I claim that the most natural interpretation of “[Transcendental] idealism means all specific human perceptions are moulded by the general form of human perception and there is no way to backtrack to a raw form.” is that there’s no way to backtrack from our beliefs, impressions, and perceptions to ultimate reality. That is, I’m interpreting “backtrack” causally: the world causes our perceptions, and backtracking would mean reconstructing what the ultimate, outside-our-heads, existed-before-humanity reality is like before we perceive or categorize it. (Or perhaps backtracking causally to the initial, relatively unprocessed sense-data our brains receive.)
In those terms, we know a ton about ultimate, outside-our-heads reality (and a decent amount about how the brain processes new sensory inputs), and there’s no special obstacle to backtracking from our processed sense data to the raw, unprocessed real world. (Our reasoning faculties do need to be working OK, but that’s true for our ability to learn truths about math, about our own experiences, etc. as well. Good conclusions require a good concluder.)
If instead the intended interpretation of “backtrack to a raw form” is “describe something without describing it”, “think about something without thinking about it”, or “reason about something without reasoning about it”, then your original phrasing stops making sense to me.
Take the example of someone standing by a barn. They can see the front side of the barn, but they’ve never observed the back side. At noon, you ask them to describe their subjective experience of the barn, and they do so. Then you ask them to “backtrack to the raw form” beyond their experience. They proceed to start describing the full quantum state of the front of the barn as it was at noon (taking into account many-worlds: the currently-speaking observer has branched off from the original observer).
Then you go, “No, no, I meant describe something about the barn as it exists outside of your conceptual schemes.” And the person repeats their quantum description, which is a true description regardless of the conceptual scheme used; the quantum state is in the world, not in my brain or in my concepts.
Then you go, “No, I meant describe an aspect of the barn that transcends your experiences entirely; not a property of the barn that caused your experience, but a property unconnected to your experience.” And the person proceeds to conjecture that the barn has a back side, even though they haven’t seen it; and they start speculating about likely properties the back side may have.
Then you go, “No! I meant describe something about the barn without using your concepts in the description.” Or: “Describe something that bears no causal relation to your cognition whatsoever, like a causally inert quiddity that in no way interacts with any of the kinds of things you’ve ever experienced or computed.”
And the person might reply: Well, I can say that such a thing would be a causally inert quiddity, as you say; and then perhaps I can’t say much more than that, other than to drill down on what the relevant terms mean. Or, if the requirement is to describe a thing without describing it, then obviously I can’t do that; but that seems like an even more trivial observation.
Why would the request to “describe something without describing it” ever be phrased as “backtracking to a raw form”? There’s no “backtracking” involved, and we aren’t returning to an earlier “raw” or unprocessed thing, since we’re evidently not talking about an earlier (preconceptual) cognition that was subsequently processed into a proper experience; and since we’re evidently not talking about the physical objects outside our heads that are the cause and referent for our thoughts about them.
I claim that there’s an important equivocation at work in the idealist tradition between “backtracking” or finding a more “raw” or ultimate version of a thing, and “describe a thing without describing it”. I claim that these only sound similar because of the mistake in Berkeley’s master argument: confusing the ideas “an electron (i.e., an object) that exists outside of any conceptual framework” and “an ‘electron’ (i.e., a term or concept) that exists outside of any conceptual framework”. I claim that the very temptation to use ‘Ineffable-Thingie’-reifying phrasings like “there is no way to backtrack to a raw form” and “what an electron is outside of any conceptual framework”, is related to this mistake.
Phrasing it as “We can’t conceive of an electron without conceiving of it” makes it sound trivial, whereas the way of speaking that phrases things almost as though there were some object in the world (Kant’s ‘noumena’) that transcends our conceptual frameworks and outstrips our every attempt to describe it, makes it sound novel and important and substantive. (And makes it an appealing Inherently Mysterious Thing to worship.)
The reason I’m focusing on this is that I think some of the phrasings you chose in trying to summarize Kant (and translate or steelman his views) are sliding between the three different claims I described above:
[1] “We can’t know things about ultimate reality without relying on initially unjustified knowledge/priors/cognitive machinery.”
[2] “We can’t know things about ultimate reality.”
[3] “(We can know that) ultimate reality is wildly different from reality-as-we-conceive-of-it.”
E.g., you say
The kind of knowledge he says you can’t have is knowledge of the thing in itself, which in modern terms would mean something like knowledge that is not relative to some conceptual framework or way of perceiving
In treating all these claims as equivalent, you’re taking a claim that sounds at first glance like 2 (“you can’t have knowledge of the thing in itself”), and identifying it with claims that sound like either 1 or 3 (“you can’t have knowledge that is not relative to some conceptual framework or way of perceiving,” “you can’t have knowledge of the real world that exists outside our concepts”, “space/time/etc. are things our brains make up, not ultimately real things”).
I think dissecting these examples helps make it easier to see how a whole continent could get confused about Berkeleian master-argument-syle reasoning for 100-200 years, and get confused about distinctions like ‘a thought you aren’t thinking’ vs. ‘an object-of-thought you aren’t thinking about’.
The reason I’m focusing on this is that I think some of the phrasings you chose in trying to summarize Kant (and translate or steelman his views) are sliding between the three different claims I described above:
[1] “We can’t know things about ultimate reality without relying on initially unjustified knowledge/priors/cognitive machinery.”
[2] “We can’t know things about ultimate reality.”
[3] “(We can know that) ultimate reality is wildly different from reality-as-we-conceive-of-it.”
With regard to Kant’s claims, there is no “sliding” because he asserts all 3 of those, and provides separate arguments for them. In particular, [3] is supported by the Antinomies, which purport to show that spatiality is not a property of objective reality. He is not deriving everything from a single argument, any other than Berkeley is.
I claim that there’s an important equivocation at work in the idealist tradition between “backtracking” or finding a more “raw” or ultimate version of a thing, and “describe a thing without describing it”.
I can’t see why equivocation is helpful. If you want to ascertain the existence of some kind of noumena, you need to distinguish the thing you can do—come up with a theory of the causes of your perceptions as external physical things—from the thing you can’t do—get outside the map entirely.
We can’t conceive of an electron without conceiving of it” makes it sound trivial, whereas the way of speaking that phrases things almost as though there were some object in the world (Kant’s ‘noumena’) that transcends our conceptual frameworks and outstrips our every attempt to describe it, makes it sound novel and important and substantive.
The significant-sounding claim does indeed follow from the trivial sounding one. That makes it a good argument. Good arguments should draw non-obvious conclusions from well-founded premises.
I claim that the most natural interpretation of “[Transcendental] idealism means all specific human perceptions are moulded by the general form of human perception and there is no way to backtrack to a raw form.” is that there’s no way to backtrack from our beliefs, impressions, and perceptions to ultimate reality. That is, I’m interpreting “backtrack” causally: the world causes our perceptions, and backtracking would mean reconstructing what the ultimate, outside-our-heads, existed-before-humanity reality is like before we perceive or categorize it. (Or perhaps backtracking causally to the initial, relatively unprocessed sense-data our brains receive.)
In those terms, we know a ton about ultimate, outside-our-heads reality (and a decent amount about how the brain processes new sensory inputs), and there’s no special obstacle to backtracking from our processed sense data to the raw, unprocessed real world. (Our reasoning faculties do need to be working OK, but that’s true for our ability to learn truths about math, about our own experiences, etc. as well. Good conclusions require a good concluder.)
If instead the intended interpretation of “backtrack to a raw form” is “describe something without describing it”, “think about something without thinking about it”, or “reason about something without reasoning about it”, then your original phrasing stops making sense to me.
Take the example of someone standing by a barn. They can see the front side of the barn, but they’ve never observed the back side. At noon, you ask them to describe their subjective experience of the barn, and they do so. Then you ask them to “backtrack to the raw form” beyond their experience. They proceed to start describing the full quantum state of the front of the barn as it was at noon (taking into account many-worlds: the currently-speaking observer has branched off from the original observer).
Then you go, “No, no, I meant describe something about the barn as it exists outside of your conceptual schemes.” And the person repeats their quantum description, which is a true description regardless of the conceptual scheme used; the quantum state is in the world, not in my brain or in my concepts.
Then you go, “No, I meant describe an aspect of the barn that transcends your experiences entirely; not a property of the barn that caused your experience, but a property unconnected to your experience.” And the person proceeds to conjecture that the barn has a back side, even though they haven’t seen it; and they start speculating about likely properties the back side may have.
Then you go, “No! I meant describe something about the barn without using your concepts in the description.” Or: “Describe something that bears no causal relation to your cognition whatsoever, like a causally inert quiddity that in no way interacts with any of the kinds of things you’ve ever experienced or computed.”
And the person might reply: Well, I can say that such a thing would be a causally inert quiddity, as you say; and then perhaps I can’t say much more than that, other than to drill down on what the relevant terms mean. Or, if the requirement is to describe a thing without describing it, then obviously I can’t do that; but that seems like an even more trivial observation.
Why would the request to “describe something without describing it” ever be phrased as “backtracking to a raw form”? There’s no “backtracking” involved, and we aren’t returning to an earlier “raw” or unprocessed thing, since we’re evidently not talking about an earlier (preconceptual) cognition that was subsequently processed into a proper experience; and since we’re evidently not talking about the physical objects outside our heads that are the cause and referent for our thoughts about them.
I claim that there’s an important equivocation at work in the idealist tradition between “backtracking” or finding a more “raw” or ultimate version of a thing, and “describe a thing without describing it”. I claim that these only sound similar because of the mistake in Berkeley’s master argument: confusing the ideas “an electron (i.e., an object) that exists outside of any conceptual framework” and “an ‘electron’ (i.e., a term or concept) that exists outside of any conceptual framework”. I claim that the very temptation to use ‘Ineffable-Thingie’-reifying phrasings like “there is no way to backtrack to a raw form” and “what an electron is outside of any conceptual framework”, is related to this mistake.
Phrasing it as “We can’t conceive of an electron without conceiving of it” makes it sound trivial, whereas the way of speaking that phrases things almost as though there were some object in the world (Kant’s ‘noumena’) that transcends our conceptual frameworks and outstrips our every attempt to describe it, makes it sound novel and important and substantive. (And makes it an appealing Inherently Mysterious Thing to worship.)
The reason I’m focusing on this is that I think some of the phrasings you chose in trying to summarize Kant (and translate or steelman his views) are sliding between the three different claims I described above:
E.g., you say
In treating all these claims as equivalent, you’re taking a claim that sounds at first glance like 2 (“you can’t have knowledge of the thing in itself”), and identifying it with claims that sound like either 1 or 3 (“you can’t have knowledge that is not relative to some conceptual framework or way of perceiving,” “you can’t have knowledge of the real world that exists outside our concepts”, “space/time/etc. are things our brains make up, not ultimately real things”).
I think dissecting these examples helps make it easier to see how a whole continent could get confused about Berkeleian master-argument-syle reasoning for 100-200 years, and get confused about distinctions like ‘a thought you aren’t thinking’ vs. ‘an object-of-thought you aren’t thinking about’.
With regard to Kant’s claims, there is no “sliding” because he asserts all 3 of those, and provides separate arguments for them. In particular, [3] is supported by the Antinomies, which purport to show that spatiality is not a property of objective reality. He is not deriving everything from a single argument, any other than Berkeley is.
I can’t see why equivocation is helpful. If you want to ascertain the existence of some kind of noumena, you need to distinguish the thing you can do—come up with a theory of the causes of your perceptions as external physical things—from the thing you can’t do—get outside the map entirely.
The significant-sounding claim does indeed follow from the trivial sounding one. That makes it a good argument. Good arguments should draw non-obvious conclusions from well-founded premises.