Immanuel Kant - The Critique of Pure Reason

[Sideroxylon]

Thanks for posting, Roger.

 

[!Kaggen]

The problem I think arises when the natural interaction between reason and experience is lopsided by adults with an unconscious vested interest in one or the other.

For example

No.

 

[Darat]

...snip...


Hume is awesome. As you say, it's not necessary to read Hume the way you'd read Kant, because ...snip.

.... Hume seems to want people to find his works accessible, Kant to me often seems like he was trying to do the opposite - make his work as impenetrable as possible.

 

[Sideroxylon]

.... Hume seems to want people to find his works accessible, Kant to me often seems like he was trying to do the opposite - make his work as impenetrable as possible.

That reminds me of the following passage from "Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding":

But this obscurity in the profound and abstract kind of
philosophy is objected to, not only as painful and tiring, but
also as the inevitable source of uncertainty and error. Here
indeed lies the fairest and most plausible objection to a large
part of metaphysics, that it isn’t properly a science [= ‘isn’t
a theoretically disciplined pursuit of organised knowledge’], but arises
either from •the fruitless efforts of human vanity, trying to
penetrate into subjects that are utterly inaccessible to the
understanding, or from •the craft of popular superstitions
which, being unable to defend themselves by fair arguments,
raise these entangling ·metaphysical· brambles to cover and
protect their weakness.

http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdfbits/he1.pdf

I think I remember reading Karl Popper wrote something interesting on the subject of clarity but I haven't been able to locate it. Does anyone know what I may be thinking of?

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

This is where JREF becomes very annoying. A full fledged ethics would take, what, a book at the least? Realistically a book, rebuttals, further books, etc. It is perhaps possible that my one paragraph didn't address every nuance of ethics/morality, yes??

Our ethics are clearly compatible with a social species. It is also clearly compatible with a thinking, social species. I suggest, without the multiple books written required for back up, that our morals come down to "with what will we put up with"? There is no clear answer that logic and reason can provide. What we accept and allow varies over time. But, it all ties back to our mammalian nature. We don't eat our lovers, because we aren't spiders. Eating your lover works for spiders and their biology. It doesn't work for us. We have other social constructs to ensure our young get sufficient nutrition.

I wonder if that is a falsifiable proposition or not? Is there any possible evidence that you could constitute proof that some moral ideas do not "tie back to our mammalian natures"? It's a fairly vague claim, which contributes to the difficulty I see in defining it so that it is falsifiable. It might turn out to just be a boring tautology, like "all human moral ideas are moral ideas generated by meaty, physical, fallible brains".

And, we have decidedly non-Kantian ways to determine what we want our ethics to be. We may, for example, argue that jazz leads to fornication and the destruction of society. Yet, using emperical evidence, not transcendental reason, we find that in fact it does not lead to those things. We can experiment, and find just how wrong we usually are when we use any kind of pure reason. And we can bounce that off of the deeply ingrained preferences we have as a social species to decide how best to regulate our lives.

Note that this is anything but an 'anything goes' argument. Our mammalian nature is going to again and again rebel against wholesale slaughter of, I dunno, minorities. It is again and again reach towards corroboration and group dynamics as solutions to problems. The details will change with time, cultures, and our thinking, but all available evidence suggests this is true.

The way you've framed it I don't think this claim is falsifiable either.

What Kant's pure reason suggests I don't know, but I'll just take another helping of evidence, thank you very much.

Imagine that as a book length essay, not 4 paragraphs .

I'm fairly sure that moral constructs like the Nuremberg rules governing human experimentation are not products of pure reason, merely that they are often taken as having an absoluteness comparable to that Kant believed his moral prescriptions had. That's why I called them Kant-like rather than Kantian.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

You can define synthetic a priori however you want, and I won't stop you (I may roll my eyes). The fact remains its a terrible way to ascertain knowledge about reality, and things we would happily label as synthetic a priori will prove not to be just wrong, but amazingly, stupendously wrong. Kantians can deny it all they want, but statements about the physical world that they label SAP are just things we have learned from experience that we consider 'obvious.' Just like it was once obvious that things were particles or waves, that time is a constant amongst observers, that if you drew a triangle between three star the angles would add to 180. It's just bias built from a narrow perception of the universe.

So, I don't care if you can come up with something that is SAP - the fact remains that much which has been labeled SAP has led to incorrect conclusions about the nature of reality. That absolutely destroys pure reason as a method of inquiry into the nature of reality.

That's what I'm wondering, though. Does the category of synthetic a priori even make sense?

It seems to me that there is no such category if we examine the issue fully. Just as analytic a posteriori probably makes no sense, syntheitc a priori seems to make no sense.

There would seem to be a type of structural "knowledge" that is a priori, but that is so basic that we don't even see it or talk about it -- it simply is the way our nervous system works. And there are things that are true by nature of their definitions. I'm not sure that I could point to any other a priori knowledge.

How should we categorize the Cartesian "thinking occurs" even? Is that really true by definition, or is it actually true by experience? Every time we doubt we certainly experience doubt.

But I've never spent that much time thinking about these issues, so I may simply have this all backward.

 

[roger]

I wonder if that is a falsifiable proposition or not? Is there any possible evidence that you could constitute proof that some moral ideas do not "tie back to our mammalian natures"?

I'm no ethicist - it's just my hypothesis. Imagine a lot of 'largely', 'for the most parts', and 'it seems to me' in what I wrote.

Ya, it's mushy, which makes falsifiability hard if not impossible. But, ethics are mushy. I know, Kant was trying to make them not mushy. I don't see any reason to think they can be made to be not mushy - I've never seen it done, though I will admit I don't read widely in the field. OTOH, we are still killing each other, so if a non-mushy version exists it ain't percolated down to the leaders and masses.

Mushy & falsifiability is an interesting question, though. Very interesting. I'd probably adopt (just musing out loud here) a Popperian framework - I can't prove my inductions, but I can easily disprove them with one example. In the case above, I wouldn't assert that every last ethic we've ever had would trace back to our mammalian roots, just by and large they do. I'm certainly in the position of of being criticized like somebody like Margaret Mead was - just so reasoning and the like.

But, it is clear we are driven by our hormones. We have traced love, for example, back to oxytocin, and the waxing and waning of love to our response to that chemical over a period of time. That's not intended to be purely reductive - a reactive mind engaged in feedback loops moderates our behaviors in ways the chemical never will. Let us say it (oxytocin) is a necessary, but not sufficient component of humans being in love.

So, I strongly doubt our ability to develop and maintain an ethics that ignores the effect of oxytocin+mind on us. You can falsify that so long as I don't engage in 'just so' stories - find a society where human bonding is not a large feature of the ethics. I can easily find them in the animal kingdom, just as I can find ones where bonding is the central feature.

I guess I would take that last sentence and ask you to run with it. Is it possible to say that, penguins, say, use pair bonding in their societies, but monitor lizards do not? Is that a scientific, falsifiable statement? I'm ignorant in the matter, but I'd guess very strongly that the answer is 'yes'. If so, I don't see why we cannot observe human behavior across multiple societies and determine to what extent pair bonding, altruism, monogamy vs multiple partners, etc play a role. Everything I've read suggests, for example, that we look to monogamy to form trust bonds and to provide sufficient resources for our children, but against that multiple partners allows us to either spread our seed far and wide (male) or get the best genetics for our children while staying with the best provider (women). Those factors arise out of our mammalian features - long gestation, ~10 years of offspring helplessness, etc. You may have noticed how much of our ethics focus on where and when we can stick our penises. I can't think of how to prove it, but I don't view that as a random coincidence. Do you?


In short, color me incredulous, but I don't foresee widespread societies where we eat healthy members of our society when other food sources are readily available. I don't foresee societies where we just drop our newborn babies into a government creche, never to see or care for them again. Etc. They are just so contrary to our needs, wants, and biology (oxycotin ain't going to let the average mother want to just abandon her baby). Could some dictator enforce some of these? Sure. Could a David Goresh get a small minority to do these things? Yup. But a whole society, willingly, over a fairly significant period of time? I don't think so. And that is falsifiable - just point out counter-examples.

edit: somebody will complain that I only mentioned oxycotin in relation to love. I'm not writing a dissertation on the biology of love here. Obviously Oxycotin is the 'snuggling' chemical (a vast simplification), and a whole slew of chemicals work together to form our feelings and behavior (adrenaline, dopamine, serotonin, etc.)

 

[roger]

That's what I'm wondering, though. Does the category of synthetic a priori even make sense?.

It doesn't make any real sense to me. Kant's arguments are vague. He says that there is nothing in 12 that suggests 5+7. What on earth does "nothing in" mean? It's undefined. We know he's wrong - we can derive arithmetic from set theory, for example, and thus prove the statement is true (mathematicians are wringing their hands at this statement - I know the limits of Russell and Whitehead and the Principia Mathematicia - the point is merely this is a self-consistent formal system, not some universal truth). I would love to know what Kant's 'intuition' says about the following:
123412341234123987 + 23498572342134897 = 1.46910914 × 10^17



True or not? Not so obvious.

If you google synthetic a priori you'll find people tying themselves up in preztels trying to explain the concept. It's all gobbledygook to me. Perhaps I'm just dumb. But, perhaps I'm not fooled by wishy-washy language. I've seen the same kind of "thinking" in literature - somebody doesn't understand some vague 'idea' - a bunch of hand-waving goes on, and finally the person relents with a 'ah, I see' when it's clear nothing is seen at all.

But, why twist your panties in a bunch worrying about it? We know such intuitive truths are not a reliable description of reality.

To be fair, you have to have read a fair amount of 20th century mathematics to get how far off base Kant is. So, another example, that may work better for the non-mathematically inclined.

Kant claims that 'every effect has a cause' is SAP. I won't reproduce his reasoning here. It's bogus. We are trying to determine if this is true or not in QM. If I understand it correctly, at the moment some interpretations of QM says its true, others say its false. We don't know. Whether it is true or not comes down to how the universe works, not abstract reasoning. IOW, we can imagine a physics where every effect has a cause, and we can imagine a physics where not every effect has a cause. Either would be self-consistent and possible. Which describes our world? We don't know yet.

Not a single physicist uses a Kantian argument to decide the result. Sure, physicists use intuition and what seems right to decide their research paths. And once we know enough about the world we can reason using formal systems to determine what might be true. I think I remember Einstein being quoted as saying if an experiment disproved his theory, he'd feel sorry for the experimentalist. It sounds very Kantian. But he had a wealth of experimental results that showed the Newtonian framework wasn't sufficient to explain the universe. We knew the current explanations were insufficient. Einstein's explanation was simple, consistent, yet profound. In our experience, the universe is simple, consistent, yet profound. He was likely to be correct (and, he was).

edit: another example - what does 299792457+2 equal? If you answered 299792459, you'd be wrong. Of course, I was sneaky, and left the units out. The units are m/s. Yup, speed of light. If you asked Kant this question, in the form of one person is travelling at 299792457, another person is traveling at 2 in the opposite direction, what would they measure their approaching speed as, he'd answer 299792459, and furthermore insist that was synthetic a priori knowledge telling us something real about the world. Except we know the real answer is more along the lines of 299792457.something.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

Thanks Roger, and excellent examples. You've helped me understand this considerably.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

I'm no ethicist - it's just my hypothesis. Imagine a lot of 'largely', 'for the most parts', and 'it seems to me' in what I wrote.

Ya, it's mushy, which makes falsifiability hard if not impossible. But, ethics are mushy. I know, Kant was trying to make them not mushy. I don't see any reason to think they can be made to be not mushy - I've never seen it done, though I will admit I don't read widely in the field. OTOH, we are still killing each other, so if a non-mushy version exists it ain't percolated down to the leaders and masses.

Mushy & falsifiability is an interesting question, though. Very interesting. I'd probably adopt (just musing out loud here) a Popperian framework - I can't prove my inductions, but I can easily disprove them with one example. In the case above, I wouldn't assert that every last ethic we've ever had would trace back to our mammalian roots, just by and large they do. I'm certainly in the position of of being criticized like somebody like Margaret Mead was - just so reasoning and the like.

But, it is clear we are driven by our hormones. We have traced love, for example, back to oxytocin, and the waxing and waning of love to our response to that chemical over a period of time. That's not intended to be purely reductive - a reactive mind engaged in feedback loops moderates our behaviors in ways the chemical never will. Let us say it (oxytocin) is a necessary, but not sufficient component of humans being in love.

So, I strongly doubt our ability to develop and maintain an ethics that ignores the effect of oxytocin+mind on us. You can falsify that so long as I don't engage in 'just so' stories - find a society where human bonding is not a large feature of the ethics. I can easily find them in the animal kingdom, just as I can find ones where bonding is the central feature.

I guess I would take that last sentence and ask you to run with it. Is it possible to say that, penguins, say, use pair bonding in their societies, but monitor lizards do not? Is that a scientific, falsifiable statement? I'm ignorant in the matter, but I'd guess very strongly that the answer is 'yes'.

I don't know anything much about monitor lizards, but for the sake of this discussion I'm perfectly happy to assume that they don't pair-bond at all and move on from there.

If so, I don't see why we cannot observe human behavior across multiple societies and determine to what extent pair bonding, altruism, monogamy vs multiple partners, etc play a role. Everything I've read suggests, for example, that we look to monogamy to form trust bonds and to provide sufficient resources for our children, but against that multiple partners allows us to either spread our seed far and wide (male) or get the best genetics for our children while staying with the best provider (women). Those factors arise out of our mammalian features - long gestation, ~10 years of offspring helplessness, etc. You may have noticed how much of our ethics focus on where and when we can stick our penises. I can't think of how to prove it, but I don't view that as a random coincidence. Do you?

No, I'm just wary of moving from those premises you just outlined (which I agree with completely) to the conclusion that all moral thinking is, is a fuzzy attempt to rationalise our evolved urges and/or rationalise strategies that maximise social effectiveness.

I'm sure that some X is a result of Y, but that doesn't get us to the conclusion that all X is a result of Y.

In short, color me incredulous, but I don't foresee widespread societies where we eat healthy members of our society when other food sources are readily available. I don't foresee societies where we just drop our newborn babies into a government creche, never to see or care for them again. Etc. They are just so contrary to our needs, wants, and biology (oxycotin ain't going to let the average mother want to just abandon her baby). Could some dictator enforce some of these? Sure. Could a David Goresh get a small minority to do these things? Yup. But a whole society, willingly, over a fairly significant period of time? I don't think so. And that is falsifiable - just point out counter-examples.

While I think the conclusion you are arguing for is probably correct, the argument you are using looks exactly like special pleading. "No society with quality Z could ever exist... unless it was a dictatorship or a theocracy or something, and they do not count". Why can't someone from a dictatorship or theocracy say equally well "Our society represents the natural state of being for animals like us, because we are social beings who maximise social effectiveness. Your society represents an unnatural departure from that norm and doesn't count as counter-evidence"?

As for whether the "average mother" could abandon her baby, Pinker wrote a very interesting article titled "Why do they kill their newborns?" about infanticide in the human female. I think you could make a case that it's probably perfectly natural to be able to ditch a baby on the day of its birth without enormous psychological trauma.

We need to be very, very careful about reifying our culture's approved response to such chemicals as inherent facets of human nature.

 

[Beerina]

Well, as you probably know, it was an attempt at discovering what we know a priori - knowledge independent of experience.

And (of course) he corked it up by page 5. For example, he claimed that 5+7=12 is synthetic a priori. Unfortunately this evidences a complete lack of understanding of math. Which is understandable enough, since at that time we hadn't developed the underpinning of mathematics as formal systems, nor was he aware of the possibilities of non-Euclidian geometry, etc. OTOH, what hubris to argue for 1000+ pages, deliberately sans experience and knowledge of what he is talking about.

It's conceivable the demon could be altering everything that depended on 2 + 2 actually equaling 5, such that it appeared to support the false 2 + 2 = 4, including altering thoughts in your mind.

Remember that the feeling of certainty is an emotion itself. And if your reasoning is all cocked up by delusion, you have a problem.

And if you can't rely on reality itself to pop you in the face because of your incorrect theories, as normally happens from time to time, because the demon is changing things around, well...

 

[roger]

It's conceivable the demon could be altering everything that depended on 2 + 2 actually equaling 5, such that it appeared to support the false 2 + 2 = 4, including altering thoughts in your mind.

Remember that the feeling of certainty is an emotion itself. And if your reasoning is all cocked up by delusion, you have a problem.

And if you can't rely on reality itself to pop you in the face because of your incorrect theories, as normally happens from time to time, because the demon is changing things around, well...

I'm not terribly worried about it.