasoning, but would not concede the thesis that there is an intuition corresponding to these symbols in Kant’s sense of intuition. Many mathematicians will tell you this themselves, pointing out that in higher order maths what is important is the manipulation of the marks according to rules, not the intuition of what corresponds to these notations. This, I think, would be rather obvious in the case of things like imaginary numbers, but perhaps not. Indeed, the attempt to intuit what corresponds to these notations can be positively detrimental to the ability of the person to do these sorts of mathematics. The case is analogous to that of quantum mechanics, where they attempt to intuit the objects described by the equations renders everything hopelessly muddled.
My point here is that if this is the case it’s necessary to entertain the thesis that maths are not especially tied to intuition. This is an entirely reputable position in the philosophy of mathematics. Indeed, intuitionists are by far the minority where the philosophy of mathematics is concerned because intuitionism cuts too deeply into actual mathematical practice, legislating what is and is not meaningful in maths based on whether or not it can be constructed in intuition. The majority of philosophers of mathematics rightly recognize that they should side with what maths discovers rather than beginning from a pre-determined normative criteria that then dismisses entire branches of mathematics.
An aside about intercommunicative ethics: I am glad you’ve brought up your distaste at being told that you lack a knowledge of philosophy of math or mathematics. However, I find myself perplexed as to why you would find this irksome when you continually claim that others are lacking a knowledge of a particular text, rather than simply outlining how you understand the text and the claim. It seems that there’s something of a double standard here. However, the fact that you’re applying your standard inconsistently, doing the very thing you’re criticizing me for doing with respect to your remarks about how well I’ve understood Kant or whether I adopt the “standard reading of Kant” (appeal to authority, and a strangely anonymous authority to boot– “das Man”), does not undermine the wisdom of the principle you’re evoking. As a general sociological principle pertaining to academic discussion we could perhaps evoke the law that “discussion disintegrates into conflict to the degree that one interlocutor or the other attributes ignorance to the other.” That strikes me as a readily observable phenomenon in discussions. This would be why charges of misinterpretation, even if true, tend to be so ineffectual rhetorically in these discussions. Just as you find yourself irritated and the victim of cheap shots when I point out that a number of your remarks reflect an ignorance of debates in the history of mathematics and mathematics itself that are highly relevant to this discussion– certainly this would be relevant in addressing your ability to credibly discuss these sorts of issues, unless you think all that work and math is somehow irrelevant which reveals the true stripes of your “metatheory” and willingness to subject it to scrutiny –it is incredibly irritating to be told that one is misinterpreting a philosopher that they’ve been misinterpreting a philosopher they’ve been studying for over a decade and which they’ve studied with some very well known Kant scholars. Note well, I am not saying that I am not misinterpreting Kant (though I don’t think I am, I think rather you’ve misconstrued a good deal of what I’ve said about Kant because you don’t understand the issue being disputed as a result of your attention being directed to understanding a particular philosopher not a particular issue). I am making a point about the rhetorical effectiveness of approaching such a misinterpretation in a particular way. As I mentioned earlier in our exchange, I think your claim that these mathematical objects can be constructed in intuition (though I strongly disagree and you’ve never provided a demonstration that they can, only some vague declarations that they can) was a legitimate line of attack. Similarly, misguided as it was– or indicative of a failure to understand the issue –your charge about collapsing the distinction between metatheory and theory was a legitimate line of attack. All this stuff about misinterpreting the text was both insulting and had the air of a petty school professor lecturing an ignorant student. I mean, really, does one have to recount the arguments of the transcendental aesthetic point by point to demonstrate knowledge so the real discussion can actually begin? This way of talking to others is a nasty habit that we fall into when we teach and do scholarship and does nothing to further discussion. It’s also a reflexive, knee jerk reaction of Continental historians who have only ever dealt with texts and never worked on problems, thereby believing that problems don’t exist or that all problems are textual problems… Not that I’m saying this is what you are, though it is a bit baffling as to why anyone would talk about Kant rather than Kant’s solution and claims with respect to a particular problem and whether this problem was well posed and the solutions actually responsive to the problem.
At any rate, I think this is a good place to end the discussion because it’s become predictable at this point:
Me: There are certain objects that cannot be constructed in intuition and this significantly calls into question Kant’s metatheory, suggesting that, in fact, these objects of knowledge aren’t dependent on intuition.
Alexei: “No!” Pounds table vigorously. “If it is mathematical it is necessarily constructable in intuition, therefore since the object you evoke is mathematical its constructable in intuition! Besides, you’re conflating metatheory (which is not falsifiable under any conditions!) with theory! And you’re conflating pure intuition with empirical intuition! And if you just read the doctrine of method you’d understand! And unnamed Kantian experts [think they might have an axe to grind? show me the one who is both a mathematician, philosopher of mathematics, and Kant scholar and maybe I’ll take the defense seriously] debunked the non-Euclidean geometry argument years ago, aren’t you aware? And we know maths is constructed based on intuition as it uses notation… But wait, wait, when I evoke notation, I’m not literally referring to inscription– even though there are a number of philosophers of mathematics that would claim that it has a lot to do with the inscription nature alone [but I won’t digress on the importance of Arabic numerals in the development of mathematics, that’d be too “empirical” –I’m referring to inscriptions that construct their corresponding intuitions!”
Me: Wait, but are you familiar with patheological functions, imaginary numbers, uncountable infinite sets? What and how, precisely, can these things be constructed in intuition? Additionally, aren’t you aware that in the history of the philosophy of mathematics the Kantian intuitionist school dismissed large swaths of the most exciting developments in contemporary mathematics as nonsense? Doesn’t that strike you as a problem?
Alexei: If it’s mathematical it’s constructable!
Me: So you concede that these elements of maths they dismissed are mathematical and therefore claim they’re constructable?
Alexei: If it’s mathematical it’s constructable in intuition!
Me: So you can refer me to someone who shows how these things are constructable in intuition and who has rejected the Kantian intuitionist line of argument as it was developed in the intuitionist school?
Alexei: You’re shifting the issue and I won’t address your arguments here because we need to focus on the issue at hand. Besides, you haven’t discussed the role the analytic of the sublime plays in all of this.
Me: Wait, so actual objects in mathematics and the claims of the Kantian intuitionist school aren’t relevant to this discussion?
Alexei: A lecture about how noble he is trying to avoid cheap shots (while making quite a few of them) and talking about how he’s doing all this for the children (all those students who might get misguided by these posts).
Me: Quite
Anyway, no need to repeat all of that yet again, but you can certainly lecture me again by telling me all about how one is entitled to have a misinterpretation of Kant, but not to have others not point this out. Of course, here “misinterpretation” means not following the logic of tautological reason, i.e., dogmatism.
February 25, 2009 at 3:13 pm
Hi Levi,
I’ve been following this argument and I’m a little lost. If you’re interested in attacking the claims of the intuitionist school in mathematics, why not show exactly where Brouwer and the line following him goes wrong? Maybe this has been your intent, but Kant is hardly the poster boy for the intuitionist school (since it arose a while after his death as a response to Cantor’s claims). To what extent is this argument actually about intuitionism?
As for Kant… A lot of the issues you’re describing, e.g., the difficulty of reconciling Kant with post-Newtonian physics or more recent developments in mathematics were dealt with at length by the neo-Kantians in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For an early example, check out Hermann Cohen’s *Das Prinzip der Infinitesimalmethode.* For a reconciliation of neo-Kantianism with Einstein in particular, see Ernst Cassirer’s *Zur Einsteinschen Relativitätstheorie. Erkenntnistheoretische Betrachtungen.* There’s a whole Kantian theory of science out there. To my mind, Michael Friedman is the inheritor of it (and an impressively original thinker in his own right). The fact that Kant himself is not great on math is no big secret (though he’s certainly not an absolute disaster in the way that someone like Hegel or Schelling is). This doesn’t mean, however, that incredibly powerful work on math (and mathematical science more generally) isn’t possible within the Kantian line. If you’re going to show that *Kantianism* (and not just Kant) is wrong – and I assume that this is your aim, since otherwise you end up in the same continental textualism that you condemn – the specific arguments of works like those I’ve mentioned (or their more recent incarnations) are probably your real targets.
Also, if I remember Meillassoux correctly, not just Kantianism but also most of analytic philosophy (insofar as it’s taken the “linguistic turn”) ends up getting tarred with the same correlationist brush. All intuitionists may be correlationists, but the reverse isn’t true. Even if intuitionism produced a failed mathematics (which is obviously an open question given the work of Kleene and others in the twentieth century), there’s still the possibility of a non-intuitionist correlationism getting things “right.” I don’t necessarily see you conflating intuitionism and correlationism, but it probably bears repeating….
February 25, 2009 at 3:13 pm
C’mon Levi, this is really absurd; if you are compelled to feel like you you’ve won, then so be it: you’ve won. now that that’s out of the way, and we’ve prejudged the matter to everyone’s satisfaction, maybe we can get back to something important.
yes fine. I’ve never claimed that I was 100% right — I’ve even claimed that I’m not so much offering an intepretation as I am a general sketch of the standard readings of Kant. I’ve alays said it’s a composite. So You’re already preaching to the choir about that. I’m not terribly interested in being right anyway. I have nothing vested in KAnt, save that I don’t think you’ve said much that sounds even vaguely like an interpretation of him, or that accords with Kant’s work (his claims or his problems — I tend to use ‘Kant’ as a synecdoche for all things pertaining to Kant; nor am I alone in this)
As I’ve said before, I would rather be wrong in an interesting way, than be trivially right. I have outlined Kant in the manner above simply because I think it needs to be said. As usual, you are free to disagree with me, or not — take it or leave it, as I’ve also said.
see Kant’s discussion of Quanta and addition in CPR.
Levi, if you want to define math as some kind of operationalism or as fictionalism, that’s fine; you can do that, and many people do, but not everyone. The problem of course is that neither operationalism nor fictionalism is realism (nor do they account for mathematical knowledge). So, if you want to be a realist, you can’t say that math is operationalist, or fictionalist. the Math has to refer to a real entity (phenomenal or ontological). if it refers, we have to be cognizant of the reference, if we are cognizant, we have intuition. It’s such a basic point, it hadn’t occurred to me to make it explicit.
Furthermore, at a certain point, it’s actually unproductive to say that Math is just notation. the notation describes objects with certain properties. to the extent that I have an understanding of the property cluster I have an intuition (constructive approaches to math all share this kind of claim, athough they are certainly not the mainstream view).
First this is a very weak claim, even without the ‘necessary’ that you’ve thrown in. one can think in concepts. Neither I nor Kant have ever denied that. The point is that the concepts are meaningful in virtue of the intuitions they ‘subsume’ or what have you. You make a true claim, but at the price of its being trivial.
As for the ethics of debate: I take myself to have always explained what I’ve asserted — I’
ve even argued for it, your claims to the contrary notwithstanding. Nor have I told you that you have no knowledge of something. I’ve said — and I stand by this — that I don’t think you’ve finished CPR, and that you have misread the dialectic. on the first score, don’t feel bad, few People have read the whole of CPR. So what. It’s only important because I tried to argue that you’ve got a funny reading of the Dialectic, which could be remedied by looking at the Doctrine of Method.
Now, my claims are a far cry from saying, “you mispelled someone’s name, which forces me to conclude you know nothing about the topic.” If you don’t see the difference between my claims and yours, fair enough. We’re no better than each other. What annoys you in me, is the same thign that annoy me in you. I’ve apologized several times for any annoyances. You: 0.
If we can’t have a serious discussion about perceived inadequacies in an interpretation, Levi, then I fail to see why you would make any of your thoughts public. If you think that your misinterpretation of Kant is just as legitimate as my misinterpretation of kant, fine. I’ve said all along that the only thign that needs to be done is mark the fact that it’s an interpretation that veers of the beaten track at precisely listed moments, and not to claim that its standard, or that everyone should read Kant in this way. You’ve not been happy with my attempt to allow a number of readings. And that’s why the argument has gone the way it has.
In fact, your typical tactic is not to defend what you’ve said, but to attack your opponent. It’s not the most friendly tactic, but I’ve been good natured about it. In retrospect, I should have noted it much earlier. Fact is Levi, you rarely defend yourself without saying, “You are totally and utterly confused about this matter,” “That is so wrong it makes me laugh” etc, and you hardly — in fact I’m still waiting for it — argue for anything. You like to make pronouncements. And then you get frustrated because people say, “uh, that doesn’t follow.”
But, to return to the main point at hand, to say that we can’t actually argue the merits of our interpretations in public is just dumb. If you don’t want to argue about Kant, why bring him up? If nothing depends upon your claims, if they are trivial, why make them?
Moreover, if I’ve come across as a condescending teacher to you, you have my apologies. I know a little about Kant, more than some, and I need to make choices about what is relevant in a given situation. But honestly, saying that I speak from a position of das Man is really, but really uninteresting. I’m not about to pin a bibliography to everything I write here, provide meticulous citation — hell you don’t even cite where you quote stuff from and now you want others to do your homework for you?! — and some things have been so internalized that I’ve long since forgotten who said them first. If there’s a particular claim I’ve made that you feel is in error, take issue with it, but this general tendency of your to try to sweep everything away by saying things like the above is totally unhelpful to both of us.
Levi, when you make claims about a particular text (say the Aesthetic) that fly in the face of what most people have said about the text, then yes, you have to justify your interpretation. I don’t understand how or why you fail to see that. When the rest of us think that the world rests on the back of four elephants that stand on the back of a turtle, and you want to say something else, you have to argue for it and convince us. IN this case, the argument is about a text, and hence should involve that text. Otherwise no one will take you seriously. and Rightly so.
About arguments. Here’s one. 7+5=12 is synthetic a priori (i.e. it involves intuition). Now, there is no empirical object to be intuited, or referred to in the above equation. Hence it’s not a posteriori. Nor is it analytic, since by the definition of analytic neither ‘7,’ nor 5, nor ‘+’ nor ‘=’ are contained in the notion 12. so, it must be synthetic. since it’s both a priori, and synthetic, it’s synthetic a priori. This is a basic example, but the same structural features are involved in all logical and mathematical manipulations, so the point can be generalized without loss.
and for the record: tautology isn’t dogmatic, since dogmatism purports to be informative.
February 25, 2009 at 6:14 pm
Alexei,
Nowhere, as far as I can tell, have you shown me where or how I’m misinterpreting Kant. You write:
I fully endorse this interpretation of Kant and it is the one I have been working with. I have never suggested that this issue is one of empirical objects to be intuited. That would be a completely mistaken interpretation of Kant and you would be right to call me out on this were I making such a claim. You have attributed to me the position that I am speaking about empirical intuition. Not only would this be an absurd misreading of Kant, but it would be a nonsensical thesis about mathematics. Clearly maths can’t be based on empirical experience. We need only consider the fact that we can think numbers greater than the number of particles in the universe to see that mathematical empiricism is the height of absurdity. By contrast, I am making the claim that there are forms of mathematics that are not based on pure intuition and that therefore 1) pure intuition is not a necessary condition for mathematics, and 2) therefore Kant’s metatheory is mistaken. I have provided arguments or supporting reasons for this claim by referring to entities such as uncountable sets, imaginary numbers, and pathological functions, all of which I hold are non-intuitable.
February 25, 2009 at 6:29 pm
Hi Rob,
Thanks for the references. With respect to your question about Brouwer, I think I have indicated where I think he and his school goes wrong. I have argued that when given the option of siding with the metatheory or the mathematics the choice should always be on the side of the mathematics. Consequently, if the metatheory tells us that the mathematics is nonsensical this is grounds for rejecting the metatheory, not the mathematics. Now, in transcendental terms, why do I think this is a sound argument against intuitionists like Brouwer? I think this is a sound argument against Brouwer because transcendental arguments begin, as a premise, with a statement of fact and then proceed to determine what transcendental conditions must be operative for this fact to be possible. Kant begins with three quid facti claims: That geometry, arithmetic, and Newtonian physics are true. The question then becomes how must our minds be structured by right in order for us to have knowledge such as this about the world (working from the premise that 1) this knowledge can’t be acquired through empirical experience, and 2) that it is synthetic in character). So the key point here is that Kant [rightfully] takes the truth of these maths and sciences for granted and proceeds from there. Likewise, I begin from the premise that Cantorian set theory is sound and the question then becomes– if we take a transcendental approach –how this knowledge is possible. Brouwer and his followers violate this virtuous circle of transcendental arguments, allowing their metatheory to legislate knowledge rather than allowing knowledge to constrain their metatheory. That’s my argument.
No disagreement here, though the debate is very much still alive. I haven’t claimed anything more than that but have simply taken a particular side in the debate.
I think you need to go back and read the thread more carefully, as I’ve already said what you say here. As I’ve remarked in two or three posts now, if Kant’s particular account of mathematics fails, this does not necessarily entail the failure of the transcendental move as such. That is, Kant could be wrong in the details but the transcendental approach could nonetheless be the only way in which this question can be solved. Thus, I’ve said there are three options a) Kant is in fact right and his account of maths is able to account for modern developments in maths (I think this is wrong, but it is an option), b) Kant is wrong in the details, but the general nature of the transcendental argument is redeemable by modifying his aesthetic, and c) Kant is both wrong in the details and the transcendental argument is mistaken.
No disagreement here. I would describe both Lacan and Derrida as correlationists, but neither of them are intuitionists. Rather, in their case the correlation is between language and objects, not structures of mind and objects. Correlationism comes in many flavors.
February 25, 2009 at 6:35 pm
Alexei, you write:
Quick additional points: First, I did not offer the claim about notation as anything more than a weak claim. You were making the very strong claim that all mathematical notation necessarily involves intuition. My weak claim was “not so fast, there are plenty of good reasons for thinking this is not the case and here they are…” Second, the claim that mathematical notation does not, in many cases, involve any sort of intuition is not equivalent to an endorsement of operationalism or fictionalism. One would only be committed to operationalism or fictionalism if they argued, additionally, that is the notation that makes the mathematical truth. However, this is not what is claimed when it is said that the use of mathematical notation does not, in many cases, involve intuition at all. Consequently, one can both hold that mathematical notation need not involve intuition and that the mathematical objects corresponding to this notation are real.
February 25, 2009 at 7:16 pm
Alexei,
I want to return to a comment you made earlier as there you most clearly outline where you see me misinterpreting Kant. You write:
I think this is a rather uncharitable interpretation of the claim I’m attributing to Kant. I share your thesis that Kant’s transcendental subject and transcendental object are not metaphysically real and am thus not ontologizing them as you suggest. I am, however, unclear as to what you have in mind when you refer to the transcendental as “only explanatory”. What do you take Kant to be claiming when he argues that objects conform to mind rather than the mind to objects. I take him to be making a claim about how things-in-themselves are structured through the operations of mind.
Yes, on this we are in full agreement and I have taken this point for granted since the beginning of this discussion (perhaps I should have said that explicitly, though I thought it was such a commonplace about Kant’s mode of argument as to be in no need of stating). In fact, my rejection of intuitionists like Brouwer is that they don’t proceed in this Kantian way, but instead legislate over the sciences. The issue for me is not whether or not Kant accepts the universality of the sciences, but rather whether or not his metatheory does what he wants it to do.
Again, no disagreement here. If there is a distinction between concepts and intuitions it is a real distinction, not a numerical distinction. By a “real distinction” I understand a distinction between two things that are distinguishable without being able to exist apart from one another. For example, color and shape are really distinct, but color cannot exist apart from shape. By contrast, two things are numerically distinct if they can exist apart from one another.
To express my point more clearly, when Kant argues that “the conditions for the possibility of experience are the conditions for the possibility of the objects of experience”, I conclude that Kant is really claiming that “the conditions for the possibility of experience are the conditions for the possibility of objects (tout court).” This is why I see the epistemic fallacy as a fallacy. It reduces all objects, in my view, to their mind dependence such that we can say nothing of what objects are as independent of mind (or substitute whatever other correlation you might like).
The thing is that I just don’t see where we’re disagreeing in our interpretation of Kant because everything you say about what Kant is claiming are things that I agree with. I might not express this interpretation in terms that you would use, but you haven’t said anything so far that strikes me as different than my own understanding of his thought and what he’s doing. This is why I find it disturbing to go over to Perverse Egalitarianism to find myself being mocked for somehow misinterpreting Kant.
Now that I reread this post, I think we here get to the nub of the issue. I’ve boldfaced what I take to be the key phrase in your sentence here. You say “Kant leaves ontology completely undetermined”. Here it is clear to me that we are using the term “ontology” in different ways (not uncommon in discussions of ontology). For me Kant does not leave ontology undetermined. First, when I refer to ontology I am referring to a discourse about objects and what objects are. The “is” is ambiguous in that it can refer to either the whatness of a being (essence) or the thatness of a being (existence). When Kant reduces objects to phenomena, he is, as I understand it, making an ontological claim about objects, i.e., that they are empirically real only within the constraints of how we experience them and cannot be spoken of as possessing these characteristics independent of our minds or how they are for-us. Likewise, when Kant claims that the in-itself is not structured as it is for-us in phenomena, he is making a substantial ontological claim about the in-itself (he explicitly states this in the aesthetic, though unfortunately I don’t have the text here at my office). My position– and in light of the rather mean spirited discussion over at Perverse Egalitarianism (though you’ve conducted yourself well) I am stating it as a position or an intuition or a commitment, not something I’ve demonstrated –is that this renders scientific practice and our relationship to the world incoherent for a number of reasons I’ve discussed in previous posts (cf. especially my post on Roy Bhaskar and the transitive and the intransitive). This is why I refer to such a move as a fallacy or the epistemic fallacy.
The logical positivists would certainly be an extreme example, but the epistemic fallacy assert that any philosophy that makes objects dependent on our knowing or treats them as phenomena alone rather than what they are in-themselves is a fallacy. It could, of course, turn out that this claim is itself incoherent. Basically any variant of idealism would, under this thesis, be a fallacy.
February 25, 2009 at 7:28 pm
Rob, thanks. Levi and I have got a little knotted and lost our way. And the blending of Kant and intuitionsism isn’t felicitous. As far as I can tell, looking back over the conversation, Intuitionism really plays no part (I mentioned that I have intuitionist leanings, and I think that logded in Levi’s mind). Similarly, we (or maybe just me) haven’t been very good at keeping Kantianism separate from Kant. Maybe that’s a function of my interpretative promiscuity.
Now Levi: I’ve said you’ve totally misrepresented (1) the explanatory order in Kant (it’s among my first comments), because you keep saying that the conditions of possibility are applied to something, rather than derived from something. My argument for this point revolved around how transcedental arguments operate (they’re two step-arguments, etc). Since we now both agree on how transcendental arguments operate, you can no longer claim that the conditions are applied in the sense you did initially. our whole argument about theory/metatheory developed from this point.
I also argued that (2) you misrepresent the Kant’s Dialectic because you think it applies in equal measure to scientific constructions as it does to philosophical uses of pure reason. My argument was a bit of finger pointing here: see the Doctrine of Method, where Kant discusses how scientific analysis differs form philosophical analysis. Slightly more generously, I argued from the following premises: scientists get to construct intuitions. Philosophers don’t; because philosophers can’t construct intuitions, they rely on ideas. The use of transcendental ideas generates the dialectic. Therefore only philosophers’ claims transcend the bounds of possible experience in the dialectic. Since Kant is pretty clear on this point, I didn’t think much past the text was needed.
now,
Two things: (1) Mathematical notation is a kind of access, or mode of givenness (a kind of intentionality [think of Husserl’s arguments in Experience and Judgment and Formal and transcendental logic for the relationship between formal logic and formal ontology]), not a kind of intuition. It constructs new intuitions and can assume previously constructed intuitions. So It’s not the case that it relies on intuition in an absolute sense.
(2) I don’t think you can say what you want to say here without paradox. Theories that say things like this tend to either claim that Math = tautologies, or that math = analytic judgments. IN both cases, it is precisely the notation, which is based on a set of stipulative definitions (‘let ‘=>’ be ….’), that ensures ‘truth/untruth’. Moreover neither refer to objects independent of experience (in fact it’s not clear that either refer at all), since math has become little more than the defined syntactic operations. It’s precisely this kind of view that’s leads to all of the problems concerning the metaphysics of number etc.
There is a bullet to be bitten here, Levi: either you claim that math doesn’t refer (hence doesn’t need intuition) and thus commit yourself to some form of antirealism (which is by and large the dominant repsonse I think), or you claim that it does refer (how reference works, don’t know), which requires some form of an intuition (Russellian acquaintance and descriptions, Fregean Sinne and Beduetungen, husserlian intuitions, whatever they’re all responses to the problem of reference)
February 25, 2009 at 7:57 pm
Levi, what can you say about noumena? Really.
Two things: Your claim viz Kant’s aesthetic is slightly foreshortened. since Kant’s claim in the aesthetic is epistemological, we can’t even say that the the thing in-itself is different form the thing as it appears to me; but one can imagine some entity — and this is Kant’s example — having different forms of intuition, and thus intuiting a different world; to the extent that different forms of intuitions lead to different forms of accessing the world, we are epistemologically warranted in saying that what apears to me isn’t transcendentally real (see Allison’s book on the CPR on this point).
Now, about noumena. Kant uses noumena as a limit concept, and it’s not straighforwardly identical to the thing in itself (turns out Kant uses the latter in three distinct sense, but I can’t be bothered to check what they are). Quite simply put, although noumena is thinkable (and hence why we inevitably fall into the Dialectic), it’s not cognizeable (hence why it receives a positive and negative definition).
To the extent that it’s not cognizeable it remains undetermined by the transcendental framework of possible experience, since the framework is nothing other than the determination of an object for us. Ultimately the positive definition of the supersensible coincides with the transcendental ideas, and are presented (dargestellt) through sublime, teleological, and artistic phenomena (hence why beauty is the symbol morality, and why god makes that huge appearance at the end of the 3rd Critique).
Now about the your anti-Epistemic commitment: ok. As I’ve said, since Baskar’s formualtion is tantamount to saying sometimes it’s incorrect to reduce the ontological to the epsitemological, sometimes it’s correct (which doesn’t strike me as any different that saying epistemically real, transcedentally ideal), I don’t find it terribly informative or helpful. But that apparently is a matter of other committments — a matter of taste, almost….
February 26, 2009 at 12:51 am
Alexei,
Yes, I agree, this is what Kant should be saying, but he is far from clear on this point. I was surprised to come across the passages where he says otherwise. Thus Kant writes,
The first sentence of this passage says something quite different than the second and third sentence. The first sentence says that things-in-themselves are not spatial and temporal, while the second and third sentence make the far more modest claim that we cannot know whether they are. I agree that the more charitable reading of Kant is to go with the reading suggested by the second and third sentence.
No, this isn’t what Bhaskar is saying. He is arguing that Kantian style transcendental arguments render scientific practice incoherent because they don’t attribute the properties of objects directly to things in-themselves.
February 26, 2009 at 1:13 am
Hi Alexei,
This is because my target isn’t Kant, but correlationism in general. Kant is only one particular instance of correlationist thought. You write:
Yes and no. The transcendental conditions are deduced from the truth of the sciences and maths, but the transcendental argument is that the mind plays an active role in structuring experience. “Applied” might be a less than happy choice of words, but the mind is doing something in giving experience structure. While we do not know things-in-themselves, things-in-themselves do affect mind and get worked over by the pure forms of intuition and concepts in empirical experience. In the case of maths, of course, the question of affect is not relevant as we’re not working with empirical objects when we do maths. However, one of the more interesting aspects of Kant’s theory is that it is able to explain why mathematical knowledge that we’re able to know through thought alone also is able to apply to the empirical world, i.e., because mind structures the manifold of empirical intuition in terms of the pure forms of space and time.
Here we disagree (with respect to science, not what you say about philosophers). Scientists, like anyone else, can fall into what Kant would call idle speculation and make claims that go beyond the bounds of experience. For example, the claim that the universe begins with the big bang tout court is a violation of the first antinomy. The “tout court” here is important. The claim that our universe begins with the big bang and that perhaps there was something prior to the big bang would not be a violation of the first antinomy. Likewise, the research being done through the use of supercollidors is premised on a violation of the second antinomy. That is, it is premised, in part, on the claim that there are ultimate constituents of matter and is seeking to discover them.
Yes, I understood what you were claiming about notation after you clarified your position, I simply don’t share this understanding of language. Hopefully I’ll be forgiven if I don’t repeat the arguments of Derrida and Lacan as to why this is not the case or why intuition is not an essential feature of language.
Being a mathematical realist, I, of course, hold that maths refer and are not simply a syntax (I agree that there is a deep and important truth in the fact that the world itself is mathematical and that we can discover mathematical truths through thought alone without appeal to empirical experience). Where we disagree is in your thesis that the reference relation requires some form of intuition; or rather, to put my point more modestly, I am not convinced that the reference relation requires intuition. Again, however, I would agree that the question of just how the reference works would be a vital question. Additionally, it is important to note that even if it should turn out that the reference relation involves intuition, it is not the case that this intuition need be construed in Kantian/correlationist terms. For example, one can be a Platonic realist.
February 26, 2009 at 4:08 pm
About Baskar: I obviously haven’t read his book, and so can only comment on what you’ve quoted. As I’ve said already, his formulation of the so-called epistemic fallacy is equivalent to saying “sometimes I can legitimately reduce ontology to epistemology, sometimes I can’t.” That is, Baskar’s formulation and my version have the same truth conditions. mine is true when and only when his is true. This suggests that either his formulation is flawed (i.e. someone needs to reformulate the fallacy on his behalf so that it really is a fallacy), or that there is no fallacy in the first place. What else can I say. Whatever else Baskar has to say, my point is merely conceptual/logical. If it turns out that it generates a paradox for Baskar, so much the worse for his work.
Now, about my criticisms of your Kant-interpretation: If you’re satisfied that they’re not applicable to your position, we can move on. As I’ve said, I think there are problems, but for me to push the matter past the point of its clear articulation isn’t helpful.
A quick aside though: of course it’s possible for scientists to speculate (idly or not), and thus fall into the a transcendental Dialectic. But that’s hardly the interesting, productive case.
And with respect to the big bang and the first antinomy, I can only confess ignorance. I really don’t know what the consensus/standard interpretation is, when it comes to the big bang, and don’t want to risk saying something remarkably dumb. It does strike me, though, that prima facie the big bang doesn’t actually occur in time, nor is it in space — and hence doesn’t actually fit the assumptions of the antinomy. Again, I don’t really know enough to say this definitively, and don’t want to venture anything past a skeptical remark about the applicability/subsumption of the big bang to the premises of the first antinomy.
But this constant appeal to a scientific hypothesis or research strategy to show that something in Kant’s Dialectic must be false, isn’t a great one to begin with. It seems too quick, for it takes the results of science with too much faith (there may not have been a big bang, although all our evidence and predictive models indicate the contrary. Like Philosophy, science is fallible), and not enough critical analysis of the science or of the Antinomy/Dialectic.
You’re argumentative approach here is similar to someone who points out that when one adds one drop of water to another, or one cloud to another, one doesn’t get two drops of water or two clouds; one has just one entity — therefore 1+1 = 2 must be false. There is of course something to the observation (ever wonder why/how clouds float in the sky rather than immediately fall to earth?), but the conclusion is drawn too quickly, and doesn’t do the hard work of analysis.
SO, I know you won’t like me saying this, but nevertheless: I think you’re misreading the Dialectic. But we can disagree about this, and move on.
Now, about Math: I’m actually unconvinced by your reference to Derrida or Lacan. I don’t think Derrida’s ‘criticisms’ (are they really criticism, or more identifications of constitutive limits that make something possible?) actually speak against what I’ve said. This said, I’m biased when it comes to Lacan (I find him singularly unhelpful in all matters), and my Derrida knowledge isn’t good [I’ve read La voix et le phénomene, for instance, and don’t see how it applies to what I’ve written, so I must be missing something])
About mathematical realism: It occurs to me that the kind of realism possible with respect to math must in fact be tied to some form of a philosophy of access.
It seems incoherent to say that Math exists independently of sapient (or sentient) beings. For mathematics itself — and certainly its notation — isn’t a necessary feature of the universe, even though it gives us access to the universe’s necessities and is necessary for our knowledge and action in it. Try a few counterfactual scenarios, to see what I mean.
In fact (following the Logic of Harman’s infinitely withdrawn objects), the moment that reference becomes an essential feature for a version of realism (and extension is a kind of reference), it becomes a realism of access (my concept/intuition/statement/theory about X) is truth valuable because it purports to describe something the relations that obtain between the things it refers to.
So not all realisms are created equal (in fact if ‘speculative realism’ differs from what one normally calls ‘realism’ (and there are many forms of realism, as you know), it’s got to be because it is not merely another realism of access. But anyway. It’s just a thought.
About Platonic Realism: Frege was a platonist, but still needed intuition.
And about Plato: Plato said we had access to the Ideas, and that our souls intuited them. The problem was that we no longer have that direct intuitable access, but rather a mediated one (the flux of appearances), which was based on the retention of an intuition in memory (anamnesis). It’s just a less explicit theory of intuition, not a radically different one.
February 26, 2009 at 5:46 pm
Hi Alexei,
I disagree with your judgment as to whether or not, by Kantian lights, scientists fall into speculation. What I find interesting in this moments pertaining to the big bang or supercollidors is not that the scientists are speculating, but rather that Kant’s philosophy ends up legislating over scientific practice from the armchair, deciding a priori what it can and cannot do. Critical philosophy is often characterized in terms of the virtue of modesty (we must ground the possibility of our knowledge and all that). But actually, realism is a far more modest position. Realism begins from the premise that knowledge acquisition is a laborious activity, that often our theories are mistaken, that they must be revised, and that it is an ongoing process. It doesn’t begin by legislating what is and is not possible to know or by predetermining how we know. As a result, it has a far more ad hoc epistemology, but one, I think, truer to the actual process of acquiring knowledge.
You write:
“Philosophy of access” in Harman is a highly specific technical term referring to any version of anti-realism or idealism. The realist, of course, is going to be interested in questions of epistemology or how we can know things (though very likely the realist will give these questions a secondary status, rather than treating them as “first philosophy” as is often done today). Where the realist and the “philosopher of access” or correlationist differ is in the ontological status they ascribe to entities. For the latter, things like quarks or pi are phenomena for-us and cannot be ascribed any ontological status independent of humans, i.e., they may exist independent of us, they may not exist independent of us, but we can never know one way or the other. It is this position to which Bhaskar’s “epistemic fallacy” is addressed. If you get a chance you should give the book a look, it’s truly first rate even if you don’t end up endorsing his claims. For the realist, by contrast, these beings exist in their own right and as mind independent, regardless of our access to them. Important Note: There are many shades between these positions. Thus, for example, one can be an anti-realist about mathematical entities, while being a realist about quarks, and so on. I’m strongly inclined towards Platonic Realism, myself, when it comes to mathematics though I haven’t worked through all that yet and have struggled with the question for over a decade now.
I think that Derrida is up to more than you ascribe to him in Speech and Phenomena. These points come out somewhat more clearly in “Signature Event Context”. What he is attempting to show in both texts is that writing and language are not dependent on intention or intuition.