Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

  • Has Any Philosophical Problem Been Solved? The case of psychologism in logic.

    For Cyrus

    ……………

    A reader is skeptical of my solubility skepticism. He adduces the problem of psychologism in logic which, he suggests, has been definitively settled in favor of the anti-psychologizers.  Here, then, is a problem that supposedly has been solved. There is progress in philosophy after all. My reader is joined by Robert Spaemann who, in his Persons, tr. O'Donovan, Oxford 2006, writes:

    The refutation of psychologism in logic, with which Husserl and Frege are associated, is among the very few philosophical achievements that have brought an existing debate to a decisive close. (54)

    Would that it were so! But alas it is not.  The existing debate rages on. Having been brought up on Husserl, and influenced by Frege, I was for a long time an opponent of psychologism in logic, and thought the issue resolved. Time to revaluate! Here is a post from August 2004 from my first blog:

    ARE THE LAWS OF LOGIC EMPIRICAL GENERALIZATIONS?

    Someone on a discussion list recently resurrected the old idea of John Stuart Mill and others that the laws of logic are empirical generalizations from what we do and do not perceive. Thus we never perceive rain and its absence in the same place and at the same time. The temptation is to construe such logic laws as the Law of Non-Contradiction — ~(p & ~p) — as generalizations from psychological facts like these. If this is right, then logical laws lack the a priori character and epistemic ‘dignity’ that some of us are wont to see in them. They rest on psychological facts that might have been otherwise.

    But now consider this reductio ad absurdum:

    1. The laws of logic are empirical generalizations. (Assumption for reductio)
    2. Empirical generalizations, if true, are merely contingently true. (By definition of ‘empirical generalization’: empirical generalizations record what happens to be the case, but might not have been the case.) Therefore,
    3. The laws of logic, if true, are merely contingently true. (From 1 and 2)
    4. If proposition p is contingently true, then it is possible that p be false. (Def. of ‘contingently true.’)Therefore,
    5. The laws of logic, if true, are possibly false. (From 3 and 4)Therefore,
    6. LNC is possibly false: there are logically possible worlds in which ‘p&~p’ is true. (From 5 and the fact that LNC is a law of logic.)
    7. But (6) is absurd (self-contradictory): it amounts to saying that it is logically possible that the very criterion of logical possibility, namely LNC, be false. Corollary: if laws of logic were empirical generalizations, we would be incapable of defining ‘empirical generalization’: this definition requires the notion of what is the case but (logically) might not have been the case.

    The above is a good, but not a compelling, argument. For it presupposes the distinction between necessary and contingent propositions.  Is that distinction objectively self-evident? Martin Kusch, Psychologism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

    Massey also invokes the stronger form of the claim that logical truths are not necessary (1991, 188). According to this criticism, the very notion of necessity which is presupposed in calling logical laws ‘necessary truths’, is beset with difficulties. The argument leading to this conclusion was developed in a series of well-known papers by Quine. Quine argued that the notions of analyticity, necessity and aprioricity stand or fall together and that the traditional distinction between analytic and synthetic truths is relative rather than absolute. But once this distinction becomes relative, necessity and aprioricity go by the board (Quine 1951, Engel 1991, 268–70). Massey summarises the implications of Quine’s arguments succinctly:

    If we reject the concept of necessity … we also forego the concept of contingency. If it makes no sense to say that the truths of mathematics are necessary, it makes no better sense to say that those of psychology or any other so-called empirical science are contingent. But if we may not employ necessity and contingency to demarcate the deliverances of the empirical sciences from those of the formal sciences, how are we to distinguish them in any philosophically interesting way? (1991, 188).

    Now I don't much cotton to Quine, but he is no slouch of a logician!  And he is certainly a looming presence in 20th century American philosophy.  So on the basis of his dissent alone, we ought to agree that the psychologism problem has not been solved.   I am assuming that a problem hasn't been solved unless it has been solved to the satisfaction of all competent practitioners.  It hasn't been solved until the debate about it has been brought to a decisive close. Kusch gives several reasons in addition to the one cited above why this is not the case with respect to the psychologism debate. 

    Bill Vallicella

    12 responses to “Has Any Philosophical Problem Been Solved? The case of psychologism in logic.”

  • Deism, Classical Theism, and Existential Inertia

    Nemes and VallicellaOn deism, God starts the universe existing, but then he takes it easy, allowing it to exist on its own in virtue of its 'existential inertia.' The latter is an analog of inertia in physics. Newton's First Law states that a body at rest or in uniform rectilinear motion continues in its state of rest or motion unless acted upon by an external force. Analogously, what could be called the First Law of Deistic Metaphysics states that an existing thing continues to exist on its own without external assistance unless acted upon by an external annihilatory force.  This is but a rough and preliminary formulation of the thesis of existential inertia.  Continuing to exist is the 'default.'  Suppose I bring a primitive table into existence by placing a board on a stump.  The thought behind 'existential inertia' is that the compound object that just came to be does not need something to keep it from blinking out of existence a nanosecond, microsecond, millisecond . . . later.

    On classical theism, by contrast with deism, God is no mere cosmic starter-upper: creatures need God not only to begin to exist but to continue existing moment by moment.  A defense of classical theism against deism must therefore include a rejection of existential inertia.

    Steven Nemes offers a rejection of existential inertia in his article Deism, Classical Theism, and Existential Inertia. He solicits my comments. I am happy to oblige.

    He defines the phrase as follows:

    Let’s say that the existence of a thing is “inertial” if and only if it continues to exist over time, in the absence of annihilating factors, without the assistance of anything outside of it.

    He gives the example of a cat which, "once in existence, continues to exist over time, so long as nothing intervenes to destroy it, without anything outside of the cat helping it or sustaining it in existence." But surely the cat cannot continue to exist without air, water, food, a tolerable range of temperatures, and so on, factors clearly external to the cat.   Note also that Nemes' definition presupposes that only temporal items are existentially inertial which is not obvious: on a classically theistic scheme even so-called 'abstract objects' are going to have to be existentially inertial.  But I won't worry this second point in this entry.

    Here is a better way to convey the notion of existential inertia. Suppose a deistic god creates exactly one iron sphere and nothing else.  In this world there is nothing to cause the sphere to rust or otherwise corrode away into nonexistence.  Nor does it, like a living organism, require anything external to it to continue to exist.  It doesn't need oxygen or water like Nemes' cat. And it has no internal mechanism to self-destruct.  The sphere exists inertially iff its 'default setting' is continued existence which is to say: it has no intrinsic tendency to cease to exist. 

    The sphere is of course a contingent being. Hence there is no necessity that it continue to exist.  But while there is no necessity that it continue to exist, it will continue to exist absent some external annihilatory force. The deistic god could zap it out of existence, but if he doesn't, it will continue to exist on its own 'steam.'  He needn't do anything to keep it in existence, and of course he can't if he is truly deistic.

    And the same goes for the cat, despite the cat's need for materials in its environment such as oxygen and food.  It too will continue to exist if those things are supplied without the need for a special metaphysical factor to keep it from sliding into nonbeing.  The critter's natural default is to existence.

    Nemes's Argument against Existential Inertia

    1) The real existence of the cat does not show itself as one of its properties.

    2) "The real existence of the cat is thus not a part of that total complex of individuated properties which make up the particular cat which we experience. "

    3) "The unexperienceable real existence of the experienceable cat must therefore be something that is somehow “outside” of the cat, and yet “pointed at it” in such a way that the cat exists."

    4) "This is easy to understand if we say that the existence of the cat consists in its standing on the receiving end of an existence-endowing relation to “something else.” ". . . a “something else” that is not itself an individual thing with properties but rather pure existence itself. And this “pure existence itself,” according to classical theists, is God."

    (1) is true. (2) appears merely to unpack (explicate) (1); if so, it too is true.  The transition to (3), however, is a non sequitur. The real existence of the cat might be hidden within it or an empirically inaccessible feature of it.  Absent further premises, one cannot conclude that the real existence is 'outside' the cat.

    Of course, I am not endorsing existential inertia; I am merely pointing out that the above argument, as it stands, is invalid. Perhaps with further work it can be made valid. 

    Bill Vallicella

    19 responses to “Deism, Classical Theism, and Existential Inertia”

  • Knowledge of Existence: Is Existence Hidden?

    1) I see a tree, a palo verde.  Conditions are optimal for veridical perception.  I see that the tree is green, blooming, swaying slightly in the breeze. The tree is given to my perceptual acts as having these and other properties.  Now while I do not doubt for a second the existence of the tree, let alone deny its existence, the tree is not given as existing.  It is given as green, as blooming, etc., but not as existing. I see the green of the tree, but I don't see the existence of the tree.  If existence is a property of the tree, it is not an observable property thereof.  Whatever existence is, it is not phenomenologically accessible or empirically detectable. And yet the tree exists. We might be tempted to reason as follows:

    a) The tree is not exhausted by its quiddity: it is not a mere what, but an existing what.
    b) The existing/existence does not appear: only quidditative properties appear.

    Therefore

    c) The existing/existence of the tree is hidden.

    2) Should we conclude that the existing of things is mysterious or hidden, an occult depth dimension beyond our phenomenological ken? P. Butchvarov and others would answer in the negative. And presumably anyone phenomenologically inclined would have to agree. Now there is a class of views according to which the existence of a concrete particular such as a tree is a sort of coherence of the facets, aspects, guises, noemata, intentional objects — pick your term — that are presented to us directly and in their turn present the thing itself.  Following Butchvarov I will use 'object' and distinguish objects from entities. The tree itself is an entity; the various facets, aspects, guises, noemata, are objects.

    For example, I am seated on my porch looking at the tree.  I cannot see the whole of it, and I don't see all of the properties of the portions I do see. Seated, I enjoy a visual perception the accusative of which is (incomplete) object O1.  When I stand up, still looking at the tree, I am presented with a slightly different (incomplete) object, O2.  Advancing toward the tree, a series of objects come into view one after another.  (This makes it sound as if  the series is discrete when it is actually continuous.) Arriving at the tree, I put my hands around the trunk. The resulting object is richer than the others by the addition of tactile data, but still incomplete and therefore not identical to the completely determinate entity. But these objects all cohere and 'consubstantiate' (Castaneda) and are of one and the same entity. In their mutual cohesion, they manifest one and the same entity. They present the same infinitely-propertied entity in a manner suitable to a finite mind.

    Butchvarov speaks of the material (not formal) identity of the objects.  On such a scheme the existence of an entity is naturally assayed as the indefinite identifiability of its objects.  Existence is indefinite identifiability. By whom? By the subject in question. We could call this a transcendentally-subjective theory of existence, although that is not what Butch calls it.  We find something very similar in Husserl and Hector-Neri Castaneda. In Husserl, existence is 'constituted in consciousness.' Sein reduces to Seinsinn.

    On a scheme like this, existence would not be hidden but would itself be accessible, not as a separate monadic property, but as the ongoing relational coherence of objects, noemata, guises, aspects or whatever you want to call them. It would seem that the phenomenologically inclined, those who agree with Heidegger that ontology is possible only as phenomenology, would have to subscribe to some such theory of existence. 

    3) On the above approach one could 'bracket' the existence in itself of the tree entity and still have available existence as indefinite identifiability.  But does this 'bracketing' (Husserl's Einklammerung) merely put existence in itself out of play or does it cancel it?I suspect it is the latter.

    Let's be clear about the two senses of 'exists.' 

    In the phenomenological sense, existence is the mutual cohesion of Butchvarov's objects, Castaneda's guises, Husserl's noemata.  Existence is thus accessible from the first-person point of view. It is in the open and not hidden. The question, How do I know that the tree exists? has a ready answer. I know that the tree exists from the manifest coherence of its objects, their indefinite identifiability in Butchvarov's sense.  

    In the second sense, existence is such that what exists exists independently of (finite) consciousness and its synthetic activities. In this second  'realist' sense of 'exists,' things could exist even in the absence of conscious beings. Existence in this second sense is that which makes existents exist outside of their causes and outside the mind and outside of language. In the former 'idealist' sense of 'exist,' nothing could exist in the absence of consciousness. 

    4) One conclusion:  if you deny that existence is hidden, then it looks like you will have to embrace some type of idealism, with its attendant problems.

    5) How might existence be hidden? Suppose that everything  apart from God is kept in existence by ongoing divine creative activity. If so, each thing apart from God is an effect of the divine cause.  Its being the effect of a hidden Causa Prima is itself hidden.  My tree's being maintained in existence outside of its (secondary) causes and outside the mind  is not manifest to us. Perceiving the tree, I cannot 'read off' its createdness.  Its createdness is its existence and both are hidden.

    6) My final conclusion is that no classical theist can adopt a phenomenological theory of existence.

    Bill Vallicella

    3 responses to “Knowledge of Existence: Is Existence Hidden?”

  • Husserl, Thomas, and Sister Adelgundis

    Some of us live within the tension between the autonomy of reason and  obedient faith and trust.  On the one side, we are admirers of Edmund Husserl with his  ethos of critical examination, of cautious inquiry  painstaking and protracted, of scholarly sobriety; we share his fear of error, of doxastic over-extension; we subscribe to an ethics of belief, we feel the anxious concern for intellectual honesty. His question, Wie kann ich ein ehrlich Philosoph sein? is ours. On the other side, that of Thomas, we feel the willingness to take doxastic risks, to go beyond what can be strictly known, or even shown to be possible; we desire  truth whether or not it can be philosophically validated; we are open to the  allowing of church authority to override the judgment of the individual, even if in the end we cannot accept the Church's magisterium.

    Husserl was drawn to the Catholic Church in his later years. But he felt too old to enter her since he would need at least five years to examine each dogma, as he explained to Sister Adelgundis.  (See John M. Oesterreicher, Walls are Crumbling: Seven Jewish Philosophers Discover Christ, London: Hollis and Carter, 1953, p. 80.)

    A comparison with Simone Weil is apt. She lurked outside the Church for years but could not bring herself to enter. Intellectual scruples were part of it. She was strongly opposed to Blaise Pascal's bit about just taking the holy water and going through the motions in the expectation that outer practices would bring inner conviction.

    Husserl's attitude was that it would be intellectually irresponsible to accept the dogmas prior to careful examination to see if they are rationally acceptable. To which the believer will say: How dare you question God's revelation? God has revealed himself in the Incarnation and you will waste five years 'examining' whether it is logically possible when it is a foregone conclusion that you with your scrupulosity of method will be unable to 'constitute' in consciousness the Word and its becoming flesh?  It's a fact that lies beyond the sphere of immanence and irrupts into it, and thus cannot be 'constituted' from within it. What can be constituted is at best a transcendence-in-immanence, not an absolute transcendence. What's actual is possible, and what's possible is possible whether you can understand how. If it is actual, then it is possible even if it seems self-contradictory!

    Oesterreicher: "But to do so [to examine the dogmas] is to judge the Judge, to try the word of God, forgetting that it is the word of God that tries us." (Walls are Crumbling, p. 80) Oesterreicher goes on to say that Husserl tries to shift "the centre of being and truth" "from God to ourselves." (ibid.) That is exactly right, and this shift is the essence of modern philosophy from Descartes (1596-1650) on.  The 'transcendental turn' does indeed make of man the center, the constitutive source of all meaning and being.

    "It is this luminous authority which gives faith its certainty." (p. 81)  But how do you know that this certainty is not merely subjective? Objective certainty alone is of epistemic worth. And how do you know that the authority really is an authority? Josiah Royce's religious paradox is relevant here.

    One option is just to accept the faith and seek understanding afterwards. Fides quarens intellectum. And if understanding doesn't come? Well, just keep on believing and practicing. On this approach, faith stands whether or not understanding emerges. "I accept the Incarnation without understanding how it is possible; I accept it despite its seeming impossible."  Faith does not have to pass the tests of reason; reason has no veto power over faith. There is a Truth so far above us  that the only appropriate attitude on our part is like that of the little child. "Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." (Matt. 18, 3)

    Would this response move Husserl? No. Should it? Not clear.

    Perhaps Wittgenstein in his Vermischte Bemerkungen gives the best advice:

    Go on, believe! It does no harm.

    Believing means submitting to an authority. Having once submitted, you can't then, without rebelling against it, first call it in question and then once again find it acceptable. (Culture and Value, tr. Peter Winch, p. 45e)

    Bill Vallicella

  • Edith Stein on Sister Clara and Edmund Husserl

    A search on 'Sister Adelgundis' turned up the following which I reproduce from this interesting weblog.

    Pax Christi!

    Dear Sister Adelgundis,

    Our greetings go from one death-bed to the other.  Our Sister Clara departed today for eternity, very gently, after a year of suffering.  I commended our dear Master [Husserl] to her often, and will do so again tonight at the wake.  I believe one is well taken care of in her company.  She was our eldest lay sister, tireless in the lowliest of tasks, but a strong and manly character who had grasped and lived the Carmelite ideal with complete determination.  So faith turned it into a completely spiritual life.  I am not at all worried about our dear Master.  It has always been far from me to think that God’s mercy allows itself to be circumscribed by the visible church’s boundaries.  God is truth.  All who seek truth seek God, whether this is clear to them or not…

    Most cordially, your

    Teresa Benedicta a Cruce

    Bill Vallicella

  • “Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother”

    Honor your parents for what was honorable in them. As for the rest, forgive and forget, or at least forgive.

    Honor the honorable; forgive the rest.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Kleingeld meine Herren, Kleingeld!

    Edmund Husserl used to say that to his seminarians to keep them careful and wissenschaftlich and away from assertions of the high-flying and sweeping sort.  "Small change, gentlemen, small change!" Unfortunately, the philosophical small change doesn't add up.  Specialization, no matter how narrow and protracted, no matter how carefully pursued, fails to put us on the "sure path of science."

    Given that plain fact, learned from hard experience, you may as well go for the throat of the Big Questions.  Aren't they what brought you  to philosophy in the first place?

    This line of thought is pursued in Fred Sommers Abandons Whitehead and Metaphysics for Logic.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Somebody Else’s Faith

    Thomas Merton, Journals, vol. III, p. 251, from the entry of 25 January 1959:

    He entered the monastery on somebody else's faith and lived there on somebody else's faith and when finally he had to face the fact that what was required was his own faith he collapsed.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Clarity and Content in Philosophy: Two Principles of Method

    A commenter enunciates two principles:

    1) The guiding principle of analytic philosophy – not always observed – is that the author has a duty to be maximally clear.

    2) The guiding principle of Continental philosophy – always strictly observed – is that the reader has a maximal duty to understand.

    Here are my principles:

    A) One guiding principle of serious philosophy is that the writers of it have a duty to strive for as much clarity as they can muster and as much clarity as the subject matter allows, but without loss of content and without evading real problems and genuine obscurities. In addition to those two caveats, it needs to be said that clarity is not enough. "Clarity consistent with content" is my motto.

    B) A second guiding principle of serious philosophy is that the readers of it have a duty to try to understand the author in a spirit  that is open-minded and charitable. A good-faith effort ought to be made to understand the author in his own terms and from his own tradition despite the hours of effort this typically requires.  Only then is critique and even rejection justifiable.

    Commentary on the Principles

    Ad (A).  "Reality is messy," a student once said in response to my drawing of distinctions. I replied, "True, but it doesn't follow that our thinking about reality should be messy." Clearly, we ought to strive to be clear. But 'ought' implies 'can.'  There cannot therefore be any legitimate demand that one be "maximally clear." That is unachievable by us. And it may be unachievable in itself.

    The subject matter sets a second limit to our quest for clarity.  In his Nicomachean Ethics, Book One, section 3, Aristotle famously writes,

    Our discussion will be adequate if it achieves clarity within the limits of the subject matter. For precision cannot be expected in the treatment of all subjects alike . . . .

    For a well-schooled man is one who searches for that degree of precision in each kind of study which the nature of the subject at hand admits: it is obviously just as foolish to accept arguments of probability from a mathematician as to demand strict demonstrations from an orator. (1094b 10-25)

    Aristotle was discussing ethics and politics, but the principle holds across the board. Consider the philosophy of logic. If  you stick to logic proper, things are very clear indeed. But if you dig beneath the formalisms and schemata, obscurity soon rears its ugly head. No logic without propositions. But what is a proposition? And how are we to understand the unity of a proposition? There are competing theories, none of them "maximally clear." The prosaic pates who cannot tolerate any degree of obscurity had better stay clear of these questions.

    But the great philosophers have never done that. They were not put off by the penumbral. They dug deep.  A great logician, second only to Aristotle, if second to anyone, felt moved to write, in one of his seminal papers, "The concept horse is not a concept." Is that clear? It smacks of a contradiction. And yet Gottlob Frege had excellent motivation for saying it.

    Ad (B). A mistake many make is to think that what is not immediately intelligible to them is unintelligible, period, or perhaps even a product of willful obfuscation.  One expects this mindset among ordinary folk. Unfortunately one finds it also among philosophers, assuming they deserve that title.

    The Australian positivist, David Stove, somewhere takes umbrage at a passage from Heidegger and pronounces it gibberish, when the passage is not gibberish at all. The miserable Stove, unwilling to to do his homework, and with no understanding of Heidegger's intellectual antecedents, dismisses as gibberish what is not immediately intelligible to his shallow positivist pate. He displays this attitude throughout The Plato Cult.

    He  polemicizes churlishly against his spiritual superiors in much of his writing, so I am simply giving him, or his shade, a taste of his own medicine.

    When it came time to die, however, his empty polemics and miserable positivism left him in the lurch. His son, who, mirabile dictu, converted to Catholicism, caught him reading the Bible near the end.

    Apparently, curmudgeon Stove forgot to consider that philosophy might have something to do with wisdom.

    Related: Edward Feser, Can Philosophy be Polemical?

    Bill Vallicella

  • Kant’s Letter to Marcus Herz, 21 February 1772

    Herz marcusThe brief missive to Herz sheds considerable light on Kant's Critical project.  Herewith, some notes for my edification if not yours.

    1) How is metaphysica specialis possible as science, als Wissenschaft? Having been awakened by David Hume from his "dogmatic slumber," Kant was puzzling over this.  It occurred to him that the key to the riddle lay in raising and answering the question:

    On what ground rests the relation of that in us which we call representation to the object?

    Representations 'in us,' i.e., 'in' our minds, are of or about objects 'outside of' our minds. What makes the representation of an object about the very object of which it is the representation? For example, what makes my visual awareness of a particular tree an awareness of that very tree?

    There are three cases to consider.

    2) If the representation in the subject is caused by the object, Kant thinks that an easy answer is forthcoming: the representation is of or about the object in virtue of its being caused by the object.  The tree, or the light reflected by the tree, affects my eyes, thereby causing in me a representation of that very tree.  We set aside for the time being the question whether this easy answer is a good answer.

    3) We also have an easy answer to the above question if representations are active with respect to their objects, as opposed to passive as in the case of my seeing a tree. Suppose  the object itself were created by the representation, as in the case of divine representations. In cases like this, Kant tells us, "the conformity of these representations to the object could be understood." (82)

    4) Now for the third case, the hard case. What are we to say about the pure concepts of the understanding, the categories? These conceptual representations, being pure, are not caused by sensation. But neither are they creative with respect to their objects. What then gives them objective reference? 

    As pure concepts, the categories have their seat in our understanding. They are thus subjective conditions of thinking, not categorial determinations of things.  What gives these subjective conditions of thinking and judging — to think is to judge — objective validity?  That is the problem which Kant sets forth in his letter to Herz.  But he does not in that letter propose a solution.

    5) He gives his solution in 1781 in the Critique of Pure Reason. Can I sketch it in a few sentences?

    I touch a stone. I receive a sensation of hardness and warmth. No judgment is involved.  Judgment enters if I say, "Whenever the sun shines on the stone, it becomes warm." But this is a mere Wahrnehmungsurteil, a subjective judgment of perception. It lacks objective validity. It records one perception following another in a subjective unity of consciousness, as opposed to a consciousness in general.  The judgment does not record causation, assuming that causation involves necessitation, as Kant does assume. All we have at the level of perception are Hume's spatiotemporal contiguity of perceived events and their regular succession: the sun's shining on the stone followed by the stone's becoming warm.  Kant is of course convinced that there has to be more to causation than regular succession.

    But if I say, "The sun warms the stone," then I make an Erfahrungsurteil, a judgment of experience which is objectively valid.  I am not merely recording a succession of perceptions, but an instance of causation in which the cause necessitates the effect.  The necessary connection is not out there among the things; it enters via the understanding's imposition of the category of cause on the sequence of perceptions.  The objective or transcendental unity of apperception, as the vehicle of the categories does the job. Just don't ask me how exactly. Here is where things get murky. This is what I wrote my dissertation on.

    6) I am now in a position to answer in a rough way the question  of how the pure concepts of the understanding have objective validity. They have objective validity because the objects of experience are products of the categorial formation of the sensory manifold within a "consciousness in general," a transcendental, not psychological, unity of apperception.  It follows that the world of experience is an intersubjectively valid but merely phenomenal world and not a world of things in themselves.  The "highest principle of all synthetic judgments" is that "the conditions of the possibility of experience in general are at the same time the conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience themselves, and thus possess objective validity in a synthetical judgment a priori."

    Since "the understanding is the lawgiver of nature,"  Human skepticism bites the dust, but so also does Leibnizian-Wolffian rationalism. This is because the Copernican revolution, at the same time that it validates  synthetic a priori  judgments in mathematics and physics for phenomena, restricts them to phenomena and disallows them for noumena such as God, the soul, and the world as a whole, the objects of the three disciplines of metaphysica specialis.

    Unfortunately, Kant's system raises as many questions as it answers. But that is the fate of every philosophy in my humble opinion.  The dialectical nature of reason, which gives rise to dialectical illusion with respect to noumena, unfortunately infects everything we do in philosophy even when we draw in our horns and stick to phenomena.

    Bill Vallicella

    10 responses to “Kant’s Letter to Marcus Herz, 21 February 1772”

  • ‘On His Watch”

    What happens on a person's watch may or may not be his responsibility.  Or will you maintain that a Republican president is responsible for the arson and looting tolerated by Democrat mayors?

    Bill Vallicella

  • Like a Bolt of Lightning

    An aphorism is like a bolt of lightning: it does not explain itself.

    Bill Vallicella

  • The Purgatory of Memory

    Vexing memories are an earthly purgatory which the purgation of memory, if it could be achieved, would eliminate.

    Bill Vallicella

  • A Dawning at Dusk

    Only those near the end of it can sufficiently fathom this life's insufficiency.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Can Kant Refer to God?

    This is a re-working of an entry from 19 September 2016.  It relates to present concerns about limit concepts and whether and to what extent God can be subsumed under our concepts.

    ……………………….

    Ed Buckner raises the title question, and he wants my help with it.  How can I refuse?  I'll say a little now, and perhaps more later.

    Kant Sapere AudeKant was brought up a rationalist within the Wolffian school, but then along came David Hume who awoke him from his dogmatic slumber.  This awakening began his Critical period in which he struggles mightily to find a via media between rationalism and empiricism.  The result of his struggle, the Critical philosophy, is of great historical significance but it is also an unstable  tissue of apparently irresolvable tensions. As a result there are competing interpretations of his doctrines.

    I will propose  two readings relevant to Ed's question.  But first a reformulation and clarification of the question.  

    Can one think about God and meaningfully predicate properties of him?  For example, can one meaningfully say of God that he exists, is omnipotent, and is the cause of the existence of the natural world?  Or is it rather the case that such assertions are meaningless and that the category of causality, for example, has a meaningful application only within  the realm of phenomena but not between the phenomenal realm as a whole and  a putative transcendent causa prima?  Are the bounds of sensibility (Sinnlichkeit) also the bounds of sense (Sinn), or are there senseful, meaningful assertions that transgress the bounds of sensibility?

    Weak or Moderate Reading.  On this reading, we can think about God and meaningfully make predications of him, but we cannot have any knowledge of God and his attributes. We cannot have knowledge of God because knowledge necessarily involves the interplay of two very different factors, conceptual interpretation via the categories of the understanding, and sensory givenness.  God, however, is not given to the senses, outer or inner.  In Kantian jargon, there is no intuition, keine Anschauung, of God.  For intellects of our type, all intuition is sensible intuition.  The Sage of Koenigsberg will not countenance any mystical intuition, any Platonic or Plotinian visio intellectualis, at least not in this life.  That sort of thing he dismisses in the Enlightenment manner as Schwaermerei, 'enthusiasm' in an obsolete  18th century sense of the English term.

    But while Kant denies that there is knowledge of God here below whether  by pure reason or by mystical intuition, he aims to secure a 'safe space' for faith:  "I have found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith." (Preface to 2nd ed. of Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1787, B xxx.)  Now if God and the soul are objects of faith, this would imply that we can think of them and thus refer to them even if we cannot have knowledge of them.

    As for the soul, it is the object of the branch of metaphysica specialis called rational psychology. Since all our intuition is sensible, there is no sensible intuition of the soul.  As is well-known, Kant denies that special metaphysics in all three branches (psychology, cosmology, and theology) is possible as science, als Wissenschaft.  To be science it would have to include synthetic a priori judgments, but these are possible only with respect to phenomena.

    Kant's key question is: How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?  He believes that they are actual in mathematics and physics, and would have to be actual in metaphysics if the latter were a science.  Kant concludes that  synthetic a priori judgments are possible in mathematics and physics only because the world of experience (Erfahrung) is not a world of things in themselves whose existence, nature, and law-like regularity are independent of our mental contribution, but a merely phenomenal world to whose construction (transcendental) mind makes an indispensable contribution. 

    The dignity and necessity of the synthetic causal principle — every event has a cause — is rescued from the jaws of Humean skepticism, but the price is high: the only world we can know is the world of phenomena.  This is not a world of illusions, but a world of intersubjectively valid objects of experience. But while objective in the sense of intersubjectively valid, these objects do not exist in themselves. Things in themselves (noumena in the negative sense) are beyond our ken.  Yet we must posit them since the appearances are appearances of something (obj. gen.).  And it is presumably the affection of our sense organs by these things in themselves that gives rise to the sensory manifold that is then organized by a priori forms (categories and forms of sensibility) on the side of the subject.  The restriction of human knowledge to phenomena secures the objectivity (intersubjective validity) of our knowledge, but by the same stroke rules out any knowledge of the objects of special metaphysics (God, the soul, the world as a whole). 

    On the moderate reading, then, Kant restricts the cognitive employment of the categories of the understanding to phenomena but not their thinking employment. We can think about and refer to the positive noumena, God, the soul, and the world as a whole, but we cannot have any knowledge of them. (And the same goes for the negative noumena that correspond to sensible appearances.)  We can talk sense about God and the soul, and predicate properties of these entities, but we cannot come to have knowledge of them.  Thus we can meaningfully speak of the soul as a simple substance which remains numerically self-same over time and through its changing states, but we cannot know that it has these properties.  

    The weak reading is represented by the following argument:

    1) A necessary condition of knowledge is intuition (Anschauung).

    2) In us, the only mode of intuition is sensible. We have no faculty of intellectual intuition.

    3) The concept of God is the concept of an entity that cannot be an object of the senses.

    Therefore

    4) God is unknowable by us. (1, 2, 3)

    Nevertheless

    5) God is thinkable by us. (3)

    Strong or Extreme Reading.  On this reading,  we cannot talk sense about positive or negative noumena: such categories as substance and causality cannot be meaningfully applied beyond the bounds of sensibility to God, the soul, angels, libertarianly free noumena agents, the world as a whole, or even things in themselves. Riffing on P. F. Strawson one could say that on the strong reading the bounds of sensibility are the bounds of sense.  This reading wins the day in post-Kantian philosophy.  Fichte liquidates the Ding an sich, the neo-Kantians reduce the transcendental ego to a mere concept (Rickert, e.g.), the categories which for Kant were ahistorical and fixed become historicized and relativized, and we end up with a conceptual relativism which fuels a lot of the nonsense of the present day, e.g., race and sex as social constructs, etc.

    The strong reading is represented by the following argument:

    1*) A necessary condition of meaningful objective reference is intuition.

    2) In us, the only mode of intuition is sensible. We have no faculty of intellectual intuition.

    3) The concept of God is the concept of an entity that cannot be an object of the senses.

    Therefore

    4*) God cannot be meaningfully referred to by us.

    So my answer to Ed Buckner's title question is:  It depends.  It depends on whether we read Kant in the weak way or in the strong way.  Read in the weak way, Kant is saying that the categories of the understanding  have no cognitive employment in the absence of sensory input, but they do have an empty logical employment and objective reference/meaning.  Read in the strong way, the categories are devoid of objective reference/meaning in the absence of sensory givenness.  If so, the concept of God is a limit concept in the negative sense: it merely marks a limit to our understanding, but does not point beyond that limit. At best, the concept of God is a regulative Idea whose employment is purely immanent.

    Bill Vallicella

    2 responses to “Can Kant Refer to God?”

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