Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Robert Paul Wolff Lecture 5

in this fifth lecture on the critique of pure reason we will finally get to the good stuff as it were to the deduction of the concepts of pure concepts of understanding or as it is usually referred to the deduction of the categories before I talk about that there are two things I'd like to do the first has nothing at all to do with Kant but it occurred to me in addition to being a lecture on Conte I'm also a teacher and I should maybe mention a good book that I'm reading that some of you watching this might find interesting it's a rather difficult book I must say I first in my desperate effort to avoid listening to all of the political news I got hold of a book by Robert Sapolsky called a primates memoir Sapolsky is a fascinating character and neuro scientist who has spent 25 years three months of every summer in the in East Africa with baboons he is a delightful lecturer you can find them on YouTube and he's written this spectacularly funny and fascinating memoir called a primates memoir but after I finished that I got started on something very different it's this book here why only us language and evolution by Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky a very condensed very difficult but very fascinating treatment of this question what genetic changes in Homo sapiens led to the development of language and if you're interested if you're a philosopher of language or a linguist or if you're interested in those subjects I could strongly recommend this book I knew Noam back when he wasn't yet Noam Chomsky but a young brilliant student would come from Penn Harvard to be a junior fellow and although I don't think I have actually communicated with him in 40 or 50 years I still think of him as a friend I have no idea whether he remembers me at all but he was then as you it won't surprise you to learn a brilliant young man and his brilliance has simply continued in the intervening 50 years the other thing I wanted to do was to respond to the question that was asked by Professor Romney at the end of last lecture you will call that Professor nadir asked about two terms that Kant uses which are different in English and he wondered whether they were the same in German and it was just some feckless translation quirk by Kemp Smith or whether they really work different terms and furthermore had different meanings this is always a problem by the way I was thinking about this as I was driving over here to give this lecture when I was young we all used a translation of the dialogues of Plato by a 19th century Oxford or Cambridge scholar named Benjamin Jowett we all use them because they were in the public domain and you could reproduce them without any permissions costs and they were in Flowery the Jowett translated Plato into flowering Victorian English because he assumed in the 19th century that anybody seriously interested in Plato would be reading it in the Greek so for example if Plato used the same term four times on a page Jo it would scurry around and find three synonyms so that the same word didn't get used twice on a page which made for very nice English but if you were seriously interested in Plato raised the whole series of questions now what exactly does Plato mean by saying this word here and that word there and those of us it didn't know Greek didn't know that he used the same word four times then in the 60s and 70s a series of wonderful translation started to appear of individual dialogues with brilliant commentaries and nobody used the jaalin anymore except people putting together anthologies that didn't want to pay permissions the same problem existed when I was young with the nut with Russian novels and I don't read Russian either the two blockbuster novelists were of course Tolstoy and dusty offski and dusty F's key was translated by a woman named Constance Garnett now Tolstoy English was rather formal and sober indeed it's a fascinating fact if you've ever read war and peace that in war in peace when the aristocrats are talking to one another the dialogue was written by Tolstoy in French because that's the way they talked to one another and he assumed that anybody reading his novels would be able to read French as well as Russian so that when Pierre meets Platon Katya of this peasant who's this figure of the peasant world in Tolstoy they talk Russian to each other but when but when Pierre goes and talks to his fellow aristocrats he talks in French well constant Garnett translated Dostoevsky into English that made him sound very much like Tolstoy and so I just read them both in English and thought oh that's interesting they sound very much like apparently that's not true at all in the Russian I untold I don't mean this is entirely hearsay on my part dusty SK writes a rather earthy Russian prose which is nothing like the pros the Tolstoy writes it's as though somebody translated Hemingway and oh my mind is gonna blank yes or who's a woman who wrote is working and if you if you translated Hemingway and Edith Wharton into German so that they both sounded the same that would be the same problem anyway here's the answer and I I when professor Nader asked me the question I didn't have a clue what the answer was and having not only tenure but being a professor emeritus I felt freedom with knowledge but I didn't have a clue it's one of the virtues of ten years that you can middle things you don't know at any rate I went looked the question was there these two terms objective reality and objective validity are they the same term in German no one of them is objectively allocate you could the same terms were and and and objective a good objective validity here's some passages that Professor Maeda sent to me as passages he wanted a little clarification on b1 42 only in this way does there arise from this relation a judgment that is a relation which is objectively valid and so can be adequately distinguished from a relation of the same representations that will have only subjective validity as when they are connected according to the laws of Association Allah David Hume or another only thus by demonstration of the a priori validity of the categories in respect of all objects of our senses will the purpose of the deduction be fully attained and then we have for objective reality the pure concept of this transmittal object which in reality throughout all our knowledge is always one of the same is what can alone confer upon all our empirical concepts in general relation to an object that is objective reality the difference they're very close and they're communicating the same notion but you could say that objective reality is used of concepts insofar as they refer to real objects that is to say phenomena appearances things in the experienced world where as objectively valid is used of judgments insofar as they assert true propositions about real objects closely connected but different I think I think that's the distinction that Conte is making okay now let's finally turn to the so-called deduction of the categories at this point I'm going to change the way in which I've been proceeding and I want to take a moment to explain how I'm going to change because it will be quite strikingly different up till now I've been going seryoga through the text first preface second preface introduction aesthetic so forth and the metaphysical deduction the categories then the presentation of the categories etc but in my own study of the book what I discovered was that the argument isn't actually laid out by Khan in this fashion you have to you have to in fact you have to read it twice you have to read the whole thing and puzzle through it and then you go back and you have to reconstruct the argument taking things from one place and putting them in another place recognizing things which are supposed to be premises and argument or actually conclusions of it or statements of what is to be proved and so forth and so on so in the book that I wrote the constancy of mental activity I went painstakingly through the text reconstructing that as I went and I went through it step by step and finally by the time I got to the second analogy I was ready to reconstruct the whole argument and present it to the reader but that would be it seemed to me an insane way to proceed in a series of lectures nobody is going to sit still for a series of lectures on the promise that for lectures from now things will finally become a little bit clearer so what I'm going to do is expound what's going on in what I understand to be the coherent logical order of Kahn's final and real argument even if it means taking things from different parts of the text and moving from one place to another that will involve your reading ahead some in the next couple of weeks but I think in this way I can make the argument coherent I think I can make sense out of the argument as a as a single nine step argument so where does the argument begin well it begins as I've said previously in the lectures with the cogito of Descartes the I think of Descartes which is actually in the discourse on method there's your pulse don't was your Sui he wrote the discourse in French because he had this mad notion that would make it popular I guess for the masses or something I don't know he figured philosophers would read the meditations in Latin but the general public the general reading public would put down their copies of Voltaire and whatever that's impossible it's the wrong time span but they would put down their early novels and such and pick up the discourse on method who knows whether that's true at any rate here is the passage from the meditations that can be taken as the starting point of Descartes argument and the place that Kampf goes back to to reconstruct the argument from ground zero you'll recall that in the meditations I say you'll recall I am speaking not only to a group of people in this room all of whom I'm sure have read the meditations but also to an audience of people who may have stumbled on this video when they're actually trying to click on the highlights from the Big Bang Theory I should say I mention that because in my desperate effort to avoid politics I've been watching highlights from the Big Bang you're on YouTube and it is just spectacular probably many of you know that in the most recent season the stars of The Big Bang Theory renegotiated their contract so they get a million dollars an episode and I have to say speaking is a good Marxist that I consider that a fair wage I think they've earned every penny of it at any rate at any rate you will recall Descartes starts with a series of doubts about received judgments of beliefs that we all have and impairs away at them repeating in many cases familiar objections that were not new with him but we have been around in philosophy for a long time until he gets all the way in the second meditation to that point where he's doubted absolutely everything except his starting point he says thus it must be granted that after weighing everything carefully and sufficiently one must come to the considered judgment that the statement I am I exist is necessarily true every time it is uttered by me or conceived in my mind and what am why he says I am a thing that thinks and then almost instantaneously he proves the existence of God and he's off to the races and all the things that he said he was doubting come back in and it turns out he doesn't really doubt very much at all but that doesn't matter but that that's neither here nor there the crucial thing is this starting point the I think Cohn revises this at B 131 which is not in the first edition deduction but in the second edition deduction it's the beginning of the second edition deduction he says it's actually the beginning not the very beginning it is actually the second it's not the second paragraph it's the second section he says it must be possible for the I fink to accompany all my representations that claim it must be possible for the I think to accompany all my representations is concen of Descartes cogito it is his beginning point now notice the claim the I think it must be possible for the I think to accompany all my representations he goes on for otherwise something would be represented in me that could not be thought at all and that is equivalent to saying that the representation would be impossible or at least would be nothing to me notice that this is an extremely subjective starting place it doesn't even he is not even prepared to claim that that which the I refers to the self exists as a thing in itself of something which is the move that Descartes makes all he says is the I think the representation I think must be it must be possible for that to accompany all my representations whenever I have a perception or a thought I can always say I think such-and-such it is because it is in my consciousness now what God is here asserting is something which elsewhere he calls the unity of consciousness let me remind before I go on to talk about that and to explain just what what's involved in that let me remind you of the passage that I read from David Hume some while ago it's the passage about there being no mid median point betwixt unity and multiplicity oneness and many nests and that although Kant was unaware of that passage it's essentially that insight that he is starting with there's a puzzle how can all of the different all my different thoughts my perceptions my concepts how can they all be united in my consciousness so that the I think can accompany every one of them that's the starting place but it's a puzzle it's not something that he assumes without without the need for explanation and indeed his explanation will turn out to be the key to his entire argument to explain what he's talking about let me give you an example and I'll give you the provenance of the example as it were I got it from Kemp Smith who got it from William James who got it from France Brentano I have to tell you I'm sort of embarrassed to tell you this but I need to tell you a funny story as I was preparing these lectures I couldn't remember where in James the passage came from and I did some googling and it didn't come up and so finally I continued googling and I came across an article a journal article which is only six years old by somebody named some philosopher named Ben Mises kovash somebody I don't know called contra flexions on the unity of consciousness time consciousness and the unconscious sounded very promising so I went looking through this article until I found the footnote reference to the passage in James but he acknowledged that he himself had not found this he'd gotten it from somebody else so we gave a footnote reference to the person he'd gotten it from and who will be got it from me talk about self self referentiality I got it I got to tell you a funny story which has nothing to do with anything but it's one of my favorite funny stories at the Harvard philosophy department I was a member of the philosophy department from 1961 to 1964 1958 to 1961 and I'd been a student in the department before that and in the department in those days there was a secretary named Ruth Allen who'd been around for a long time she'd been around so long that she could remember when Quine was a student and she was sort of the collective memory of the department where we were sitting in the department meeting one day we didn't have many department meetings but this was a department meeting which a question came up about whether we could do something or other and somebody sent a message to Ruth Allen to ask whether such-and-such was according to university rules and she sent back a message that said yes and somebody was doubting this and wasn't satisfying with just a yes so we said another message back saying you know what was your source for the claim that this was in accordance with university rules and she cited a decision she had made some use earlier which I thought was just absolutely perfect at any rate let me read you the quote from James and then I'll tell you about the example that I used when I first taught this course James says take a sentence of a dozen words and take 12 men in those days that were only men and tell to each one word then stand the men in a row or Jam them in a bunch and that each of his each think of his word as intently as he will know where will they be consciousness of the whole sentence okay well I wanted to illustrate this so when I first taught the critique of pure reason since I was then a James Thurber fan some of you if you've ever raged read James Thurber will know that he wrote a series of Lee called fables for modern times Thurber is most famous for his short story the secret life of walter mitty which has been made into a perfectly awful movie which completely misunderstands the nature of the story but that's neither here nor there at any rate one of his stories which was literally only a page long was called the unicorn in the garden I won't go through the whole story but the key sentence in the story was when a man tells his wife there's a unicorn in the garden there is a unicorn in the garden is a seven word sentence so I took a piece of paper and on it I typed there is a unicorn in the garden then I took seven pieces of paper and on one of them I wrote there and the second is a unicorn in the garden I called eight students up from the class in those days I actually had more than eight in the class so that they the ones who were left didn't feel left out and on one side of the room and I gave the whole sentence to one student and I said read it and think about that sentence then to the other seven students I gave each one a piece of paper and I said look at the word on your piece of paper and think about that word then I told those seven huddled together as closely as you can and I made the point that nowhere in that huddle was a consciousness of the entire sentence whereas the consciousness of the entire sentence was on the other side of the room where one person had the whole sentence in his mind that's the concept that we are talking about that's what Conte means by unity of consciousness that's what he means when he says the I think can be attached to all of my representations now the crucial question is how can this multiplicity of representations this many nassif representations this manifold of representations to use can turn acquire a unity how can it be unified and Kant's answer is synthesis we've seen that that's his answer to the question but now the question is you remember synthesis is presented to us in metaphorical terms as a running through and grasping in one thought of many different representations well that doesn't tell you anything that's a good explanation to how you get a bouquet out of a field of flowers you run through it and you hold all the flowers together in your hand and you've got a bouquet but that is not an adequate description of how the mind makes a warning this one a many nasai of the many nests and at this point I spent a long time puzzling over this because it seemed to me that only if one could understand precisely how this happens get some insight into it could we see Kant's argument advancing and at this point I found a passage in the deduction in a which seemed to me to be the clue and that is at a 106 so let me just turn to a 106 this is in my opinion the single most important sentence in the entire critique I'm probably the only persons ever read the book of thinks that but it gives me some distinction anyway Kant says but a concept is always as regards its form something Universal which serves as a rule serves as a rule so I ask myself all right what is it about activities that are governed by a rule that is important here that is distinctive what and I undertook an analysis of rule directed or rule governed activities here's what I came up with it's not exhaustive but it's enough there are at least three characteristics of rule governed activities which we want to focus on let me tell you each one and then I'll give you extended examples because this is I want to spend some time on this because it's really important the first characteristic of rule governed activities is that the rule precedes the activity the activity is done in accordance with the rule the rule is not inferred from the activity it is not an induction from the activity the activity is guided by the rule the second characteristic of a rule governed activity is that the rule determines what is and what is not a part of the activity being governed by the rule all and only the activities prescribed by the rule constitute a unity constitute a single unified activity and the third characteristic of rule governed activities is that activities carried out in conformity with the rule can be described as correct or incorrect as right or wrong by virtue of their adherence and non adherence to the rule those are the three characteristics of rule governed activities that I want to focus on let me take each one in turn the rule precedes the activity compare for example the rules that we live by the traffic rules that we live by the governed traffic lights red green and yellow and compare the rule that specifies what we are supposed to do when we see a red a green or a yellow traffic light with what somebody might infer from observing people and simply seeing what they did when they saw a red green and yellow traffic lights and from that inferring the rule well the rule says when it's green you can go and sure enough if you observe people most people driving you will see that when the light turns green they go the rule also says stop rules are in the imperative form the whole the second part of the rule is stop when you see a red light and sure enough if you watch people you will see them stop when there is a red light the the rule for yellow is slowed down but if you observe people what you see is that when the relay is yellow they speed up so anybody who didn't know the system of traffic lights would naturally infer from observed behavior that yellow means speed-up but it doesn't mean speed-up it just means everybody's trying to run the light what the rule says is slow down even though virtually nobody obeys that rule all right now take the rule to turn the second characteristic that the rule determines what is and what is not a part of the activity being governed by the rule it singles out from everything that's going on a specific set of activities or objects which are whose significance and performance is determined by the rule let me give you a number of examples the first example I'll explain why it comes to my mind so readily is a chess game there's a lot of stories to tell you and my older son Patrick when he was seven years old insisted on being taught how to play chess I offered to teach him checkers and he said no he wanted to learn chess well to make a long story short Patrick went on to become a very famous international Grandmaster to win the United States Chess Championship twice and at one point to be the strongest chess player in the United States I spent a large amount of time when he was little attending chess tournaments which were typically held in motels they will not high-profile hi big expense jobs when you walked in now that here's the thing suppose I went to one of these with somebody who do absolutely nothing about chess I just said my son is going to be in the chess game a chess - and what would you like to come along and this friend says sure so we go and we walk in and there's this big room and tables are all laid out and there are people bustling around and there are lights on and there are banners on the walls because that turns out to be a function room that's used for other things as well and this friend of mine says all right what of all of this is part of chess is it part of chess that it's held in a room with three exits I say no that has nothing to do with chess and my friend says is it part of chess that they're a whole lot of people standing along the wall I say no they're not involved in the game at all and so my friends as well is it a game played by people I said oh yes he says well which of the people playing the game the one seated at the tables and he says oh so there are two teams right and I say no there aren't two teams each person is on his or her own he scratches his head and says okay and it's a game they play by themselves sort of like solitaire said no they play against an opponent and the opponent is a person sitting next to know that the opponent is the person sitting across the table from little by little we ascertained that the only things that are actually part of the game of chess are the two people the board the pieces and if you want to be formal about it the timeclock everything else is not a part of the game and so now the question is well how do you play the game when one person stands up and walks away from the table and comes back and sits down again so my friend says it's not a move in the game I say no no that's got nothing to do with the game he's just nervous who he sees he's antsy or he wants to walk around and another one scratches his head nice and he says is that a part of the game I say no it might be in baseball that might be assigned to the second the guy on second but in chess that's not a part of the game and well you I can just give you one classic example since I love to tell stories about my son when he was about 13 we had just moved to Boston from Western Massachusetts and I took him in New York to his first big deal chess tournament this is a chess term that had international masters and grandmasters and it knows held in a big hotel was a big deal this little kid so we walked into rooms enormous room set up with chess boards and so forth and Patrick went to sit down to play his first game and as it happens he had black so some adults sat down this is not a child's tournament so some adults sat down opposite him looked at the board for a while made a move and started the clock and Patrick Satnam is now Patrick's move and according to the rules of typical rules of chess tournaments Patrick had two hours to make his first 40 moves as time control as it's called I'm standing by the side of course I'm beside myself I mean yo proud father I'm there and and I barely play chess but I know what's going on and Patrick sits and thinks for a while and I think come on Patrick come on the clock is ticking move and Patrick thinks for a while longer and I get nervous and 15 minutes go by and Patrick doesn't move and I'm beside myself and I'm saying I'm not allowed to say anything I know that and more time goes by half an hour goes by and by now I figure he's freaked I think you know should I just take him away and get him some McDonald's and call call the whole thing quits I won't say anything unless he says something and he sits in he's just sitting there just staring at the board for an hour and a half he sat and stared at the board not moving a muscle and why now I am in third-degree heart attack I am beside myself finally he made a move and won the game he had never seen this opening before and so he sat there and studied it until he understood the opening completely and after an hour and a half he felt confident that he understood the opening and then he made his first move anybody watching this who knew nothing about chess would assume that the man standing by the side who was clearly about to have a heart attack was an essential part of the game but of course that's not true at all I had no role at all except I was the father who took him there and I knew that if he lost the game I was going to have to rush him out and get a McDonald so that he could play his next game okay that's the first thing now compare again a construction site when you go to a construction site if you know nothing about construction you see a lot of guys wearing hardhats you see equipment you see all sorts of things happening if it's a construction site in the big city is lying the offense around it and holes in the fence so that people can stare through and see what's going on if you have no idea how construction of a building is is carried on it'll just look like a complete jumble but if an engineer if a construction engineer comes and takes a look right away she will be able to tell what's going on whether it's going well or badly if there are problems as if there's a shortage of a certain amount of equipment she will understand because she knows the rule that governs the activity and she will not only be able to tell what's part of the activity and what isn't but furthermore whether it is going according to the way it is supposed to be going third example is a performance of a musical composition once again if you don't know anything about music not only will you not be able to tell which of the various things you're seeing and hearing constitute part of the musical performance is the COFF by somebody in the fourth row a part of the musical performance or not there are some musical performances where it might be God who knows but not in this one furthermore you'll have no idea whether it's being done correctly or incorrectly but if you do know something about music you'll be able to say they played that too fast or not legato enough or something of the sort you'll be able to make judge you'll be able to make an evaluative judgment you'll be able to say it was done rightly or wrongly because you know the rule the rule for the performance of this activity now again with regard to whether it's done rightly or wrongly compared driving to a restaurant versus taking the drive if you drive into a restaurant you have instructions for blocks this way two blocks that way one block that way and the restaurant is on your right therefore it makes sense to say whether you've taken a wrong turn but suppose you just want to go out for a drive your answer you just want to get out of the house and take a drive and you just noodle around turning in whatever direction you wish or you're taking a walk and you're just ambling around there is no such thing as a right turn and a wrong turn there's only a right turn and a left turn because there is no rule that determines what you are doing these are the characteristic part versus playing with clay you see somebody slapping clay and twirling a twirl in it on a twirling it on a on a stand and so forth that person may be making it into a bowl and out of that emerges a bowl or it may just be somebody who's slapping and playing around with clay and same thing with regard to painting nowadays you may not be able to tell the difference unless you have some concept and maybe even then you may not be able to tell it but that's just my prejudices you get the point all of these are characteristics of rule governed activities they are activities that determine they are rules that determine whether what is part of the activity whether the and what the things that are part of the activity constitute a unity that sets them off from everything else what's more when a net when something is done according to a rule it can be judged as correct or incorrect right or wrong we're going to get down to true or false obviously okay now a concept as always says Cod as regards its form something Universal which serves as a rule therefore when the mind employs a concept to synthesize a diversity of perceptions it is doing something to that diversity of perceptions in conformity with the role that is the concept that's con central notion by doing this something to the diversity of perceptions in conformity with a rule it confers unity on the diversity in such a way that the doing can be evaluated as correct or incorrect true or false valid or invalid that's the central idea that Kant is working with and this now raises the obvious question what is the activity that is performed in accordance with the rule Kant's answer is synthesis what are the rules for synthesizing amount of fold of sensibility answer the categories but since we don't yet know we don't yet know what synthesis is we don't yet know what the categories really are and this is an important point to emphasize and Kahn talks as though it's settled what the categories are we got those from the metaphysical deduction then the table of categories which I showed you last time no more questions about that in fact we haven't yet so much as given a defense of a single category we have the general notion that categories are rules for the synthesizing of a manifold but we don't know what the activity of synthesis is and therefore we don't know what the categories are and it's going to turn out this will come further down the road it's going to turn out that the argument is actually exactly the opposite of what Kant says you don't first establish the identity of the categories and then talk about how the categories inform the activity of synthesis from an analysis of synthesis you derive the categories it is from an analysis of the activity of synthesis that for the first time you can identify what the categories are so that the categories will turn out to be the conclusion of the argument not the beginning of the argument now cod in a certain sense Kant doesn't know that I mean I think in a deeper sense he did know it but it's not the way in which he lays out his philosophy and this is a big problem now there are several more crucial things to say but I want to break my exposition at this point to say something that is implied by what we've gotten so far something terribly important not the Kant's theory achill philosophy but for his moral philosophy in fact what contest just said completely undermines his moral philosophy a fact that so far as I can tell nobody ever pays any attention to what me so I will now talk about it you remember the famous tag line in what it is what is it the first preference I forget I have had to restrict knowledge to make place for faith Kant had this big ambitious plan when he was working during those nine years before he published the critique he was not only going to come to terms with Leibniz and Newton and fuming he was also going to deal with the problem of determinism he was he was going to make a place for freedom in the Newtonian world which was a deterministic world he was going to show that despite the determinism of Newtonian physics freedom free will was possible and that was the foundation of all ethical theory and in order to do that he was going to put it as simply as possible he was going to say as he knew he was going to say that whereas the categories apply to things as they appear to us and that gives us Newtonian physics the categories only apply hypothetically to the realm of things in themselves so that although we can never have of things in themselves we can formulate propositions about things in themselves in particular about the causal efficacy of moral agents who in the realm of things in themselves make promises and keep their keep their promises and pay their debts and do all the other good things that they're supposed to do we can never know that because it is as things in themselves as Numan 'el selves as moral agents that they do these things but we can formulate the claim that they do this and so there we can by limiting the scope of knowledge we make room for the possibility of moral action that's Kant's big plan in order for that plan to be carried out the categories have to have hypothetical application to things in themselves it has to be possible to say coherently and meaningfully that the mob that the numinous self acts morally in accordance with the moral law and in doing so determines its actions causes its actions even though we can never have knowledge of that because to have knowledge of that we would have to have X direct experience of things in themselves which can't sense is impossible that's the large plan and Kant never deviated from it that was the plan on the basis of which he wrote the second critique after writing the first critique on the basis of which he wrote the foundations of the metaphysics of morals after writing the first critique it was the plan that he never deviated from but when he says that the categories are rules for the synthesis of a manifold he undermines that whole plan because if the categories are rules for the synthesis of the manifold then they have not they don't even have hypothetical application to anything but a manifold a manifold of intuition if that's what the categories are they could have hypothetical an application to the intuition of a creature whose forms of sensibility are different from ours that's hypothetically possible although not very interesting to count but they couldn't have even hypothetical applicability to things in themselves he can't never realized that when he reinterpreted concepts as rules for the performance of an activity called synthesis he undermined his theory his ethical theory and there is no I I firmly believe that there is no solution to this problem there is no fix it really is the case that if you take seriously what Kant says in the deepest sections of the deduction in the first and second editions then there is simply no way in which the categories can have possible application or hypothetical application to things in themselves and therefore there is no way in which you can make sense of the compatibility of freedom and determinism okay now this is not a series of lectures on concept achill theory so I won't go into that further but it's it's a matter it's so important that I wanted to lay it out because it really does deeply undermine Kant's large-scale programmatic plan for his entire philosophy now let me introduce a complication it's a complication that appears in the scheme at ISM which we're coming to and it's implied in various places but once again it's one of those things on which count is less clear that he might be the distinction between first and second order rules think about it for a minute if the categories lie ready in the mind for application to a manifold of sensibility and if the categories are rules for the synthesis of a manifold of sensibility and if consciousness itself depends on that synthesis then it would appear that the categories must have been applied to the manifold of sensibility in order for us even to be conscious of which means if you think about it seriously that we ought to be able to read off the specific laws of physics from the mind there should be no need for experimentation no need for observation there should simply be this this philosophical unfolding of what is contained already in the mind so that we would be able to deduce Newton's physics from the structure of the mind and Kant doesn't want that he knows that's not true he knows that observation is an essential part of of science and he says as much so it turns out if you think about it that the categories are not rules for the synthesis of a manifold they are rules for the construction of rules for the synthesis of a manifold they are second-order rules let me give you a simple example to illustrate this notion suppose that you're hired by a game company and your job as an employee of the game company is to make up saleable games that they can put on the market either they put them on the market with a board and pieces or they put them on the internet I don't care which and your boss says to you alright your job is to make up games and here the here are some of the things I want these games to have number one it's got to be a game you can't play without what you get from us that's crucial we're going to make money out of this we're not given this to the world that's number one number two I want it to be a game that's played by at least two people and no more than for number three I want it to be a game that you can finish in some reasonable amount of time not like the three pack three packs of cards war that my sister and I used to play when we were little kids that went on for days because with three packs of cards it took forever for one person to win all the cards we don't want to gain like that one again ideally it's a game that should be over in half an hour 45 minutes max maybe a little bit more in special cases now I want you to construct a game that follows all those guidelines what the boss has given you is a rule for setting up rules a rule for constructing rules that's what the categories are they are rules for constructing rules for synthesizing a manifold and it's going to turn out when we get to the analytic of principles and in particular to the analogies of experience that the categories are rules for constructing specific rules which look like the categories things for synthesizing a manifold now this that will salvage the necessity for observation experiment and interaction with the world in order to learn the laws of physics but it raises a question which can't have very little to say about it became a question that dominated philosophy of science for 150 years or more namely the problem of induction the problem of the relationship between observation and scientific laws even if you knew what the general form of a scientific law was supposed to be that didn't tell you when you had a bunch of observations which scientific law was was actually the operative law and what kinds of observations you needed what conformation you needed whatever in order to in order to arrive at the correct scientific laws and Condon was aware that there was a an issue here but he had no grasp on the complexity of the problem that so many philosophers in subsequent generations and centuries have spent so much time talking about namely the problem with induction the problem of causal laws in science and so forth and so on but the foundation for it is laid here in this distinction between first and second order rules I have to tell you a funny story as always I I can't stop myself back in the day when I was a professor at Columbia which are from 64 to 71 there was an English philosopher of science than Jonathan Bennett and Bennett came to Columbia one day to give a talk now far away the smartest and also most charming member of the philosophy department at Columbia was Sidney Morgan Vassar about whom there are a thousand wonderful stories which I can't begin to tell you but if you read my autobiography you'll find a bunch of them there we all gathered in the seminar room with the picture of John Dewey looking down at us to hear Bennett's talk and benefit Bennis talk was called the justification of induction again a talk on just this topic to give the to give the essence of the talk in a second Bennett's argument was that the whole series of characteristics of inductive reasoning and a whole series of characteristics of deductive reasoning and it turned out that many of the characteristics were the same for inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning but there are a couple of differences between inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning and that constituted something of a justification for inductive reasoning all right more I was sitting right next to Bennett who was at one end of the table and Morgan vested was sitting at the under other end of the thing Morgan breast was irrepressible sitting next to him was a young philosopher had come up from Princeton to hear the talk guy named Thomas Nagel who had been a student of mine in the first concourse I taught at Harvard Tom is a very polite and very proper man Morgan vesser as soon as Bennett started talking sat there gossiping with Nagel Nagel was trying very hard to listen to the talk and knew that it was inappropriate for Morgan besser in an audible voice to be gossiping with Nagel so Nagel sat there by every trick of body language trying to say I'm not listening to Morgan vessel I'm not actually sitting next to Morgan vessel not even here really I'm just listening to the talk and Morgan vesser just went on you know all through Bennett's talk at the end of the talk you know how these things are a talk comes to an end and there's a kind of embarrassed silence before the first question is asked and when this moment came Morgan Besser sensed a breach and a break in the forces that were he said yeah there was some difference in the background noise better than stop talking and so Morgan Bessel looked up and realized that Bennett had finished his talk and nobody is asking a question so Morgan versus are where he said I'll ask a question it's such a any and he then asked a question which all of us recognized completely destroyed Bennett's argument what Morgan vesser said is you know you say that there are always characteristics that inductive and deductive reason you have in common it's also the case that valid deductive reasoning an invalid deductive reasoning have a lot of characteristics in common so that presumably just constitutes some justification for invalid deductive reasoning and then work investor realized that he had destroyed this poor man's talk so he said well you wouldn't even want to answer a question like that it's so stupid and he went back to gossiping with Nagel and while the rest of us had to spend an hour coughing up questions to keep Bennett afloat before it was time to take him to dinner and get him out of this misery all right this raises the obvious question the question that we've I've been putting off all this while and believe it or not I'm going to put it off to the next lecture what is the activity of synthesis that what is that activity the doing of which by the mind makes of oneness out of a many nests and that I the answer to that is the passage in the critique called the subjective deduction you remember that at the very beginning of these lectures I read you a funny little passage from the first preface in a in which concept this sort of mysterious thing there was one part he said of the text which wasn't really serious because it was actually a psycho psychological story so that it wasn't essential to the argument but in fact he said as it'll turn out it really is God knew what was going on he understood that he needed the subjective deduction even though he was uncomfortable about that fact and so right at the beginning of next lecture we will take a look at the subjective deduction the so-called three fold synthesis and we will finally find out what the activity is once we do that we will it will be possible to move the argument forward until finally when we get to the second analogy the argument for the creek for the causal maxim of any rate will be brought to a conclusion and we will then have a real argument starting with the proposition the I think can be attached to all of my representations and ending with the validity of the causal maxim so what I want you to read the next time in addition to with refreshing your memory of the subjective deduction and the whole rest of the deduction in a I want you to read the deduction in B and then I want you to read the section called the scheme it ism that's not actually a lot of pages although it's difficult stuff and it has some very surprising statements in it which caught intends and means and is going to stand behind and with that I will bid you farewell until next time

Channel: Alex Campbell

Views: 30,236

Rating: 4.8108749 out of 5

Keywords: kant, critique, critique of pure reason, analytic, synthetic, 18th century, philosophy, metaphysics, history, epistemology, free will, determinism, faith, ethics, james, brentano, manifold, synthesis, transcendental, idealism, lecture 5, robert paul wolff

Id: UcD-xfVoLoo

Length: 57min 14sec (3434 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 04 2016