2008 Conference

Well, we just had the third and final conference of the TPN project. It all went very well, although Mark's absence was keenly felt by everyone there. Since it was the last event of the project, this is likely to be the final post on the blog.

I gave a paper, titled "Can Transcendental Philosophy be Naturalised?", in which I offered an account of Husserl's transcendental theory of intersubjectivity. Husserl's theory pruport's to offer the necessary conditions of experiencing something as 'alter ego'. I discussed two common objections to the view and one suggestion, due to Shaun Gallagher, that problems with the theory can be resolved by recourse to empirical work on neonate imitation and mirror neurons. I suggested that we should be somewhat cautious concerning the application of this empirical work but that, nevertheless, the prospects of a naturalised version of Husserl's account are in some respects promising.

Daniel warren gave a paper, titled "Substance, Inherence and the Thinking Substance in Kant". In the paper he presented an interpretation of Kant's way with the rational psychologist in the Paralogisms. He argued that we best understand Kant's arguments there only if we take into account (a) Kant's conception of logic, and (b) the basic metaphysical categories that Kant inherits from the tradition. By paying attention to (a) we see that the Strawsonian reading of the Paralogisms doesn't really get at Kant's intended arguments. For Strawson thinks the arguments turn partly on how we successfully identify individuals with singular terms. But Kant's intensional logic means that that he is more properly understood to be concerned with how we identify the properties an object (as a substance) has essentially rather than accidentally. By paying attention to (b) we see that Kant's arguments in the Paralogisms turn on denying that the rational psychologist has the resources to properly understand the kind of compositional unity a thinking subject would have as a substance. But this strategey itself depends on employing various metaphysical categories Kant inherits from Baumgarten.

David Papineau's paper, "Philosophy as an A Posteriori Discipline", did exactly what it said on the tin. Arguing against those who see the philosophical enterprise as analytic and/or a priori, he offered an account of philosophy as broadly continuous with empirical science. His view is one not about how philosophy should be done, but about how philosophy in fact is done. Thus he thinks that philosophers who claim to be engaging either in conceptual analysis, or in (synthetic a priori) transcendental reasoning are, in fact, mistaken about their own practise. What they are actually doing is offering synthetic theories about the world that have the distinctive feature that they adress problems the resolution of which calls for no further empirical evidence.

Rolf-Peter Horstmann's paper, "Fichte's Anti-Sceptical Strategies", described two phases of Fichte's work in which he took distinct approaches to the problem of philosophical scepticism. Before 1800, Fichte offered a 'justification-oriented' picture in which the sceptic is confronted on his own terms. This account, he argued, must be considered a failure, as the sceptic can always question that which is brought in to do the justificatory work. In his post-1800 work, however, Fichte attempted to respond to scepticism in a way that might be called 'grounding-oriented'. Here there is a conception of 'absolute knowing' which itself constitutes the distinction between subject and conceptually structure world.

The second day of the conference began with Hilary Kornblith's, "Reasons, Naturalism and Transcendental Philosophy". He argued that a certain non-naturalistic picture of human reason, shared by a number of philsophers all either explicitly or implicitly influenced by Kant, is based upon false empirial assumptions. The picture is one in which humans, unlike other animals, have the capacity to reflect on their own belief-forming mechanisms and thereby revise them. We are able to do this since we possess the concepts of reason, belief and truth. As a consequence, only human subjects can be truly ascribed states of knowledge, or even states of belief. Kornblith argued that the purported distinction between human and animal cognition was unfounded and, in fact, the picture makes it very hard to see how the normal course of human development to bring us from an animal-like situation into 'the space of reasons'.

Ernie Sosa's paper, "Transcendental and Circular Reasoning" addressed the problem of how it could be that our perceptual beliefs can be justified in a non-circular way. He argued that perceptual beleifs can be reason-based, but nevertheless gain their epistemic via their reliablility in providing required information. He also considered a sceptical scenario in which it is suggested that we may have taken a pill that cognitively disables us. In response to this, he offered a transcendental argument to the effect that we cannon but believe our own reasoning faculties to be reliable. To deny it, is to prevent oneself from being able to put one's trust in that very denial.

In the final paper, "Sartre and the Transcendental Tradition", Sebastian Gardner argued that, on any reasonably broad construal, Sartre's early philosophy must be counted transcendental. One difficulty with understanding his philosophy is Sartre's emphatic claim that he is not an idealist despite the fact that he sees the structure of the world as being correlated with the fundamental structures of the human subject. How are we to understand this correlation without supposing that the world is in some sense subject-dependent. Sebastian suggested that Sartre may have considered a Fictean response according to which the distinction between being for-itself and in-itself is constituted by something itself prior to the subjective.

A priori workshop: John Skorupski

John gave a paper entitled 'Aprioricity and Normativity'. In it he talked about a certain form of a priori knowledge we have about the relations between reasons. A thinker's epistemic reasons are relative to what John called her 'epistemic field'. This is a set of facts at a specific time that are ascertainable by the thinker, but not necessarily ascertained. If there is outright sufficient reason to believe p then that belief has a priori support in the relevant epistemic field. John then talked of a narrowed epistemic field which he called an 'epistemic state'. A fact p is part of an epistemic state if the obtaining of p at a particular time gives a monotonically sufficient reason for the thinker in this state to believe that p. An example of such a fact might be that if I'm thinking and I have the thought that I'm thinking, I can know a priori that the latter thought is true (no further adduced evidence can falsify the thought).

John then went on to describe 'a priori warrant' as a phenomenological attitude towards a thinker's belief that she has sufficient reason to believe a fact p. If she bases that sufficient reason on her being in an epistemic state which gives outright sufficient reason to believe p, then she has a priori warrant. He then gave what he called the 'critical argument' where he argued that a thinker could not generate the relevant attitude to undewrite a priori warrant with regard to any a posteriori fact. Given his argument for a priori warrant, the conclusion was what John called the cognitive irrealism of the 'normative view' - that the apparently factual a priori propositions we know about reasons are in fact non-factual offshoots of synthetic a priori knowledge of reasons. What such knowledge has as its object is something like what Kant called the pure principles of the understanding - presumably principles of epistemic reasoning as such.

A priori workshop: John Callanan

John gave a paper entitled 'Kant's a priori and seeing how things must be'. In it he distinguished between two types of necessity that get talked about, and not always kept apart, in the first Critique. The first is the familiar necessity of synthetic a priori truths about the transcendental structure of experience - the necesary conditions of possibilty of experience that hold with 'strict universality' for any thinker/perceiver as such. The second is the necessity which attaches to certain experiences, so that we literally, in the course of experience, 'see' that, say, a certain temporal ordering of events is necessary rather than contingent. In uncovering this second source of necessary truths, Kant is very roughly doing a kind of phenomenology influenced still very much by the early modern philosophy that preceded him. For instance, very much influenced by Hume's reflections on how sense impressions are given to the mind and ordered by it in certain ways. What Kant changed was the Humean demarcation between the given and constituting elements of experience (for example, the representation from which the concept space is derived is constituted not given for Kant). Also, concepts derived from what is constituted are legitimate for Kant, whereas they are not for Hume. This is because for Kant they are a necessay condition of the very experience in question (for example, the constituting element of the causal principle is a necessary condition for Kant of the possibility of us experiencing certain sorts of temporal order at all).

But John also argued that for a lot of Kant's arguments in the Critique, he is concerned not with so called transcendental arguments, but rather with a phenomenological analysis of the understanding at work in experience. Kant works with quite a rich conception of experience and John's focus was his analysis of how we 'see' that something is the case, like when we see that in turning a cube a certain coloured side is bound to reappear at a certain point. We might say then, that the focus is on an a 'seeing that' which is suffuse with the conceptual activity of the understanding.

This general approach has ramifications for how we view Kant's philosophical project. John argued that we tend to see Kant through Frege's anti-psychologistic spectacles, that we see him as concerned with the conditions of possibility of thinking per se. But on John's view, Kant is far closer to Hume. He is involved in a phenomenology of experience that uncovers constituting elements that are merely human. Of course, this interpretation will effect how we think of the Kantian a priori. That is, on John's account it quantifies over a far more limited domain of individuals than it is often taken to.

I for one think John's approach is fruitful and probably right, certainly as a reading of the Aesthetic and the Analogies. But there seems to be a problem over the Transcendental Deduction, which appears to be concerned with the conditions of possibility of thinking as such. But there is a way out: perhaps Kant is concerned in those sections, as McDowell has argued, with another problem: that of intentionality. The TD could then be seen as arguing for certain a priori concepts that constitute thoughts and perceptions alike, so that perceptions have a certain minimal conceptual content. Kant's universalism about logic then becomes detatchable from the TD and it can fit with John's overrall interpretative approach of seeing Kant as concerned with analysing phenomenologically the understanding at work in experience.

Nature of Naturalism: Penelope Maddy

Penelope gave a talk entitled 'Naturalism, Transcendentalism and Therapy'. This paper was very rich and I can't hope to do justice to it here. The main thread was that the 'second philosopher' who is 'born native to natural science' rejects 'first philosophy', which is any philosophy that proposes a two level view: on one level there are philosophical truths marked by a specifically philosophical level of proof and evidence, on the other is the empirical domain of everyday discourse and natural science. One way of motivating first philosophy is by making radical scepticism about the external world pressing. Answering such scepticism requires giving a 'from scratch account' of what grounds (say) our perceptual beliefs (an account that doesn't make reference to theories that draw on perceptual evidence). The second philosopher doesn't reject such a 'grounding' of natural science, but she sees that it brings in its train more problems than it promised to solve, and for that reason she rejects it.

The second philosopher also hopes to give us a dose of philosophical therapy - like Kant, Carnap and the later Wittgenstein, she wants to release us from various philosophical anxieties. But Kant and Carnap require us to swallow a lot of first philosophy in order to get the therapeutic dose. The second philosopher rejects this. She is closer to Wittgenstein. But in Wittgenstein's dealings with Moore's argument against external world scepticism in On Certainty, it seems that he wants to take Moore to task for making a category mistake (expecting an answer to the 'from scratch' question in terms of methods of evidence that take for granted what that question puts in doubt). Penelope argued that perhaps this isn't right. Perhaps Moore is just a consistent second philosopher, refusing to see why he should find the 'from scratch' question pressing. Penelope ended by saying that perhaps Austin is a better therapeutic philosopher than Wittgenstein for he only adverts to ordinary language to give us our therapy, whereas Wittgenstein seems to continue to advert to specifically first philosophical problems as pressing and natural for us.

One question that came up was about circularity: is the second philosopher's appeal to perceptual methods in justifying her beliefs viciously circular? The answer was no, some accounts of the world that are viciously circular are so because they employ suspect science, not because of circularity per se. Another question was: given that first-philosophical anxiety is rife, is the second philosopher shirking her therapeutic work if she doesn't take such anxiety seriously? Penelope suggested that perhaps there is an intermediate stage where therapy a la Wittgenstein is necessary before second philosophy can properly come into view for many philosophers.

Maths and Logic workshop: Brian King

Brian King gave a paper entitled ‘Making Mathematics Sensible: a Kantian manifesto’. In it Brian defended the Kantian thesis that for mathematics to apply to the world there must be a link between sensibility (our access to the world) and the axioms or fundamental concepts of mathematics. Brian’s line here was fairly classically Kantian: the form of our intuitions is an a priori structure which belongs to sensibility and the objects to which sensibility relates. This guarantees a link between mathematics and the world because mathematical concepts are given their meaning by reference to this form.

What was interesting in the paper was Brian’s manifesto for making a Kantian philosophy of mathematics viable to the contemporary philosopher of mathematics. He argued that Kant had too heavily relied on empirical intuition (the drawing of lines, the counting of beads etc.) and that this reliance seems to vitiate his philosophy of mathematics, due to the fact that much of mathematics since Kant is not possible in terms of such crude methods. However, he suggested that if we effect a split between sensible mathematics, the concepts of which gain their meaning by reference to pure intuition, and intellectual mathematics, the concepts of which gain their meaning by having the logical form common to all concepts, then we can link mathematics to the world and account for much of modern mathematical practice. He further suggested that the sensible part of mathematics could receive a propadeutic justification of its application to the world a la Frege, and the intellectual part could be understood along the lines of Hilbert’s axiomatic method of justification.

The paper was very rich. One question that came up in different forms was whether, when we consider that much of modern mathematics would fall on the intellectual side of the divide, there really is any need for the sensible side. Brian’s answer was that as philosophers of mathematics we should be concerned with showing how mathematical concepts apply to the world and that a translation of intellectual concepts into sensible ones would play a large role in providing such a grounding.

Maths and Logic workshop: Emily Carson

Emily Carson gave a paper entitled ‘Arithmetic and the Possibility of Experience’. In it she sought to work out Kant’s position on how arithmetic is grounded in the transcendental structures of experience. This questions asks, very roughly, how we can explain that every ‘discursive’ thinker - as Kant puts it - possesses some arithmetical knowledge, and how arithmetic applies absolutely generally to every empirical object (every such object is quantifiable). In the case of geometry Kant’s position is fairly clear: geometry is the pure science of space and our pure intuition of space is the source of our a priori geometrical knowledge. But there is no comparable science of number for Kant, the source of which would be our pure intuition of time.

Emily argued that the source of arithmetical knowledge are the categories of quantity, categories that are involved in every synthesis of any manifold of intuition. She explained this by arguing that the threefold synthesis cited in the A-edition Deduction, a synthesis apparently necessary for any determinate thought content whatsoever, is a synthesis that minimally involves the categories of quantity. Thus the formal element of possible experience that arithmetic is grounded in is this synthesis, and this explains Kant’s cryptic statement that the formal element in experience that grounds arithmetical knowledge is‘the universal in the synthesis of one and the same thing in time and space, and the magnitude of an intuition in general (number) that arises from that.’

I for one found this a very convincing account of Kant’s position. But one question that arose was that if all that grounds arithmetic is the categorical synthesis of quantity, doesn’t that give us an unKantian answer to how arithmetic and the possibility of experience relate? That is, arithmetical capacities now start to look wholly conceptual. It came up in discussion that it seems necessary for there to be some intuitive structure to index the categories to, so that arithmetical abilities didn’t depend on contingencies like the amount of objects in the world (if there were only four objects, the sentence 7+5+12 couldn’t be formulated unless there were an infinite iterative structure like time that has enough places to index the constituent numbers of the sentence to). What was then asked was, why should this indexing structure be specifically time or space? To my mind, against Kant, this question is wrongheaded: he is not trying to show how any discursive thinker would be capable of arithmetic, but how we are.

Mind Workshop: Rödl

Sebastian Rödl, Action Explanation, took his cues from Anscombe’s contention that intentional actions attract “why?” questions without further intermediary. So what explains my intentional action (I do A because X) is simultaneously an explanation of my response to practical questions or my practical reason for endorsing that action (I should do A because X). On this picture, a peculiarity of intentional actions is, then, that action explanations explain actions that are actions in virtue of attracting this kind of explanation. Given this account of intentional action, Rödl is bound to reject the empiricist position that actions are caused by states of mind distinct from actions. In his view, practical reasons are not additional causal factors, but constitute the very causal nexus under which individual causal episodes can be subsumed and represented as a comprehensive configuration of thought, will and action. This, he concludes, makes of action concepts necessary conditions for the apprehension of intentional actions. Furthermore, as practical reasoning issues in intentional actions without further intermediary, practical reasoning presupposes the unity of thought and activity.

Mind Workshop: Kitcher

Patricia Kitcher, "The Unity of Kant's Active Thinker", offered a particular interpretation of the transcendental deduction as moving regressively from the assumption of empirical cognition to the necessary condtions of thinking, including the transcendental unity of apperception. The unity of apperception shows the poverty of inner sense views, according to which inner sense simply takes a record of psychological goings on. Our awareness of rational judgement must proceed in the light of a consciousness of judging based on the evidence. Not only cannot inner sense views account for this phenomenon, neither can contemporary, naturalistic, accounts of reasoning modelled on production systems.

VRG: Maddy, Kant's Transcendentalism

Maddy approaches Kant’s transcendentalism by distinguishing, helpfully, between what she calls a “harsh” and a “benign” reading. The harsh reading holds that empirical objects, which we can know, are strictly mental, basically Berkeleyan ideas; things in themselves are Locke’s external objects, except that neither secondary nor primary correspond to features of them (p. 51). This view steadfastly takes appearances and representations in the strictly empirical sense, as a subject’s mental contents which have no existence independently of their apprehension. There are, famously, passages in Kant that seem to support this reading, and among those who adhere to it Maddy lists Prichard, Strawson and Guyer (p. 50, note 7).

The benign view avoids the flattening understanding of appearances as simply subjective mental states, mere sensations. Kant does of course allow for mere subjective states to count as appearances – these are appearances in the empirical sense. But there are also appearances in the transcendental sense: those objects that are to be met with in space and time, which are independent of an individual’s mental states, are still mere appearances. The realm of appearances is thus expanded to include not only subjective states, but also empirically real objects whose existence is independent of individual states of consciousness. On this view, the very same objects which Kant allows are empirically real, those familiar independent objects around us that the natural scientist studies, are recognized at the level of critical reflection also to be appearances. Plants, rocks, raindrops and the like, are all empirically real (whereas for Berkeley they are empirically ideal) and at the same time transcendentally ideal. (See Maddy, 52-53)

The benign reading is thereby committed to a two-level theory. At one level we study the world around us as empirically real; at the transcendental level we switch and study that same world as transcendental appearance, i.e. as transcendentally ideal. As Maddy brings out clearly the two levels are supposed to be sufficiently insulated in Kant for the idealism of the transcendental level of inquiry not to compromise or even affect the ordinary practice of science at the empirical level. (p. 54). There is more to be said about the benign view (pp. 53-55) but the central feature is as outlined. Among those who take the benign view Maddy cites (p. 51, note 11) Allison, Bird and Matthews.

Leaving aside the question of which of the two interpretations is most accurate, Maddy concentrates her discussion on the benign view: partly because it is philosophically more interesting, but mainly because of its relevance to a central theme of her Second Philosophy – the rejection precisely of two-level theories such as the Kantian. The SP adheres steadfastly to a single level of explanation: the empirical explanations given by natural sciences. Given this orientation of SP, the Kantian two-level model usefully poses the question whether SP is missing out on anything, or somehow falling short in virtue of her confinement, and therein lies its interest for Maddy. The rest of the chapter (56-64) is devoted to this central question. In her view, it is not clear that there is anything cogent that the Kantian has to offer at the second level of theorizing.

Maddy’s worries about Kant’s level of transcendental inquiry, and SP’s refusal to follow him out of the safety of empirical explanations, are various. But there two main worries:

(1) Kant seems to have a cluster of substantive results from his transcendental inquiry (space and time being forms of intuition, characterizing apriori the world as it necessarily appears to us, thereby cutting us off from the world as it is in itself; the categories; all cognition requiring the contribution of the two primary faculties, sensibility and understanding, of both intuitions and concepts…). SP is happy to consider these results, but does so at the level of empirical inquiry, at which level there is no evidence to suggest that they hold. Kant agrees, of course, but thinks that SP needs to depart from the empirical level of inquiry, to engage in the transcendental inquiry. The trouble is that SP cannot see what the methods of transcendental inquiry are, and cannot consequently see how they yield the substantive results that comprise Kant’s transcendental psychology. (61-63)

(2) There is no explanatory task that SP can see needs to be carried out, and which cannot be carried out except at the transcendental level. Kant thinks there is – the task of explaining how synthetic apriori truths are possible; the task of identifying transcendentally necessary conditions of experience. This is something that empirical investigation cannot establish, but in Maddy’s view the SP regards the plea for an extra-empirical investigation as misguided. “Any judgement about whether or not we have a priori knowledge of the world can only be supported by serious investigation of the world and our cognitive access to it.” (p. 63)

Maddy concludes that SP can find in Kant’s project “no compelling motivation for his extra-empirical inquiry” – there is no outstanding puzzle about a priori knowledge that requires a departure from the familiar empirical methods of inquiry, and anyway there are serious problems with the nature of the methods of that extra-empirical inquiry. (p. 64).

There are several lines of discussion that could be followed up here. Some have to do with Kant scholarship, some are more general. Here are two of the latter.

(a) An austere version of Kant’s two-level inquiry might play down the substantive claims that comprise the doctrine of transcendental psychology, emphasizing rather those framework constraints that serve to keep our scientific investigations of the world resiliently confined to the empirical level. In addressing the pressure to a two-level account it might be better to concentrate on that austere version, in a way that Maddy does not. Indeed, it is arguable that any philosophical thesis to the effect that we are of necessity confined to asking internal questions, or to our empirical investigations, must resort to some such austere two-level account. This latter is not a criticism of SP, insofar as SP does not defend such a philosophical thesis; Maddy seems nicely to construe her confinement to the empirical as more a matter of a given intellectual orientation, of her philosophical proclivity. But the weakness of this orientation in the empirical – that it is difficult to render it resilient without precisely resorting to a two-level account, however minimal – is thereby obscured. (What is it, we may wonder, that stops SP from straying into metaphysics?) It may be that the later discussion of two-level views will address to this.

(b) Has Maddy made it clear enough that there is no interesting notion of transcendental necessity to contend with? There are transcendental arguments that seem to establish something like synthetic a priori necessities: say, the First and Second Analogies, perhaps the Refutation of Idealism, or the first argument of the Metaphysical Exposition of the Concept of Space. No doubt, Kant is not clear about either the method for revealing, or the nature of such necessities. But is Maddy not too quick to dismiss the idea that there may be something going on here, which sets a priori framework constraints on empirical level experience, and which cannot be established at the empirical level?

Reading Group: Lear's 'Disappearing We'

Jonathan Lear takes a line on the later Wittgenstein (LW) inspired by the Williams' paper we read last week. The paper outlines Wittgenstein's investigation of the way inner episodes of understanding meaning are intrinsically connected to the potentially publicly available outer manifestation of the practical ability to follow a rule. It compares this to Kant's investigation of how intuitive representations are 'saturated' by concepts due to their being instances of the analytic unity of apperception. The quite general point of comparison is that a certain synthetic unity amongst representations is required to make possible inner episodes of understanding/apperception. For LW the synthetic unity in question is constituted by language-games, so that understanding has to be capable of manifesting itself in rule-following which is potentially recognisable as a shared linguistic practice. Lear glosses this in terms of every 'I understand' implying a 'We are so minded'. This is supposed to license the 'we' in the second locution disappearing, so that what makes sense to 'us' shortens to 'what makes sense'. I presume the thought here is that if any case of understanding a word will also be a case of some potentially publicly available linguistic ability manifested in a language-game, then the 'we' who take making sense to consist in such manifestation just is the 'we' of sense-makers simpliciter.

The disappearing 'we' is one leg of Lear's interpretation of LW. The other is that our reflective self-consciousness of the fact that making sense simpliciter is a matter of words being potentially manifested in shared linguistic practices is consciousness of a form of transcendental idealism. The idea here is that the metaphysical articulation of the world is utterly enmeshed with the linguistic articulation of language-games - to individuate an object is always to articulate a view of the world that is part of our linguistically articulated 'form of life'. The thought is that any such individuation will consist in introducing one more possible articulation of the world that the global 'we' finds makes sense as a language-game, and that this means there is no room for articulating how the world is in itself. Or, to put it another way, on this view, the limits of possibilia coincide with the limits of what is linguistically articulable.

There are two obvious questions here. Does the 'we' disappear simply because understanding a word requires potentially publicly available manifestations of rule-following? If so, does this really imply idealism? To the first question, I think the answer is yes. If the global 'we' is defined as those subjects who understand meanings in terms of publicly available rule-following or shared linguistic practices, then any such understanding will be encompassed by some shared linguistic practice. It is then an anayltic truth that understanding will be part of the global 'we'. As for the second question, I'm not sure. I think it will depend on what one understands by 'realism'. If this is understood as our linguistic articulation of the world not falsifying the properties and relations that the world contains , then I don't think anything idealistic follows (some subset of our form of life might be articulated by language-games that precisely 'map' what there is). But if realism is taken as having an epistemic element, so that it requires that what makes our thoughts/sentences true is their correspondence with a world as it is in itself, then I think the position is transcendentally ideal. For it says that no such correspondence is intelligible, for there is now no sense to the idea of the way the world is in itself.

Mark Sacks at the Transcendental Arguments Workshop

Mark gave a paper entitled 'Phenomeno-logical proof'. In it he argued for a specific understanding of what makes transcendental arguments transcendental - there being descriptions in argument form of what Mark calls presupposition relations between situated thoughts. The idea is that appeal to situatedness explains how transcendental proofs make a synthetic or ampliative step. If such arguments are construed as concerned with meanings, propositional contents or conceptual analysis, then it is hard to see how we get more than we started with. And anyway, the inference from 'there is a tree in the garden' to 'there is a tree in front of me' is not analytic, for such inferences fail in cases where the perceiver is remotely located, or where the statements describe, for example, trees and gardens on different possible worlds. But, once we situate the thinker so that the thought 'there is a tree in the garden' is demonstratively directed at its objects, the inference is made good and can be sanctioned a priori (no specific empirical information over and above the presupposition relations between the situated thoughts themselves is required).

The general idea then, is that what we are doing when we engage in transcendental proof is thinking ourselves into the relevant situated thought. We then see that certain presupposition relations necessarily hold between such thoughts. These necessary relations are what transcendental proof describes - a synthetic a priori body of truths about what might be termed the structural features of situated thinking. The description of situatedness at work is thin, but this is to be expected, as in order to make necessity claims, not too much must be built into the various cognitive scenarios we investigate transcendentally. Moreover, the necessary truths we uncover in this manner only hold from within the relevant situated viewpoint - they are not 'world-directed' truths, but truths about how experience must be from such a viewpoint. In other words, they are necessary truths about possible experience.

One objection was that how do we know that our inability to, say, not ascribe two contradictory predicates to an object at the same time was not being driven by general metaphysical principles about possession of incompatible properties. Mark's reply was that we are asking how incompatible predicates get applied in experience, and this requires recourse to the situatedness of the thinker, and thus to necessary presupposition relations between a pair of thoughts like 'this is a cube that is red all over' and 'this is the same cube that is green all over', and the thought that 'this same cube has persisted through time'.

Another objection inquired after what made the putative necessary truths yielded by situated thoughts necessary - i.e. are we not mistaking the limits of our imagination for some sort of metaphysical limit? Appealing to the modesty of situated thoughts - there not being world-directed - will not help here, for they still make necessity claims about what any situated thinker of the relevant type must experience the world to be like. Mark's reply was that there was no way to guarantee necessity here. Kant's proofs have stood the test of time, and so that is a marker of their success. I was unclear whether Mark was suggesting that transcendental proofs operate with a deflationary epistemically constrained understanding of modal truth, or whether they purport to uncover full-blooded metaphysical necessities (albeit about subjective experience). In other words, is the suggestion that there is no way to definitively verify that such truths are necessary, but that there is also no reason to think transcendetnal proof an unreliable guide to uncovering necessary truths, or, is it that continual convergence over time in phenomeno-logical proof is what being a necessary truth consists in around these parts?

Reading Group: Abela on Putnam & Kant

No actual reading group this week - were just online. So I don't have the benefit of other's thoughts and, as a result, I don't have a great deal to say.

The gist of Abela's short paper is that Kant's empirical realism should be sharply distinguished from Putnam's internal realism. Three ways of distinguishing the two are considered, only the last of which is found to be ultimately compelling.

(1) "The first concerns the greater generality of Kant's account of cognition as compared with Putnam's treatment" (50)
(2) "The second involves an alleged belief constraining/informing connection between noumenal reality and phenomenal reality in Kant's account that is rejected by Putnam" (50)
(3) Kant should be viewed as "repudiating the interface model of cognition enforced by scheme content dualism", whereas this is not the case with "Putnam's internal realism, with its fundamental commitment to the interface model of cognition" (54)

I'm going to ignore (1), say a little about (2), and then something on (3).

Abela thinks that (2) misrepresents Kant, attributing to him a distinction between scheme and content that he does not in fact hold. He also suggests that only a two-world interpretation would take this view. On the face of it I don't see why either of these two claims are compelling. As I understand it, the idea is the naive one that there is some way the world is in itself and this has some role to play in experience. For instance, it accounts for the fact that I am now experiencing grey damp weather rather than blazing sunshine (and so are those around me, as opposed to those in Arizona). It is far from clear that, in and of itself, this amounts to accepting something called 'the scheme-content distinction'. Sure, we might then give a two-world spin on this, with the attendant 'construction' of the empirical world, and perhaps that would involve something like a given being interpreted/chopped up in a certain way by the subject. And perhaps that amounts to a scheme-content distinction. But, in and of itself the naive thought does not appear to force that sort of reading, and if it is something that Putnam rejects, then we do have a way of distinguishing the two views.

On (3), it is somewhat unclear to me exactly what Abela is saying. On the face of it he rejects the interpretation of Kant as proposing a scheme-content distinction. However, as I said above, Abela tends to associate this with a two-world view and so to a mentalising of appearances. So, part of his rejection amounts to rejecting the mentalising of the empirical world. But, again, I just don't see why the scheme-content distinction requires the objects of experience to be mentalised. This is especially so, given that the scheme content appears to be understood along the lines of the naive thought above. As such, my impression is that Abela throws out the baby with the bathwater. In rejecting the idea that Kant's empirical world is in some way mental, he maintains that "it makes no sense to think of something outside of judgment as having an informative, evidential, or in any way belief constraining connection to empirical knowledge" (54). If this means that the way the world is plays no role whatsoever in determining belief, then I find it impossible to believe. But perhaps I'm reading this wrong and we should understand the claim as, something like, Davidson's view that only a belief can justify another belief. This makes sense, but is surely does travesty to the role that perceptual experience plays in our cognitive lives.

But, no doubt, I'm barking up the wrong tree here.

Transcendental Idealism Reading Group: Van Cleve's Two Worlds View

This week we read pp. 143-155 of Van Cleve's Problems from Kant. These sections aren't really a defence of the two-world view, but rather a battery of arguments against one-worldism. The arguments are of two types: those concerned with what Kant actually thought, and those concerned with which of the one and two-world views is most philosophically convincing. I shall say a little about both these types of arguments, although I won't discuss everything Van Cleve says in these sections of his book.

First, there is some textual evidence offered for why Kant is a two worlder. When he uses language indicative of one-worldism, such as using the same pronoun to refer to things as they for empirical cognition and as they are in themselves, this is a rhetorical device that does not imply one or the other of the two ontological views. Second, one worlders are in the uncomfortable position of saddling Kant with a Leibnizian conception of cognition that he clearly rejects - that we perceive things in themselves (TiTs) confusedly in perception, and clearly by means of the intellect. Presumably one-worlders are forced to pin this conception on Kant because for them, empirical cognition is of TiTs, but only in terms of how they appear, so that such cognition is a 'confused' version of what the understanding alone cognises of TiTs.

The first point is fine but points in neither a one world or two world direction, it merely makes two worldism as consistent with some of what Kant says as one-worldism. The second point seems to me to get Kant all wrong. Kant continually warns against the idea that pure understanding can think TiTs in anything more than an extremely cursory way - in a logically consistent but cognitively empty manner. This just gets us the very idea of TiTs as coherent, rather than some proper cognition of them a la Leibniz. So there are two modes of access to TiTs for one worlders. One via empirical cognition and one via transcendental philosophy itself. But (for the post-critical Kant anyway) there are not two cognitive routes to TiTS - for cognition requires an object for Kant, and the solely intellectual use of the understanding has no object.

Van Cleve goes on to raise some difficulties with apparent contradictions for the one world view. These are encountered by asserting of TiTs that they are both spatial (as they appear) and non-spatial (in themselves). He propose three different models for dissolving the contradictions, which I shal summarise as follows.

(1) It is in fact different parts of the same object that possess the apparently contradictory properties, i.e. there is no contradiction is asserting that a buliding is round on the first floor, square on the third.

(2) The apparently contradictory properties are ascribed by two different interpretations of the facts, one or both of which turn out to be false.

(3) What appear to be contradictory monadic properties are in fact relational properties. There is no contradiction is saying Fred is taller than Alfonso, yet shorter than Diego.

(1) is apparently no good as it reintroduces the two-object view. We questioned this. It doesn't so much introduce the two-object view but assert that a 'thing' has two parts, spatial and non-spatial. Now, it may be strange to talk about 'things' as composites, but it preserves the one-world view without contradiction (and who said transcendental idealism wasn't strange!).

(2) is also apparently no good, because it makes appearance talk illusory and this is something one-worlders wish to avoid. We also questioned this. Van Cleve assumes that if two apparently contradictory predicates are ascribed to a thing, then on this model the only way to make sense of this is one or both ascription being wrong. But this assumes there is a contradiction which is what the one-worlders deny. What they argue is that one ascription is true of things at the empirical level, and the other at the transcendental level. To refuse this dissolving of the contradiction by recourse to such distinctions comes very close to begging the question against the one-worlder.

(3) is the best option according to Van Cleve. If monadic properties are disguised relations, our apparent contradiciton is solved, and one-worldism can fly. He has no conclusive argument against this model. He simply points out that it is very strange to think of 'having a shape' as a relational property. But again, whoever said transcendental idealism wasn't strange!

To demystify the idea of spatial properties being relational, he suggests the relation be understood as 'being shaped in relation to subjects with constitutions like ourselves' (or some such). But then, he claims, this just reintroduces the illusion/reality picture one-worldism wants to avoid. We found this unconvincing, as it presumes transcendental realism (that there is one way of cognising objects which is common to God and ourselves, and that any object either has or does not have a given predicate correctly asserted of it according to this single cognitive perspective). Again, this seems mighty close to begging the question against one-worlders who insist that cognition is relative to a transcendental standpoint. (I presume that one-worlders think there is only one way the world is. What they deny is that that way can only be correctly described from a single cognitive perspective.)

Van Cleve raises some further problems for one-worlders. He claims that Kant, in the Amphiboly section of the first Critique, maintains that certain principles hold of TiTs - such as (a) complexes being composed of simples and (b) the identity of indiscernibles - but not of appearances. But if this is so, then one-worlders must hold that a thing in both its aspects (phenomenal and noumenal) has two different mereological structures, and that two indiscernible things are both identical (at the noumenal level) yet diverse (at the phenomenal level). Both of these conclusions Van Cleve claims are absurd.

In a footnote, Van Cleve admits that it is not clear that Kant does hold that (a) and (b) hold of TiTs, rather, Kant is merely pointing out in the Amphiboly section that our cognition cannot be understood as individuating objects solely in terms of their qualitative features via concepts. This is because spatio-temporal objects are known through their relations to other such objects, and two of them can be qualitatively identical yet differ in spatial location. Thus, Kant concludes, our cognition should not be modelled on Leibnizian style conceptual individuation. If this is right, Van Cleve's argument must be recast as 'if (a) and (b) hold of TiTs, then one-worlders are committed to the absurd conclusions outlined above.'

I personally don't find relative identity particularly troubling, as identity is a relation ('a is identical to b according to qualitative individuation, different according to spatial'). But relative mereology does seem absurd. How can a single object be both simple and composite?

Hannah Ginsborg at the Normativity Workshop

In her paper Hannah argued for a solution to Kripke-inspired scepticism about rule-following by appealing to what she called 'primitive normativity'. She located her approach in terms of dispositionalist and anti-reductionist responses to the problem. The most fundamental problem for the former approaches is that they cannot account properly for the normative aspect of rule-following, and the most fundamental for the latter is their inability to account for the 'disoposition-like' nature of rule following. Hannah's approach operates below the level of facts about meaning yet above the level of mere behavioural responses.

Her approach rejects Kripke's way of setting up the shape a possible solution to the problem might take. He notes that there are two points at which the sceptic will apply pressure: what you meant by past uses of a rule, and what funds your present confidence in applying it? And he insists that a justification of the latter confidence can only be funded by a justification of what you meant in the cases of past usage. Hannah challenged this way of framing the problem. She claimed that one can justify one's present confidence in applying a rule without appeal to facts about past meaning. Invoking examples like children applying a mathematical rule such as 'add 2' without properly understanding the meaning of '+', yet still with enough confidence and reliability in relation to past patterns of application to distinguish such activity from blind responses, she claimed one can be justified in one's present confidence by appeal to such 'primitive normativity' - i.e. normativity that flows from a rulish compulsion to 'go on in the right way' that doesn't explicitly or even implicitly rely on the internalisation or acceptacnce of the meaning of the rule. Once we have answered this half of the sceptical challenge we can help ourselves to a suitably formulated version of dispositionalism to answer the other half: one meant the intended rule because one possessed a disposition to apply it, interfering factors notwithstanding.

Here are some objections that came up in discussion. A general point which recurred was that examples of primitive normativity are not central to the rule-following considerations and it is not clear that appeal to them can work for all applications of rules. Or, to put the point another way, to talk of such primitive normativity is to fall below the bar of rule-following proper and thus to perhaps change the subject rather than answer the problem at hand.

Another objection was that perhaps rules about meaning were being sneaked in the backdoor - isn't 'conforming to past patterns of application' to conform to an understanding of what you meant to do in the past, namely, apply a certain pattern?

It was further pointed out that the patterns of application were such small snatches of finite behaviour that it was not clear one could cite them as cases of rule-following at all.

It was also pointed out that appealing to Kant's conception of aesthetic judgement to understand primitive normativity would not do. For such judgement is involuntarily wrung from one in a way that does not involve a surveying of past usage and so is fundamentally disanalogous to the case of a primitive rulish compulsion to conform to past patterns of application.

I myself do not feel the force of rejecting anti-reductionist responses on account of their not accounting for rule-following being 'like' other dispositional responsive mechanisms. Perhaps it is only 'like' such mechansims!

Although I will not detail them here, Hannah presented robust responses to all these objections and convinced me that something could be made of this original response to the problem.

Johannes Haag at the TI workshop

Johannes Haag gave a paper entitled 'Transcendental Realism'. In it he argued that Sellars' conception of the scientific image as the ultimate telos of human knowledge is not driven, as is commonly supposed, by scientism. Rather, it is driven by his analysis of the phenomenology of perception on the one hand, and transcendental methodology on the other. The former analysis leads him to make the 'sense impression inference': because normal and abnormal (false) perceptions have the same representational content, something must explain this fact, and sensations are posited as sub-intentional entities that guide conscious perception in normal and abnormal cases. But this phenomenologically driven point leads to the empirical objects of conscious experience becoming 'ideal'. Johannes' main claim was that Sellars does not posit sensations simply owing to a desire for a scientific explanation of perception, but owing to a desire to explain the coherence of empirical knowledge. Sellars accepts Kant's claim in the Transcendental Deduction that unified experience requires an empirical object: but he sees experience as being unified and coherent only if there is an explanation at the level of transcendental reality that accounts for the sensations that guide us at the level of empirical reality. Experiential coherence is maintained because the successor concepts of the scientific image retain as much as is possible of the content of the concepts employed at the latter level.

One question that came up in discussion concerned whether experience being unified as a coherent whole at the level of the scientific image really had much in common with Kantian transcendental philosophy. Another asked whether we might reject the philosophy of perception that yields the sense-impression inference rather than going as far as bifurcating experience into empirically ideal and transcendentally real aspects.

Karl Ameriks at the Transcendental Idealism workshop

Karl Ameriks gave a paper entitled 'Kant’s Idealism: Once More into the Breach'. In it he sought to find space for a coherent 'modest metaphysical' reading of Kant's theoretical philosophy, where 'metaphysical' means allowing some sort of sense to Kant's various ways of talking about things-in-themselves, and ‘modest’ means that such talk flows from the a priori structures of experience rather than dogmatic assumptions. Karl argued the key to making tenable such a reading is to reject the false choice between accepting talk of things-in-themselves but only in the context of neo-Berkeleyan phenomenalism, and denying such talk in the context of a neo-Strawsonian descriptive metaphysics.

Karl achieved this rejection via a 'multi-stage, multi-level' reading of Kant's Critical Philosophy. He argued that Kant’s Critical Philosophy is methodologically multistage because it starts from non-inferentially accepted core claims consonant with common sense realism (the subject matter of which are immediate ‘mental-sensory’ representings); moves inferentially through transcendental claims about a priori experience-structuring features that philosophical reflection reveals claims at the first level require; and then goes on to show that these a priori features are only possible if we deny transcendental reality to space and time. This multistage understanding of experience yields a multi-level ontology that is idealist but which does not undercut the common sense realism that the position began from.

Karl’s reasons for arguing that a multi-stage methodology yields a multi-level ontology (and thus TI) were complex and interesting, but I shall not go into them here. I will just mention a couple of points that came up in discussion. First, it was suggested that it was not at all clear that Kant’s talk of empirical reality being ‘mere representations’ at the third methodological level does not undercut the robust empirical realism reinforced at the second level. Second, it was suggested that once we give up the negative deflationary conception of things-in-themselves as merely what empirical reality would look like not from our perspective (or no perspective at all), we are unconstrained in the metaphysical positions available to us as positive characterisations of noumena. For example, what is to stop us postulating an infinite hierarchy of levels of the latter, all supporting each another, rather than viewing noumena as some sort of underlying ‘causal’ substrate to appearances? In other words, what is the Critical reason for taking the latter metaphysical line?

Idealism Workshop: Moore

In his paper, "Vats, Sets and Tits", Adrian Moore explored some of the relations between Putnam's proof that we could not be brains in vats, a certain form of scepticism concerning set theory, and a radical form of transcendental idealism. An appealing response to Putnam's original argument is to claim that it answers one kind of scepticism only to leave us with another - the worry that we cannot tell whether our thoughts are limited to our "phenomenal bubble" (a limited aspect of how things are). But this kind of scepticism can be answered, thinks Adrian, by pointing out that for the subject to describe his phenomenal bubble as failing to encompass all the things there are, he has thereby thought about all the things there are. One way to respond to this is to move to a radical form of transcendental idealism according to which we can achieve some kind of inexpressible insight into the possibility that my thoughts are only answerable to my phenomenal bubble.

But the existence of such an inexpressible insight does not vindicate transcendental idealism, at best it indicates that for all I know transcendental idealism may be true. As Wittgenstein pointed out, as soon as we try to draw the limits of the thinkable, we will fail (by thinking the supposedly unthinkable). Thus we cannot think of any insight we may have as the insight that our thinking is only answerable to the phenomenal bubble. In this way, we should resist the move to radical transcendental idealism.

In discussion a number of different issues came up. One was how we should think of the Cartesian dreaming hypothesis in relation to the various types of scepticism discussed. Another was whether we should accept that the brain in Putnam's vat can have thoughts at all, since it seems that he would be unable to think about (genuine) propositions, and that looks as though it may be a condition of the possibility of thought. Finally, there is the question as to what conception of thought is being assumed in the Wittgensteinian denial of the possibility of drawing a limit to thought. Might not some "thick" conceptions of what thought about an object requires block such a move?

Idealism Workshop: McDaniel

In his paper, "Kantian Ignorance", Kris McDaniel argued that Kant's transcendental idealism should be understood minimally as the denial that we have knowledge of things in themselves. This position, in turn, is to be understood as the claim that we have no knowledge of the mind independent properties of objects. A mind independent property is one the instantiation of which does not entail the existence of a mind whose sensibility is receptive. The argument for transcendental idealism is, then, to be understood as resting on the claim that space, time and the (schematised) categories are mind dependent, and the claim that all properties of which we can have knowledge entail at least one of the above.

In the second part of his paper, Kris set about the task of explaining why it is that Kant's formulations often give the impression that he endorses a form of subjective idealism. Part of the explanation is that Kant uses the word "appearance" ambiguously, sometimes referring to experienced objects, sometimes to their (mind dependent) properties. This latter use goes some way towards explaining Kant's occasional apparent Berkleyianism.

Topics that came up in discussion included whether or not the view could accommodate Kant's view that we are ignorant of how the subject is in itself. For it is unclear that (Kantian) subjects have any mind-independent properties.

Second, the definitions given leave open the possibility of mind-dependent but in principle unknowable properties. But this may not sit entirely comfortably with Kant's general picture of the phenomenal world.

Finally, this minimal (and entirely negative) account of transcendental idealism has no essential place for Kant's views concerning the role of the subject in synthesising the empirical world. A related concern is that the broadness of the definition may allow too many views (e.g. global scepticism) to count as forms of transcendental idealism.