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: Peter Railton

In his paper, "A Naturalistic Transcendental Argument? (or, Why should Kantians have all the fun?)" Peter Railton argued that a naturalistically acceptable quasi-transcendental argument can be mounted against the sceptic. If I understood it (and I'm far from sure I do), the argument relied on the conditions necessary for a system to be in a position to learn from experience. The condition is, roughly speaking, that the epistemic options must be investigated with an expectation that assigns differential probabilities to each. If each possibility is assigned equal probability, then a system will not be able to rely on the information it gains to adjust the probabilities of further options. Further, it doesn't matter so much exactly which expectations the system begins with as, if there are epistemic reasons for the system to latch onto, then there will be a tendency for systems to converge on those reasons.

What this means for the sceptic is that his demand that his demand that we put aside all prior assignments of probabilities to the sceptical versus the non-sceptical hypotheses, is inconsistent with the supposition (sure made by the sceptic) that we are creatures capable of learning. This doesn't show that the sceptical hypothesis is false (there may be no epistemic reasons), nor that it is meaningless. Rather, it suggests that, contrary to what the sceptic wants to insist, we are justified in making assumptions (embodied in our behaving in accordance with certain norms) concerning those things the sceptic doubts despite not having an apriori 'from-scratch' argument that shows that these assumptions are true or objectively likely to be true.

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.

Maths & Logic Workshop: Peter Sullivan

Peter tentatively argued for a positive answer to the question, 'Is logic transcendental?'. An 'easy' positive answer can be gleaned from some remarks of Nagel's: any attempt to doubt logic will presuppose logical principles. Thus, scepticism about logic is self-undermining. But this is unsatisfying, as it looks not to vindicate logic but to excuse it from vindication, and brings in worries concerning the possibility of logical relativism. In search of a better alternative, Peter offered a detailed reconstruction of a line of thought found in Mark Sacks', Objectivity and Insight. Broadly speaking, the strategy is to argue that certain "structuring principles of thought" are the sources of answerability. As such, it is misguided to think of these principles themselves as answerable to anything. Whilst Mark thinks of these structuring principles as concerning 'the very structure of experience', Peter's emphasis is on 'the laws of truth' (in Frege's sense). These provide us with a structure that, "can be grounded neither in the world, nor in the mind, since it is prior to both: it is the structure that at once opens up the world to us, and defines mind as standing in coordination with that world." It makes no sense to ask whether in respect of its being structured by these principles, the mind is answerable to anything.

The paper was very rich, and I have only sketched one of the central lines of thought. One issue that came up in discussion was whether there is room for the thought of alternative 'structuring principles' that are the source not of answerability, but of schmanswerability, thus raising the relativist worry again. Another concerned to what extent we should take seriously Nagel's original thought, since logical principles can be coherently doubted if one takes them one at a time.

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.

Conference: The Nature of Transcendental Philosophy

Well, our second annual conference was, I think, a great success.

We kicked off with Ulrich Schlösser, who claimed that Kantian transcendental philosophy is defined by its proposal that we are necessarily related to objects. His paper, "The Necessity of Object Reference, Idealism and Communicability", explored two Kantian arguments for this proposal and examined their relation to transcendental idealism.

Next, Alan Richardson outlined his view of the history of Logical Empiricism, understood via its relation to both neo-Kantian transcendental philosophy and subsequent figures such as Quine and Popper. His paper, "Has Philosophy of Science Completely lost its (Transcendental) Mind?", focused on the fate of the knowing subject in scientific philosophy, and on the tenability of 'empiricism without experience'.

In his paper, "The Bounds of Sense", Adrian Moore looked at a number of attempts from within Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy to draw a distinction between that which does and that which does not make sense. In doing so he motivated his own view that an explanation of why we should draw the bounds of sense where we do must remain ineffable.

In the final paper of the first day of the conference, Barry Stroud outlined some "Transcendental Strategies". He gave an account of what we can expect to achieve by the the use of certain distinctively transcendental ways of arguing. Although, he claimed, certain conclusions can only be reached if one assumes some form of idealism, transcendental arguments may well be of significant value in showing some propositions to be 'invulnerable' in a number ways.

Our own Matt Grist, "In Defence of Epistemic Transcendental Idealism", started off the second day of the conference by offering just what his title suggested. Distinguishing his own view from that of Henry Allison, to which it is related, Matt argued that his interpretation showed that transcendental idealism is a non-trivial 'knowledge limitation' thesis which is entailed by empirical realism, as Kant understands it.

Next, Jonathan Lear put forward an account, based on the testimonies of Crow Indians after their move to the reservation, of what it is to lose that by means of which the world is intelligible to one. In, "What is it to be Deprived of a World", he argued that an understanding of this phenomenon - loss of that which makes one's world possible - opens us up to the possibility of a distinctive kind of philosophical irony, a possibility noticed by Kierkegaard in his account of Christianity within Christendom.

In, "Transcendental Philosophy without Things in Themselves?", Wayne Martin explored the possibility of understanding both transcendental idealism and transcendental philosophy more generally, without being forced to posit the existence things in themselves - a possibility that keeps the figure of Fichte hovering in the background. He addressed the question by way of a detailed reading of Kant's treatment of freedom in Groundwork III, tentatively concluding that the resort to things in themselves is driven by a particular sort of philosophical anxiety.

Finally, Christopher Peacocke in his, "Objectivity", defended the claim that transcendental arguments can, contrary to some, establish truths about the world in a way that relies on realism rather than any form of idealism. He offered two transcendental arguments, based largely upon his account of content, designed to show a 'minimum objectivity' involved in both judgement and perceptual experience respectively.

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?

Robert Stern at the Transcendental Arguments Workshop

Bob gave a paper entitled The Value of Humanity: Reflections on Korsgaard's Transcendental Argument. In it he argued that a particular reading of 'phase two' of Korsgaard's transcendental argument for the value of humanity formulation of the categorical imperative is successful (Bob stressed that he was not defending the success of phases one and three, nor another version of phase two based on a 'regress of identities argument').

The argument Bob defended had the following first three premises, which were what discussion focussed on.

1. To rationally choose to do X, you must take it that you have some reason to do X
2. You cannot think that X is the rational thing to do in itself, but only given your practical identity
3. You cannot regard your practical identity as making X the rational thing to do unless you can see some value in that practical identity

It seems premise 1 is unproblematic. Given anti-realism about the normative source of reasons, premise 2 is fairly unproblematic also - for if actiona are not in themselves possessed of normative properties, then a particular rational action will only make sense if the agent conceives of it as the instantiation of what she finds worthwhile, i.e. as an instantiation of a practical identity.

Bob suggested Korsgaard's transcendental argument be read as a modest one - that is, not as 'world directed', attempting to establish the truth of the value of humanity, but rather operating under the auspices of an anti-realism about value which means the argument is only attempting to establish what an agent must believe from within her perspective on the world.

Most discussion was of the move from premise 2 to 3. One objection was that we can have anti-realism about values without going through a self-reflexive stance where the agent values her practical identity - think of Humean projectivism. Bob replied that it is hard to understand an agent valuing what she projects without valuing the practical identity that frames the projection, unless we see the object of a rational action as itself normative (precisely what we can't do given anti-realism about norms). Another objection was that acting under a practical identity just is to find certain reasons compelling - that is, it is to operate according to the practical identity rather than to explicitly endorse that identity in an evaluative step. Bob replied that the evaluative step is necessary to answer our how possible question about rational action given anti-realism. A third objection was that reasons are usually identified with roles in reasoning, which yields a sort of anti-realism in that occupying the role makes things so (that I conceive myself as a holder of office makes it so that fulfilling that role is a reason to act, nothing more is needed to make the reason compelling). But if this is right, the move from premise 2 to 3 is invalid, for finding certain reasons compelling is constitutive of having a practical identity, which means one can see X as the rational thing to do without valuing the practical identity that frames it. Bob responded that we need the evaluative step to get reasons into the picture in the first place in an anti-realist setting.

Generally then, the scepticism about Bob's reading of the argument, such as there was, centred on the idea that acting under a practical identity implies valuing that identity. It wasn't clear to me whether the valuating step is just built in to rational action as such, or whether an agent has to actually engage in self-reflexive evaluation (which seems false), or whether the latter is more a requirement of philosophical theory that wants to explain the possibility of rational action in an anti-realist setting.

Transcendental Arguments Workshop: Vahid

In his paper, "Skepticism and Varieties of Transcendental Argument", Hamid Vahid took on a number of targets. First, he argued that transcendental arguments should be viewed as a species of inference to the best explanation (IBE). He then argued that recent 'modest' interpretations of transcendental arguments, for examples those proposed by Bob Stern, Barry Stroud and Mark Sacks, are epistemically ineffective.

First, non-modest transcendental arguments. Seeing transcendental arguments as a species of IBE means seeing them as exploiting subject matter relative assumptions which would ground the norms of simplicity, explanatory power, etc. But, if this is so, such arguments would beg the question if used to argue against, say, external world scepticism.

Second, modest transcendental arguments and the example of Bob Stern. Vahid argued that Stern's view is that transcendental arguments can be seen as justification conferring since their conclusions can be shown to enhance the coherence of the subject's belief-set. Vahid then poses a dilemma: Either coherence is truth-conducive or it is not. If it is not, then it is hard to see why the sceptic should be concerned. If it is, then the transcendental arguments become redundant, since we simply need to ask whether the proposition that appears as the consequence of the transcendental argument serves to enhance coherence - the transcendental argument itself can be bypassed.

One source of discontent with Vahid's position concerns the alignment of transcendental arguments with IBE. Take, for instance, Strawson's argument that self-ascription requires other-ascription. It is far from clear that the capacity for other ascription explains the capacity for self-ascription at all, let alone being the best explanation for it. So not all transcendental arguments can be plausibly understood in this way.

Second, with regards to the argument against Stern, can't Stern reply that the role of the transcendental argument is to identify which beliefs have a fundamental coherence enhancing role. Whilst coherence is the justificatory norm, transcendental arguments are not thereby made redundant.

Transcendental Arguments Workshop: Grundmann

In his paper, "Transcendental Arguments in Defence of Philosophical Intuitions", Thomas Grundmann argued that sceptical arguments against the evidential status of philosophical intuitions are epistemically self-defeating. This he did via a form of transcendental argument. A representative sceptical argument was his 'argument from sceptical possibilities':

1. It is possible that our intuitions permanently deceive us unnoticed.
2. As long as the possibility of such a permanent deception is not ruled out, intuition is not a legitimate source of evidence.
3. We cannot rule out the possibility of a permanent deception of our intuition.
So,
4. Intuition is not a legitimate source of evidence.

Grundmann argued that such arguments against the evidential status of intuitions invariably contain at least one premise (in this case, 1) that must be based on philosophical intuition (he had earlier distinguished philosophical from folk intuition). As such, one must already believe that intuitions are a good source of evidence if one is to endorse the premise. So, the argument involves what he called an 'epistemic inconsistency', and is self-defeating.

One issue concerns the extent to which the sceptic can simply reformulate his arguments to evade this charge. An argument form that does not require one to be justified in believing (or even to believe) one's premises is reductio ad absurdum. Can't then the sceptic restate the argument as a reductio of the claim that philosophical intuition is a good form of evidence. Considered in this way, it is this claim (rather than the sceptic's position) that is self-defeating.

Another potential problem concerns the relation between judgements of intuition and conceptual capacities. Some of the claims that Grundmann suggested were based on philosophical intuition look like they might plausibly said to be based merely on an understanding of concepts. If so, they might be thought to be analytic and, if that's right, the question of whether they are based on good evidence misses the point.

Transcendental Arguments Workshop: Cassam

In his paper, "Transcendental Arguments and How-Possible Questions", Quassim Cassam argued that (1) transcendental arguments do not provide a satisfactory response to how-possible questions in epistemology, and (2) a better response to such questions is what he called a 'multi levels' response.

A how-possible question allows that a type of knowledge is actual, notices a potential obstacle to it and asks how it can be possible given that obstacle. This, in part, involves asking what the source of such knowledge is. But transcendental arguments don't ask after sources, so they can't answer such questions.

The multi-levels approach, by contrast, attempts to show: (a) By what means such knowledge is arrived at, (b) How the apparent obstacles can be overcome, (c) What the background necessary conditions are for gaining such knowledge via such means.

One question concerns whether the distinction between the aims of transcendental arguments and the multi-levels approach is really that sharp. For instance, on one reading Strawson's other minds transcendental argument tries to show that it is a necessary condition of the possibility of self-ascription that behaviour be 'criterial evidence' for mentality. This may well be taken as maintaining that a certain means of gaining knowledge is the proper conclusion of the transcendental argument in question.

Another question concerns whether it is right to say that presenting a necessary condition of P is of no use in answering a question as to how P is possible. For might we not be able to distinguish between explanatorily relevent and irrelevant necessary conditions and, whilst agreeing that the latter are of no such use, attempt to make the case that the former are not. For example, two necessary conditions of the possibility of the capacity to intelligibly ascribe contradictory predicates to one and the same subject might be (i) time-consciousness (as Mark Sacks argued in his contribution to the workshop) and (ii) that 2+2=4 (assuming this to be a necessary truth). But whilst the first is arguably explanatory of how it is possible for us to possess the capacity, the latter is obviously not.