On Aug 14, 12:14 pm, yandahir bazoot <justinles...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> On Aug 14, 4:16 am, Immortalist <reanimater_2...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
> > On Aug 13, 5:37 am, Michael Gordge <mikegor...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
> Dear Immortalist
> I thought yours is a good post that seemed reasonably clear. I shall
> have a think about it at my leisure, because I'm very lazy and also
> tend to get confused. But it has always seemed to me that Kant misses
> something about normal, na=EFve, empirical realism, and that from this
> normal point of view although his system is very intellectual, and
> subtle it runs the danger of being a ridiculous sort of over subtlety
> that is unbelievable.
> You say that we couldn't know things in themselves without being able
> to stand outside our modes of perception and reasoning faculty. It
> depends on what you mean by 'know'. If you mean 'have a justified
> certainty and guarantee that we have grasped them correctly as they
> are in themselves' then I can see how it could seem that such a
> guaranteed degree of certainty, at least, must depend on our own grasp
> of the situation. We could not be certain about something that could,
> as it were, float away from our own grasp and do what it liked-I don't
> think there is any such certainty, including, I'm inclined to say, in
> logical deduction. In another sense of 'know' i.e. could we have
> accurately grasped the thing in itself as it is in itself, it seems to
> me there is a possible criteria by which we could make a judgement
> about realising how the independent object could itself be.
I think Kant meant the former sense of logical deduction. We have
beliefs, customs and agreements as to what logic, certainty,
proposition, conclusion, etc... is to be. And by these nearly
universal agreements, our beliefs about sense data could be mistaken,
and hence not deductive but are empirical.
No one knows: perceptual beliefs are true/false?
..=2E.suppose that two people are looking through different windows. The
first person re****ts that there is a sphere on a table outside her
window; she sees the sphere to be green. She sees this no matter from
what vantage point she views things. Suppose further that the second
person, looking through her own window, sees and re****ts the very same
thing. Each person has exactly the same justification for claiming to
know that there is a green sphere outside his window. Each is in just
as good a position to know this as the other. Surely, the only correct
conclusion to reach is that either each person knows there is a green
sphere outside her window or that neither of them knows this. It would
be entirely arbitrary, and hence unreasonable, to say that one person
knows this and the other does not.
However, it is perfectly possible that one of these people is mistaken
and the other is not. Suppose the first person sees what she does
because there is a green sphere outside her window. On the other hand,
suppose the second sees what she does because she is being tricked
with mirrors and drawings-there is no green sphere outside her window
at all. Moreover, the deception is so excellent that from behind the
windows no one could detect any difference in what is seen through
each. This shows that the first person, who is in fact not mistaken,
could have been mistaken. The second person was mistaken, and the
first person had no better evidence for what she believed than the
second person did. Since having this evidence did not keep the second
person from being mistaken, the first person, too, could have been
mistaken. What was so in the one case could have been so in the other.
The only reasonable conclusion is that neither person has knowledge.
What we have just imagined has perfectly general implications. The
experiences a person has, when he or she sees something that really
exists, can always be duplicated by the experiences of another person
who is being deceived. Because the experiences in question provide the
only evidence a person has for believing what she does, if one person
fails to know what she believes, so must the other. If one is mistaken
in believing something, then another person who has a similar belief
based on similar experiences surely could have been mistaken-even if
in fact she is not. Since this duplication of experiences is always
possible, it is always possible that a perceptual belief based on
sensory experience is mistaken. The argument for skepticism requires
no other assumption.
2) The Modified Skeptical Argument
We may conclude, then, with a slightly modified formulation of the
argument for skepticism. The first two premises of the argument, which
differ from the initial premises of the preceding skeptical argument,
are as follows:
1=2E The experiences of a person who has a true perceptual belief may be
exactly duplicated by the experiences of a person whose perceptual
belief is exactly similar but false.
2=2E If the experiences of a person who has a true perceptual belief may
be exactly duplicated by the experiences of a person whose perceptual
belief is exactly similar but false, then it is always logically
possible that our perceptual beliefs are false.
The next premise is the same as in the earlier argument:
3=2E If it is always logically possible that our perceptual beliefs are
false, then no one ever knows that any of our perceptual beliefs are
true.
>From these three premises we can deduce the skeptical conclusion.
4=2E No one ever knows that any of our perceptual beliefs are true.
Philosophical Problems and Arguments: An Introduction
by James W. Cornman, Keith Lehrer, George Sotiros Pappas
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0872201244/
http://www-philosophy.ucdavis.edu/phi102/tk.htm
> ...It seems
> to me that we could try to see how what we are aware of through
> experience could form an independently self sufficient system.
> If, for instance, we saw how it appeared self sufficient then in
> seeing this we would be seeing how it itself explained itself. As an
> example of this take Darwin's theory of evolution through natural
> selection. It is supposed by this theory that the world, space, matter
> and its properties carry on independently and that life forms are
> brought into being and evolve and develop naturally, i.e. the
> continuation of space, matter and its properties are themselves
> sufficient to produce the appearance of life forms and their gradual
> and continuing development up to and beyond the presently observable
> state of things. But this seems an essentially different sort of a
> claim from, for instance, trying to claim that these things can appear
> self sufficient due to our reasoning faculty. This seems because 1) no
> mention is made of our reasoning faculty in discussions about how the
> continuation of these things could be sufficient to produce the
> current state of life forms, and 2) if our reasoning faculty were
> supposed necessary to make it appear these things could be self
> sufficient to produce the current state of life forms this would be
> claiming that the continuation of these things could not themselves be
> sufficient to produce the current state of life forms. But this is
> what the theory is claiming. Thus Kantians are in danger of miss
> understanding the nature of what is being claimed in such cases, and
> of producing a superfluous level of explanation. If something is self
> sufficient it can't need another layer of explanation. If it needs
> another layer of explanation, then in that respect it can't be self
> sufficient.
> As another attempt to bring out this essential difference between the
> two approaches, and what is being claimed by each. According to
> evolution through natural selection, evolution through natural
> selection can't depend on anything human, or conscious, because for
> most of the time it was operating there were no humans or
> consciousness. Similarly anything e.g. space and time, that may seem
> universal and invariable in human experience can't depend on humans
> because humans vary and there is no essential nature to any species.
> There are only wider or closer groupings of variations. The reason why
> some aspects of experience may be invariable is because it is claimed
> these are part of the structure of existence and so life forms (and
> their variations) that are subsequent to and produced from these more
> fundamental forms can't alter them; although they certainly can vary
> in their perception of them in various ways. On the other hand
> Kantians, it seems, must claim that there is an essential nature to
> humans (at least), and so, consequently in some respects humans must
> be invariable. But this does not seem very plausible when we consider
> some of the gross deformities (i.e. very unusual, or socially
> unacceptable, variations) that can result from human unions; E.g.
> babies born without a head. Or are we to only count as humans, for
> instance, people who experience space as Euclidean? (Such a claim
> would seem-to me-to have the added complication that since space is
> experienced in combination with the laws of perspective, which are
> additional to the properly 'Euclidean' properties, the normal
> experience of spatial relations can't be strictly Euclidean).
>
> The big difference between the two approaches, it seems to me, is that
> the naive realist, and often science, tend to concentrate on how the
> world does it. 'How' both in the descriptive sense, but also, often,
> in the explanatory sense of attempting to see how these 'objects' in
> the world can form a self sufficient system producing what we
> experience to occur of them, depending on our position in this system.
> But often, or mostly, Philosophy tends to concentrate on how the mind
> could handle its data and produce its ideas and understanding of the
> world. Philosophy tends to think that its type of question undercuts,
> and is more fundamental than the na=EFve or scientific approach, but I
> think that the na=EFve approach does not require answering those
> philosophical questions, carries its own possible justification within
> it, and is more directly engaged with experiencable reality.
>
> http://members.lycos.co.uk/causalrealism/
That was a good post.
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