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 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.