I agree that Kant thought of himself as trying to save science from skepticism (e.g., Hume) and weird metaphysics (e.g., Berkeley), and I’m happy you’re trying to make it easier to pass Kant’s Ideological Turing Test.
Transendental 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. [...]
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. Physicalism doesn’t refute that in the least, because it is explicitly based on using physical science as its framework.
I have two objections:
(1) Physicalism does contradict the claim “there is no way to backtrack to a raw form”, if this is taken to mean we should be agnostic about whether things are (really, truly, mind-independently) physical.
I assert that the “raw form” of an electron, insofar as physics is accurate, is just straightforwardly and correctly described by physics; and unless there’s a more fundamental physical account of electrons we have yet to discover, physics is plausibly (though I doubt we can ever prove this) a complete description of electrons. There may not be extra features that we’re missing.
(2) Modern anti-realist strains, similar to 19th-century idealism, tend to slide between these three claims:
“We can’t know things about ultimate reality without relying on initially unjustified knowledge/priors/cognitive machinery.”
“We can’t know things about ultimate reality.”
“(We can know that) ultimate reality is wildly different from reality-as-we-conceive-of-it.”
The first claim is true, but the second and third claims are false.
This sliding is probably the real thing we have Kant to thank for, and the thing that’s made anti-realist strains so slippery and hard to root out; Berkeley was lucid enough to unequivocally avoid the above leaps.
The doctrine can even be stated with apparent simplicity: We can have cognition of appearances but not of things in themselves. But it is far from clear what this doctrine means, and especially unclear what sort of restriction it is supposed to place on our knowledge.
Some readers of Kant have seen the restriction as trivial, so trivial as to be utterly meaningless, even bordering on incoherence. They have criticized Kant not for denying that we can know ‘things in themselves’ but rather for thinking that the notion of a ‘thing in itself’ even makes sense. If by a ‘thing in itself’ we mean a thing standing outside any relation to our cognitive powers, then of course it seems impossible for us to know such things; perhaps it is even self-contradictory to suppose that we could so much as think of them.
Other readers have seen transcendental idealism as a radical departure from common sense, a form of skepticism at least as extreme as any Kant might have been trying to combat. To them it seems that Kant is trying (like Berkeley) to reduce all objects of our knowledge to mere ghostly representations in our minds. He is denying us the capacity to know anything whatever about any genuine (that is, any extra-mental) reality. [...]
I think much of the puzzlement about transcendental idealism arises from the fact that Kant himself formulates transcendental idealism in a variety of ways, and it is not at all clear how, or whether, his statements of it can all be reconciled, or taken as statements of a single, self-consistent doctrine. I think Kant’s central formulations suggest two quite distinct and mutually incompatible doctrines. [...]
Some interpreters of Kant, when they become aware of these divergences, respond by saying that there is no significant difference between the two interpretations, that they are only ‘two ways of saying the same thing.’ These interpreters are probably faithful to Kant’s intentions, since it looks as if he thought the two ways of talking about appearances and things in themselves are interchangeable and involve no difference in doctrine. But someone can intend to speak self-consistently and yet fail to do so; and it looks like this is what has happened to Kant in this case.
In particular, here’s Wood on why Kant is sometimes saying ‘we can’t know about the world outside our heads’, not just ‘we can’t have knowledge without relying on some conceptual framework or way of perceiving’ (p. 64):
Kant often distinguishes appearances from things in themselves through locutions like the following: “What the objects may be in themselves would still never be known through the most enlightened cognition of their appearance, which alone is given to us” (KrV A43/B60). “Objects in themselves are not known to us at all, and what we call external objects are nothing other than mere representations of our sensibility, whose form is space, but whose true correlate, i.e. the thing in itself, is not and cannot be cognized through them” (KrV A30/B45).
Passages like these suggest that things existing in themselves are entities distinct from ‘their appearances’—which are subjective states caused in us by these things. Real things (things in themselves) cause appearances. Appearances have no existence in themselves, being only representations in us. “Appearances do not exist in themselves, but only relative to the [subject] insofar as it has senses” (KrV B164). “But we should consider that bodies are not objects in themselves that are present to us, but rather a mere appearance of who knows what unknown object; that motion is not the effect of this unknown cause, but merely the appearance of its influence on our senses; that consequently neither of these is something outside us, but both are merely representations in us” (KrV A387).
Whereas (p. 65):
In other passages, transcendental idealism is formulated so as to present us with a very different picture. [...] Here Kant does not distinguish between two separate entities, but rather between the same entity as it appears (considered in relation to our cognitive faculties) and as it exists in itself (considered apart from that relation). [...]
On the identity interpretation, appearances are not merely subjective entities or states in our minds; they do have an existence in themselves. The force of transcendental idealism is not to demote them, so to speak, from reality to ideality, but rather to limit our cognition of real entities to those features of them that stand in determinate relations to our cognitive faculties.
In particular, here’s Wood on why Kant is sometimes saying ‘we can’t know about the world outside our heads’, not just ‘we can’t have knowledge without relying on some conceptual framework or way of perceiving’ (p. 64):
Kant often distinguishes appearances from things in themselves through locutions like the following: “What the objects may be in themselves would still never be known through the most enlightened cognition of their appearance, which alone is given to us” (KrV A43/B60). “Objects in themselves are not known to us at all, and what we call external objects are nothing other than mere representations of our sensibility, whose form is space, but whose true correlate, i.e. the thing in itself, is not and cannot be cognized through them” (KrV A30/B45).
I dont think the quoted passage supports your claim at all. If the object “in itself” is the object outside of any conceptual or perceptual framework, then K. Is just that all knowledge occurs within a framework, and knowledge outside a framework is impossible.
I could, however, see how Kant could be read as denying any knowledge of external objects, under circumstances where no particular meaning is assigned to “in itself”.
I mean “But we should consider that bodies are [...] a mere appearance of who knows what unknown object; that motion is not the effect of this unknown cause, but merely the appearance of its influence on our senses; that consequently neither of these is something outside us, but both are merely representations in us” seems pretty unambiguous to me. Kant isn’t saying here that ‘we can only know stuff about mind-independent objects by using language and concepts and frameworks’ in this passage; he’s saying ‘we can only know stuff about mere representations inside of us’.
Kant passages oscillate between making sense under one of these interpretations or the other (or neither):
the “causality interpretation”, which says that things-in-themselves are objects that cause appearances, like a mind-independent object causes an experience in someone’s head. If noumena are the “true correlates” of phenomena, while phenomena are nothing but subjective experiences, then this implies that we really don’t know anything about the world outside our heads. You can try to squirm out of this interpretation by asserting that words like “empirical” and “world” should be redefined to refer to subjective experiences in our heads, but this is just playing with definitions.
the “identity interpretation”, which says that things-in-themselves are the same objects as phenomena, just construed differently.
Quoting Wood (66-67, 69-70):
Yet the two interpretations appear to yield very different (incompatible) answers to the following three questions:
1. Is an appearance the very same entity as a thing in itself? The causality interpretation says no, the identity interpretation says yes.
2. Are appearances caused by things in themselves? The causality interpretation says yes, the identity interpretation says no.
3. Do the bodies we cognize have an existence in themselves? The causality interpretation says no, the identity interpretation says yes.
[… N]o entity stands to itself in the relation of cause to effect. Transcendental idealism is no intelligible doctrine at all if it cannot give self-consistent answers to the above three questions. [...]
Kant occasionally tries to combine “causality interpretation” talk with “identity interpretation” talk. When he does, the result is simply nonsense and self-contradiction:
“I say that things as objects of our senses existing outside us are given, but we know nothing of what they may be in themselves, cognizing only their appearances, that is, the representations which they cause in us by affecting our senses. Consequently, I grant by all means that there are bodies outside us, that is, things which, though quite unknown to us as to what they are in themselves, we still cognize by the representations which their influence on our sensibility procures us, and which we call bodies, a term signifying merely the appearance of the thing which is unknown to us but not the less actual. (P 4:289)
The first sentence here says that objects of the senses are given to our cognition, but then denies that we cognize these objects, saying instead that we cognize an entirely different set of objects (different from the ones he has just said are given). The second sentence infers from this that there are bodies outside us, but proceeds to say that it is not these bodies (that is, the entities Kant has just introduced to us as ‘bodies’) that we call ‘bodies’, but rather bodies are a wholly different set of entities. Such Orwellian doubletalk seems to be the inevitable result of trying to combine the causality interpretation with the identity interpretation while supposing that they are just two ways of saying the same thing. [...]
Kant of course denies that we can ever have cognition of an object as it is in itself, because we can have no sensible intuition of it—as it is in itself. But he seems to regard it as entirely permissible and even inevitable that we should be able to think the phenomenal objects around us solely through pure concepts of the understanding, hence as they are in themselves. If I arrive at the concept of a chair in the corner first by cognizing it empirically and then by abstracting from those conditions of cognition, so that I think of it existing in itself outside those conditions, then it is obvious that I am thinking of the same object, not of two different objects. It is also clear that when I think of it the second way, I am thinking of it, and not of its cause (if it has one). From this point of view, the causality interpretation seems utterly unmotivated and even nonsensical.
The problem arises, however, because Kant also wants to arrive at the concept of a thing existing in itself in another way. He starts from the fact that our empirical cognition results from the affection of our sensibility by something outside us. This leads him to think that there must be a cause acting on our sensibility from outside, making it possible for us to intuit appearances, which are then conceived as the effects of this cause.
Of course it would be open to him to think of this for each case of sensible intuition as the appearance acting on our sensibility those a wholly empirical causality. But Kant apparently arrived at transcendental idealism in part by thinking of it as a revised version of the metaphysics of physical influence between substances that he derived from Crusius. Thus sensible intuition is sometimes thought of as the affection of our senses by an object not as an appearance but as a thing in itself, and transcendental idealism is thought of as having to claim (inconsistently) that we are to regard ourselves (as things in themselves) as being metaphysically influenced by things in themselves.
Such a metaphysics would of course be illegitimately transcendent by the standards of the Critique, but Kant unfortunately appears sometimes to think that transcendental idealism is committed to it, and many of his followers down to the present day seem addicted to the doctrine that appears to be stated in the letter of those texts that express that thought, despite the patent nonsense they involve from the critical point of view. The thing in itself is then taken to be this transcendent cause affecting our sensibility as a whole, and the appearance is seen as the ensemble of representations resulting from its activity on us.
We can’t know things about ultimate reality without relying on initially unjustified knowledge/priors/cognitive machinery.”
I think that is actually two related problems.
1a. A general problem of founding knowledge.. the Epistemic Circle or Munchausen Trilemma...which applies to everything, even maths.
1b. The specifically Kantian problem, which is limited to knowledge of the external world.
This sliding is probably the real thing we have Kant to thank for, and the thing that’s made anti-realist strains so slippery and hard to root out;
I think it is pretty unfair to blame the whole problem on Kant. He is a much less clear writer than Berkely, but then he is expressing much more complex ideas. Also, a lot of the sliding is surely cause by non-philosophers summarising complex ideas into one line slogans.
Physicalism does contradict the claim “there is no way to backtrack to a raw form”, if this is taken to mean we should be agnostic about whether things are (really, truly, mind-independently) physical
“Mind independent” and “physical” don’t mean quite the same thing, and there are multiple ways of cashing out “physical”.
I assert that the “raw form” of an electron, insofar as physics is accurate, is just straightforwardly and correctly described by physics;
What “raw” means is “absent any conceptual framework”. Making that substitution, your statement is a clear contradiction,along the lines of “We have a way of knowing what an electron is outside of any conceptual framework, and that way is to use the conceptual framework known as physics”.
But even given the correctness of the tautologous version of Kant, a version of physicalism can still be asserted as, for instance, “ideal physical science is the correct framework”.
If by a ‘thing in itself’ we mean a thing standing outside any relation to our cognitive powers, then of course it seems impossible for us to know such things; perhaps it is even self-contradictory to suppose that we could so much as think of them.
Well, indeed. The question is: what follows from this truth being merely tautologous? One thing that follows is the falsehood of strong physicalism. (I believe that a solution to the hard problem of consciousness follows that in turn, but that is a topic for another day).
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 agree that Kant thought of himself as trying to save science from skepticism (e.g., Hume) and weird metaphysics (e.g., Berkeley), and I’m happy you’re trying to make it easier to pass Kant’s Ideological Turing Test.
I have two objections:
(1) Physicalism does contradict the claim “there is no way to backtrack to a raw form”, if this is taken to mean we should be agnostic about whether things are (really, truly, mind-independently) physical.
I assert that the “raw form” of an electron, insofar as physics is accurate, is just straightforwardly and correctly described by physics; and unless there’s a more fundamental physical account of electrons we have yet to discover, physics is plausibly (though I doubt we can ever prove this) a complete description of electrons. There may not be extra features that we’re missing.
(2) Modern anti-realist strains, similar to 19th-century idealism, tend to slide between these three claims:
“We can’t know things about ultimate reality without relying on initially unjustified knowledge/priors/cognitive machinery.”
“We can’t know things about ultimate reality.”
“(We can know that) ultimate reality is wildly different from reality-as-we-conceive-of-it.”
The first claim is true, but the second and third claims are false.
This sliding is probably the real thing we have Kant to thank for, and the thing that’s made anti-realist strains so slippery and hard to root out; Berkeley was lucid enough to unequivocally avoid the above leaps.
Quoting Allen Wood (pp. 63-64, 66-67):
In particular, here’s Wood on why Kant is sometimes saying ‘we can’t know about the world outside our heads’, not just ‘we can’t have knowledge without relying on some conceptual framework or way of perceiving’ (p. 64):
Whereas (p. 65):
I dont think the quoted passage supports your claim at all. If the object “in itself” is the object outside of any conceptual or perceptual framework, then K. Is just that all knowledge occurs within a framework, and knowledge outside a framework is impossible.
I could, however, see how Kant could be read as denying any knowledge of external objects, under circumstances where no particular meaning is assigned to “in itself”.
I mean “But we should consider that bodies are [...] a mere appearance of who knows what unknown object; that motion is not the effect of this unknown cause, but merely the appearance of its influence on our senses; that consequently neither of these is something outside us, but both are merely representations in us” seems pretty unambiguous to me. Kant isn’t saying here that ‘we can only know stuff about mind-independent objects by using language and concepts and frameworks’ in this passage; he’s saying ‘we can only know stuff about mere representations inside of us’.
Kant passages oscillate between making sense under one of these interpretations or the other (or neither):
the “causality interpretation”, which says that things-in-themselves are objects that cause appearances, like a mind-independent object causes an experience in someone’s head. If noumena are the “true correlates” of phenomena, while phenomena are nothing but subjective experiences, then this implies that we really don’t know anything about the world outside our heads. You can try to squirm out of this interpretation by asserting that words like “empirical” and “world” should be redefined to refer to subjective experiences in our heads, but this is just playing with definitions.
the “identity interpretation”, which says that things-in-themselves are the same objects as phenomena, just construed differently.
Quoting Wood (66-67, 69-70):
I think that is actually two related problems.
1a. A general problem of founding knowledge.. the Epistemic Circle or Munchausen Trilemma...which applies to everything, even maths.
1b. The specifically Kantian problem, which is limited to knowledge of the external world.
I think it is pretty unfair to blame the whole problem on Kant. He is a much less clear writer than Berkely, but then he is expressing much more complex ideas. Also, a lot of the sliding is surely cause by non-philosophers summarising complex ideas into one line slogans.
“Mind independent” and “physical” don’t mean quite the same thing, and there are multiple ways of cashing out “physical”.
What “raw” means is “absent any conceptual framework”. Making that substitution, your statement is a clear contradiction,along the lines of “We have a way of knowing what an electron is outside of any conceptual framework, and that way is to use the conceptual framework known as physics”.
But even given the correctness of the tautologous version of Kant, a version of physicalism can still be asserted as, for instance, “ideal physical science is the correct framework”.
Well, indeed. The question is: what follows from this truth being merely tautologous? One thing that follows is the falsehood of strong physicalism. (I believe that a solution to the hard problem of consciousness follows that in turn, but that is a topic for another day).
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.