3 Space, Time & the "Analogies of Experiences" - Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (Dan Robinson)

does a dog see a tree you know it's it's an interesting question isn't it there's there's no doubt with that by the way just speaking personally i have no doubt but the dogs see trees indeed even that they leave a record of their perception behind them very often but to see a tree is quite different from just seeing something a tree any given tree is a particular but to see something as a tree is to subsume that particular under a general category and after all particular trees come in a great variety of sizes and shapes and colors and so in order to see a tree as in seeing a tree it seems that what is needed in addition to some capacity for sensation also a capacity for subsuming sensed objects under categories in such a way as to have a concept you see and during the course of this lecture i want to emphasize how kant himself emphasizes the need for the perceived object to be incorporated into a conceptual framework absent which there is no understanding of what the object is there really isn't an experience either there's going to be a an important distinction made between a perception no question at all but the dogs and lots of other creatures perceive trees and the experience of seeing a tree and kant is going to argue that a necessary ingredient in experience is just this subsumption of percepts under general categories forming forming concepts now this is one of many problems that kant recognizes empiricism at least in its simplest form will always have trouble handling if you take the position that all that is required to form concepts is to be the passive observer of events taking place in the external world and put on hold how there is an external world to begin with an external world to begin with but if you take the position that all that's required to form complex ideas is to parlay simple ideas and all it takes to get simple ideas is to associate a number of of sensations if you take that that loki and what what kant refers to as lock's attempt to physiologize the process then it's not entirely clear that that a creature would live long enough to be able to put under the same category gigantic trees in a redwood forest and little saplings that are six inches off the ground or that any child would understand ever come to understand the tabby and mountain lions are cats more generally that any set of particulars can enter into a conceptual framework such that one actually understands what one is looking at and one is not merely looking at it more than this is required in in first lecture i talked about this shower of stimulation this incessant barrage of physical events impinging on sense organs out of which we have to create some orderly world some lawful world out of which we create in kant's terms nature itself imagine everyone in the room had a different word but if somehow you could put all of the words on all of the cards together you would have the the let's say the menu at the randolph or something right how do these how do these words get put together how do we put together this this storm of sensations in such a way as to make this after all the manifold of stimuli constitutive of this is diverse it's changing it changes as i change its direction and its orientation it changes as you look sideways at it it's constantly changing and it has many many different properties somehow these have to be pulled together in the right way just as the notes would have to be pulled together in the right way kant wants to argue that there's nothing in empiricism that tells us how this happens do you see so we're getting into the project now where he's actually going to attempt to explain things that he is satisfied empiricism cannot explain which is to say the ordered nature of experience and our capacity to recognize things and place them in a conceptual framework that surprise surprise is objective all right promises promises so the critique is divided into this is quite uneven division into a very long section which he titles the transcendental doctrine of the elements and a relatively short but quite decisive section on the transcendental doctrine of method which we will get to in later lectures it's under that heading that we meet up with the paralogisms of pure reason all of the ways that reason gets in trouble when it tries to range beyond the ambit of its proper mission and its powers well what elements does kant have in mind when he refers to the transcendental doctrine of the elements the elements are the elements of cognition one might say the elements that mind as such brings to bear on on reality and this is uh further divided into three main sections the transcendental aesthetic by which kant attempts to establish the conditions necessary for sensibility itself the a priori conditions absent which experience itself would be impossible which is to say for there to be a visual experience something other than a retina with receptor cells and photo pigments and a little dangling uh retinal ganglion cell tail forming an optic nerve something more than that is necessary something must be in place for any of that finally to amount to a perception and what is it a priori that must be in place and then the transcendental analytic which establishes the a priori and necessary and universal conditions for there to be understanding itself and then reflections on the rules that govern the deployment of our rational resources in such a way as to render the outcome objective and not subjective necessary and universal and not relative iffy and conducive to skepticism capital it's all quite simple when you think about it ha ha now how does kant want the term transcendental to be understood first with kant it is something of a neologism and he's using it quite deliberately to distinguish what he has in mind from the transcendent the transcendent refers to that which transcends experience it's beyond the ambit of our perceptual resources it's what traditional rationalism says uh is available to us as non-sensory modes of knowing kant says that's off limits we don't do that because we can't do that forget looking for the transcendent as an element of knowledge the transcendent can be reached by faith by belief by imagination by hope by coin flipping need i go on but but not as an element of knowledge because for there to be knowledge there must be a sensory basis there must be an experiential basis on which any knowledge claim is based so establish something as transcending the realm of experience and you have established that whatever it is you achieve it is not knowledge so he wants to make a distinction now between this realm of the transcendent which is off limits epistemologically and what he refers to as transcendental conditions uh it's at um a708 b736 where he tells us what he has in mind with the doctrine of methods which we will get to when he says it's the determination of all the formal conditions of a complete system of pure reason so so he is going to develop a i hate the word a methodology he's going to develop a mode of argument and analysis that establishes when reason goes beyond its legitimate its legitimate uh grounds it's legitimate terrain now with respect to the transcendental he's helpful again in giving us a definition i entitled transcendental this is at a11 b25 i entitled transcendental all knowledge which is occupied not so much with objects as with the mode of our knowledge of objects in so far as this mode of knowledge is to be possible our priori transcendental refers to the enabling conditions the conditions that render something possible do you see so a transcendental analysis is a is an analysis of some achievement of ours and the achievement is established we see trees and then the question is what must be in place a priori and necessarily for us to have the concept of a tree for us to be able to subsume a particular tree under that general concept now that would be a transcendental analysis and the conditions necessary for that would be transcendental conditions so the term refers to the conditions or powers that render something possible the a priori conditions that are enabling they don't come about as a result of experience but are understood to be necessary for there to be experience you might recall from last week that very breathless const answer to hume which when we get today to the second analogy i'll spend some more time on but if cue if hume wants a billiard table in front of him and if he wants balls moving that is to say if he wants events separated in time and understood to be somewhere out there he's got to reconcile those claims to the fact that there are no sense organs for out there there is no sense organ for elapsed time so where does this spatiotemporal domain come from and it's going to be kant's argument in the transcendental aesthetic that it comes from us that in fact our very mode of engaging the external world is spatiotemporal and that's what the transcendental aesthetic is is all about the necessary conditions for there to be an out there now why must this be the case our priori and you know what you're tempted to do you're tempted to take the position of the ordinary precipient and maybe in a huff or with characteristic youthful impatience what did that old greek say in the rhetoric young men have strong passions which they tend to gratify indiscriminately they love too much and hate too much and in all things do things to excess well in that youthful impetuosity you might be inclined to say out there for goodness sake and use some sort of hand movement to dismiss the metaphysical question of how anything comes to be out there well enter that cartesian realm for a moment suppose you want to accept the proposition that the only thing you have direct access to are your own experiences the contents of your own consciousness how on earth could you ever reach the conclusion from events to which you have direct access now in consciousness that there's something out there bringing those events about but that is what would be the sensory cue by which you understood that some things of which you are conscious are out there and other things aren't here's the answer to the county and answers the question you couldn't do it this is why he tells us at the outset that one of the embarrassments of metaphysics is that philosophy still cannot establish the reality of an external world do you see if you accept as an argument an empiricist thesis according to which all of your knowledge is mediated by sensory perceptual resources so that the only thing to which you have access are the contents of your own mind then how could you ever have a warrant for concluding that in addition to the contents of your own mind there's an external world bringing them about hello solipsism you see and there are various counters to it they're sort of kant was quite impatient with the impatient common sense alternative that says hope for goodness sake we just know it get on with it um the one thing kant never does is get on with it so so against the empiricists can't rejects a theory but would have our understanding of the external world constructed out of elementary sensations and that somehow time and space go get get get what imported into our consciousness by way of these external events can't be the case he says it just isn't the case um so so we have to bring a spatiotemporal framework we carry a spatiotemporal framework a priori as the in place conditions of sensibility we have a capacity he says which most fundamentally can be called the capacity of receptivity we've got an apparatus that at least is capable of being stimulated that isn't going to get us very far somehow that pattern of stimulation has to become coherent it has to be packaged and the packaging is spatial temporal not by way of experience but the necessary precondition for experience therefore what non-empirical therefore pure the pure intuitions of time and space the pure intuitions why on earth we chose to translate intuition to the uh eternal frustration of students first encountering kant the german well let me not become a philologist if you're a native german speaker and you're talking to another native german speaker about about some cosmic issue you you want to know that person's world view do you see how they consider the world you might say over the fourth cup of coffee in a smoke-filled room what's the steiner belt anchor what is your worldview without unshowering from unchallenged just to show or to observe something unchallenging are intuitions but i would have you understand onshowing intuition as a mode of apprehension a mode of what a mode of beholding the external world do you see in the older german on shao and the verb is to behold and when i behold upon a knight's starred face in german it would be unshallow you see no one would say and when i intuit upon a knight's starred face huge cloudy symbols of a high romance can you imagine any poet saying and when i intuit upon a night spit well god poets don't do much philosophy so so the pure intuitions of time and space then become the non-empirical necessary universal framework that goes with every beholding we have of the sensible world every apprehension we have of something out there and in fact space is that pure intuition that is the necessary condition for kant says outer sense it is in virtue of it that i can distinguish i can distinguish myself from the objects in the external world there can be an i thou relationship or an i it relationship in virtue of the pure intuition of space and it is the pure intuition of time that is the framework for inner sense my thoughts succeed each other that is to say they are ordered in time my feelings are ordered in time that's something i can now project onto the external world thereby gaining what succession do you say so now um hume's billiard balls can move in sequence first one then the other they are successive in experience in virtue of the fact that the pure intuition of time temporally organizes my inner states now of course much more than this is required if there's to be bona fide knowledge kant identifies two fundamental powers of the mind from which knowledge itself arises i quote kant at a 50 b 74. the first is the capacity of receiving representations the second is the power of knowing an object through these representations so again this distinction now between a capacity of receptivity and a quite different capacity for given we've received it knowing it as i say experience is not merely a bare sensation knowledge arises when experience and the pure concepts of the understanding are properly merged do you see that is to say the experience the experiences have to be subsumed properly under the under the right under the right categories this second power is the one kant dubs spontaneity the power of spontaneity it is the freedom with which this power operates that permits conceiving of that which is even impossible or extending concepts beyond the range of possible experience for example his example at a 96 the concept of god kant summarizes the process this way this is a worthy quote when he's clear he can be quite clear by the way this is at a97 if each representation were completely foreign to every other standing apart and in isolation that's that shower of events that are not coherently related if each representation were completely foreign to every other standing apart and in isolation no such thing as knowledge would ever arise for knowledge is essentially a whole in which representations stand compared and connected receptivity can make knowledge possible only when combined with spontaneity so these things have to be pulled together in the right way all right now what is the source of this spontaneity if you don't hear the echo the bat squeak the of that dowdy scotsman at aberdeen the source of spontaneity says kant if that isn't a principle of common sense i don't know what is mother wit this is the most intractable the most byzantine treatise in metaphysics in the in the entire philosophical canon and on this key and necessary power by which representations are pulled together in just the right way the power of spontaneity the source of it is mother wit well yes well yes where else you not from experience do you know how long it would i i was kidding with you last week with piaget's comment about the radical empiricist who believes the series of positive integers was discovered one at a time suppose you you you try to construct a a coherent ordered natural world with no resource other than repeated exposure to things repeated exposure to things and the formation of certain associative bonds oh please first of all how could you associate your first encounter with this if your second encounter is this or this well this every one of these things would be another disconnected i shall give you the neurological answer you won't live long enough you won't live long enough maybe at 97 you'll say it's a glass is it a glass is it a glass then and then i say to you is it breakable what now kant develops a defense of the intuitive a priority of time and space by way of what he refers to as a metaphysical exposition and a transcendental exposition you might remember from first week that khan's understanding of metaphysics is it it's the arena in which competing theories have it out uh it's the incessant argument it's the yes but it's the sick and known uh it's lively um and and sometimes unruly and it it and that's why you end up with indifferentism on the part of the scientific community skepticism on the part of the philosophical community because these metaphysical disputes never seem to come to an end so the prize competition etc etc well kant is going to engage in a metaphysical exposition as i've done so far to show that there really aren't any there aren't experiential sources for time and space but the empiricist project just won't do it so that's the metaphysical exposition the metaphysical exposition is to the effect that you cannot get here from there the transcendental exposition as in transcendental now is the constructive part of the argument showing the necessary and universal conditions such that you do get from here to there so you do get succession you do get outer sense you do get a valid and objective uh representation of the external world etc difference between the metaphysical exposition and the transcendental exposition now what about leibniz and the rationalist tradition after all the the debate that was the the show stopper actually for um uh the la the the early decades of the 18th century was the newton leibniz controversy which shows up in the in the clark leibniz correspondents and central to that whole issue was space as i noted in the first lecture and the second lecture briefly with newton's theory requiring absolute space as what as that cosmic container into which uh all material objects are located and it's really there there really is a cosmic container into which everything real has been poured and leibniz's position by way of the law of sufficient reason that the idea of space as an empty thing into which you might pour other things requires that space be uh that space as a nothing space as empty somehow comes about as a result of a reason for having nothing and that's contradictory so that debate is going back and and forth and kant is going to take he's he's going to take sides on the science of the thing because he is a new he is going to be newtonian in his natural science but he does understand that the issue of space is a problem and that you cannot get it by having newton simply put it there what he does have to make clear is that no device within the rationalist tradition can deduce answers to the question about the source of space and he does this in a number of ways but one of the very clever ways has to do with what today we call chiral objects what is a chiral object yes sir yes handedness that's right look um if you look at your right hand in a mirror remember now it's a mirror image all of the internal relations that constitute this hand are fully preserved in the mirror image but you cannot put a left glove on your right hand you see there's no contortion of a left-handed glove that will map it correctly onto your right hand these are called chiral objects there's good evidence that the concept of handedness itself suppose you would you had some means of contacting life in another galaxy let's say intelligent life which begs all sorts of questions doesn't it um and here's the question you you sent to them you sent them this message after you developed some means of communicating with them we here in a place called earth have hearts that are slightly displaced to the left are your hearts displaced to the left you realize they have no no way of answering that question how do you get left and right now on the conscience scheme since the motive apprehension is itself spatial it is in virtue of the fact that our experiences are spatially ordered and that gives us the means by which to let's say establish that if my palm is up and i'm facing north my thumb is facing east etcetera because i've already got the necessary spatial structuring built in but you realize in a universe that contained only one hand and let's say some intelligent being there's no way an intelligent being could determine whether that hand was left or right now that matter stood that way i wish we had more time that matter stood that way until i think it was 1958 thanks to dr wu when she in the process of winning the nobel prize uh did some elaborate experiments in physics establishing that god those of you who are doing theology should know this god is weakly left-handed as regards the asymmetry of the cosmos 1958 was the year i earned my bachelor's degree a lifelong left-hander doing battle with a right-handed world and when i discovered that god was at least weakly left-handed i said yes ah sorry i said so so uh and kant is among the first actually to employ this concept of uh of incongruity of parts chirality and to do so uh in furtherance of the proposition that absent the pure intuition of space we couldn't even make sense of things like that the point being no rational deductive procedure would would tell anyone follow this please if all you gave the leibnizian was this hand and the leibnizian was required by way of some sort of rational analysis principle of sufficient reason law of contradiction to know that you can't put a left hand glove on this hand or or that the mirror image of this hand nonetheless constitutes an incongruity of some sort there isn't anything within the ambit of reasons powers that would get you to that do you see so the empiricist can't account for it at all and the rationalist might very well just go running down the street like edvard minch's scream um now the the transcendental exposition is designed to show not only that space is a pure intuition but that it must be and for his principal example he chooses geometry which he takes to be as he says at b40 a science which determines the properties of space synthetically and yet a priori he has this in his introduction he has this praise of failies he says oh whoever it was but tradition uh gives us failies as the first we know about who who constructed the isosceles triangle look take the pythagorean theorem you don't honestly think pythagoras ran around measuring right angle triangles and came to the happy conclusion that there was a formula that you could use that turned out to be a version of a squared plus b squared equals c squared even if he were lucky enough and with the first right angle triangle that would be a three four five right angle triangle the shear math of of doing it for triangles that are that are odd numbered would would be beyond his resources the geometry we have is something mathematicians constructed hayley's makes an isosceles triangle he develops geometers will develop the axioms and theorems that provide a science of geometry which then in fact can be mapped onto the objective world the way they do this is by having the capacity for spatial representations it's not something about the external world that they go out and discover is euclidean it's that their own spatial mode of representation is itself and of necessity euclidean and that's what they bring to bear in the construction of the science of geometry and that's what turns out to be oh happy day uh something that lines up with the objective world with the world as understood by science so these are these are arguments are deuced in support of the not only the fact of the pure intuitions of time and space but their necessity and in fact their ability to match up with the objective world it's not an accident that they match up with an objective world because our engagement of the objective world becomes possible by virtue of these very resources it's what we bring to the situation so no surprise when we recover when we recover our own um aesthetic and and cognitive resources in our knowledge in our knowledge base now finally there are the three analogies of experience that uh are central to kant's critique of traditional empiricism he says that a 180 b 223 an analogy of experience will therefore be only a rule in accordance with which unity of experience is to arise from perceptions and not as perception itself these are going to be rules these are rules that determine how perceptual outcomes actually rise to the level of experience in a manner that is not that is not subjective not relative but necessitated by the very by the very absolute nature of the rules themselves i don't want to take too much time on this i think kant chooses the term analogy perhaps after lock you might want to consult lock's essay book 4 chapter 16 section 12 where locke says this concerning the manner of operation in most parts of the works of nature wherein though we see the sensible effects yet their causes are unknown and we perceive not the ways and manner how they are proceed produced analogy in these matters is the only hope we have and it is from these analogies alone that we draw all of our grounds of probability so for example the newtonian world at the level of observation becomes explicable by way of something called a gravitational force that itself is not observable but that idea of a force as something that pushes and pulls it it's analogizing to things that we do know about and as a way of establishing the cause of things where we cannot see the cause itself mind you newton never claimed well he claimed once and then corrected himself that gravity was the cause of things he said the gravitation laws are the rules by which the cause operates we do not have access to the cause why anything released goes down is something he says we we can't explain that it goes down we we know well kant sets up the uh the analogies uh this way the first analogy is that in all change of appearances substance is permanent its quantum in nature is neither increased nor diminished now you understand that uh absent that there would be no means by which to establish that a something is undergoing alteration all we would conclude is that it disappeared and was replaced by a different thing so the first analogy of experience is is that we experience certain entities as substances in that we recognize alterations in them as alterations in something that is itself permanent versus an utter change in things and other metamorphosis the second analogy which is a key part of the answer to hume everything that happens that is begins to be presupposes something upon which it follows according to a rule or as kant expressed it in the second edition quote all alterations take place in accordance with the law of connection of cause and effect again um what's hume's theory of causality what's his account of the concept of causality constant conjunction when quote whenever two events are constantly conjoined in experience it is in virtue of a habit of the mind that one comes to be regarded as the cause of the other you see constant conjunction reed had a field day with that one reed says this is a quote from reed no two events have been as constantly conjoined in human experience as day and night and yet no man come of years regards day as the cause of night or night the cause of day put another way one doesn't have to keep shooting jack before reaching the conclusion that you indeed are the cause of his dying generally one shot will do look look it it just turns out that there's a fundamental that what did you learn in school you learned in school that correlation does not imply causality see so constant conjunction simply misses the essential feature of our causal attributions not that a and b happen together but that given a you must get b now that necessary relation is not something that kant wants to argue is in some way empirically observable it is in the nature of experience that that rule guides our perception of temporally associated events do you see it's a feature because if you didn't have that there really would be no grounds on which to establish causality now the third analogy asserts that quote all substances insofar as they can be perceived to coexist in space are in thoroughgoing reciprocity kant's proof of this is as follows i can look first at the moon and then the earth or conversely first at the earth and then the moon perception can must follow perceptions can must follow each other reciprocally it's on this basis that they're said to be coexistent such coexistence is the existence of the manifold at one and the same time now unless you had that as an a priori mode of experience there'd be no way of distinguishing between sequences that are causal and sequences that are merely coexistent i'd be saying something like i'm going to look out the window now now i'm going to look at you and i'm looking out the window now and i'm going to look at you and i've reached the conclusion that my looking out the window causes you unless there were an a priori means by which to establish coexistences over and against causal lawful relationships that again is a transcendental argument you you you establish the conditions necessary for x to be the case already having granted that x is the case so what's necessary for it to be the case i want to wrap this up with a remark that kant makes in the prolegomena this in the prologue at 259. ties his entire project to what he takes to be david hume's problem for hume says kant quote the question was not whether the concept of cause was right useful and even indispensable for a knowledge of nature for this hume had never doubted but whether that concept could be thought by reason a priori and consequently whether it possessed an inner truth independent of all experience now i think there's serious hume scholarship that that that might contest the claim that that hume actually was not skeptical about there being causes uh for the little it's worth my view is that hume was not at all skeptical about there being causes and nor was he trying to provide an account of causality i believe hume quite clearly was attempting to account for the concept of causality and he accounts for that concept by way of a kind of mental associative machinery kant is saying that what hume threw his hands up over was the inability of a purely rational analysis to establish causal lawfulness well the second analogy is an answer to that question of fumes experience is possible only through the representation and the necessary connection of perceptions absent the necessary connection among perceptions experience is simply not possible thus to the extent that empiricism would restrict knowledge to experience it can succeed only by accepting the very grounding of experience itself which is the grounding kant provides in the second analogy thank you

Channel: Philosophy Overdose

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Keywords: Philosophy, History of Philosophy, Epistemology, Ontology, Analytic Philosophy, Philosophy Overdose, Metaphysics, Political Philosophy, Social Philosophy, Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Kantian, Immanuel Kant, Idealism, Transcendental Idealism, Rationalism, Empiricism, Synthetic A Priori, Theory of Knowledge, Skepticism, German Philosophy, Subject-Object, Critical Philosophy, German Idealism, Hume, David Hume, Perception, Copernican Revolution

Id: AKOycpSLuok

Length: 48min 47sec (2927 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 05 2021