As I said, you can accomplish quite a lot without delving far into the subject but writing it off may leave you with a less-than-optimal framing of reality that just might leave you vulnerable to reaching inaccurate conclusions about important topics like whether to state “all perception is illusion” instead of qualifying the claim before an eccentric who buys it draws conclusions from that premise which make him or her less inclined to try to model reality accurately or act in ways that presume a lawful external world.
Of course we bring knowledge and skills to the problem that are obtained in part through the senses and stored in memory (explicit and implicit). Zen-like meditation would not allow you to analyze anything while you were doing it. Fortunately, a number of great historical thinkers have painstakingly analyzed what immediate subjective perception might tell us about the nature of our kind of reality (presuming we share the same relevant aspects of experience, which virtually every sane non-”sensible knave” claims they do), carefully developed theories about implications, ruthlessly critiqued and revised theories of predecessors, and eventually some of the forgotten or poorly interpreted work was dusted off and subjected to the tests available in a more contemporary time that coexisted with cognitive neuroscience (many implications of Kant’s functionalist theories about basic aspects of the mind and world-access were exhumed and reinterpreted by non-antiquarian philosophers over the last few decades). Between the 1880s and 1980s some fatally flawed theories and theoretical frameworks (e.g. logical positivism) were developed by people whose only exposure to Kant may have been from antiquarians pushing his “transcendental idealism.”
“How can you generate knowledge about knowledge without having a definition for the subject matter and a presumed method of generation and evaluation already? You can’t consider the questions without taking their answers for granted.”
Kant’s basic epistemological question was “What can I know?” or how can any judgment I make, including empirical claims, be warranted in the face of deep skepticism of Hume, who had undermined the basis of Cartesian Rationalism and Leibnitz’s elaboration by offering a compelling argument not just that reason could extend to metaphysical entities (which Kant later acknowledged, more or less) but that there was no empirical basis for knowledge because we could only directly access the present rather than the past or future and moreover the only thing about immediate experience that were the collection of individual, transient sensory impressions at any given moment.
What was taken for granted by both Hume and Kant was that we seem to have warranted access to the world but Hume claimed we have absolutely no basis for any claims we make about the world and we just act out of custom and habit, and unsubstantiated beliefs—including beliefs that merely seem to have empirical support. Kant couldn’t take for granted that he could offer a better justification for such warrant than Hume—in fact he said Hume’s ideas awoke him from his dogmatic slumber.
Hume’s non-physiological account for how we could gain immediate experiences of number did not acknowledge (1) that the sensations had to be encountered in a spatiotemporal way by us regardless of the actual physics of the matter, an aspect that is just an irreducible “given” or basic intuition or (2) that acts of judgment—however implemented—need to be performed on any transient sensory impressions to perceive them as we do in our sensory perceptions let alone attribute any meaning or temporal context (e.g. in music) to them because no such interpretations are inherent in transient sensation signals. Kant employed religious language in his book for ideas that can be accepted from a secular perspective, such as the world-access expression “transcendental synthesis” to describe the necessity of intellectual acts of judgment on sensory appearances to achieve perception.
I would need to write a great deal more to provide a clear and compelling case for the claims that follow, but for a single paragraph synopsis, here goes...
The crucial importance of some form of judgment in the conversion of raw sensation into the kinds of perceptions we continually seem to have offered Kant leverage in his effort because judgment is an intrinsic part of even transient perceptual experience rather than being something detached from it; therefore, the use of judgment was no less warranted than the use of the sensory appearances (including imagination) and they only functioned well in combination. He offered an argument that the nature of our perceptions regarding things we interact with in our environment, external to what is under the complete and direct control of our minds (e.g. imagination), supports the existence of “physical objects” meeting desired criteria as well as the larger context of a lawful physical universe. Moreover, to function effectively and achieve goals, our kinds of minds require interaction with an external physical world (taking this as a premise Hegal offered additional arguments against solipsism based on the means by which humans learn from one another). While the types of abstract judgment he cites as being possible based on the demonstrated ability of people to do them may not be exhaustive or universal they provided warrant for the kinds of theoretical work Kant and other intellectuals had done, as well as the practice of scientific inquiry.
- Are all the arguments in each case water-tight?
That’s doubtful. Kant’s idealism certainly was flawed.
- Are there fatal flaws?
I haven’t noticed them in the arguments on which I focused and the cases can be considered separately rather than a completely interdependent system.
- Why bother with all this?
Aside from the modest utility of the functionalist phenomenological insights (and avoiding flawed models of our own minds), any epistemology that starts at a shallow level with “sense data” (sensory perception, w/o considering the functional judgment involved in transforming sensations into perceptions) remains open to the similar lines of attack as used by Hume and other skeptics. Kant’s world-access realist work not only outlined the limits of human reason (the physical universe) but defended against skeptical attacks our warrant in claiming to be capable of gaining and possessing knowledge.
Calderon,
As I said, you can accomplish quite a lot without delving far into the subject but writing it off may leave you with a less-than-optimal framing of reality that just might leave you vulnerable to reaching inaccurate conclusions about important topics like whether to state “all perception is illusion” instead of qualifying the claim before an eccentric who buys it draws conclusions from that premise which make him or her less inclined to try to model reality accurately or act in ways that presume a lawful external world.
Of course we bring knowledge and skills to the problem that are obtained in part through the senses and stored in memory (explicit and implicit). Zen-like meditation would not allow you to analyze anything while you were doing it. Fortunately, a number of great historical thinkers have painstakingly analyzed what immediate subjective perception might tell us about the nature of our kind of reality (presuming we share the same relevant aspects of experience, which virtually every sane non-”sensible knave” claims they do), carefully developed theories about implications, ruthlessly critiqued and revised theories of predecessors, and eventually some of the forgotten or poorly interpreted work was dusted off and subjected to the tests available in a more contemporary time that coexisted with cognitive neuroscience (many implications of Kant’s functionalist theories about basic aspects of the mind and world-access were exhumed and reinterpreted by non-antiquarian philosophers over the last few decades). Between the 1880s and 1980s some fatally flawed theories and theoretical frameworks (e.g. logical positivism) were developed by people whose only exposure to Kant may have been from antiquarians pushing his “transcendental idealism.”
“How can you generate knowledge about knowledge without having a definition for the subject matter and a presumed method of generation and evaluation already? You can’t consider the questions without taking their answers for granted.”
Kant’s basic epistemological question was “What can I know?” or how can any judgment I make, including empirical claims, be warranted in the face of deep skepticism of Hume, who had undermined the basis of Cartesian Rationalism and Leibnitz’s elaboration by offering a compelling argument not just that reason could extend to metaphysical entities (which Kant later acknowledged, more or less) but that there was no empirical basis for knowledge because we could only directly access the present rather than the past or future and moreover the only thing about immediate experience that were the collection of individual, transient sensory impressions at any given moment.
What was taken for granted by both Hume and Kant was that we seem to have warranted access to the world but Hume claimed we have absolutely no basis for any claims we make about the world and we just act out of custom and habit, and unsubstantiated beliefs—including beliefs that merely seem to have empirical support. Kant couldn’t take for granted that he could offer a better justification for such warrant than Hume—in fact he said Hume’s ideas awoke him from his dogmatic slumber.
Hume’s non-physiological account for how we could gain immediate experiences of number did not acknowledge (1) that the sensations had to be encountered in a spatiotemporal way by us regardless of the actual physics of the matter, an aspect that is just an irreducible “given” or basic intuition or (2) that acts of judgment—however implemented—need to be performed on any transient sensory impressions to perceive them as we do in our sensory perceptions let alone attribute any meaning or temporal context (e.g. in music) to them because no such interpretations are inherent in transient sensation signals. Kant employed religious language in his book for ideas that can be accepted from a secular perspective, such as the world-access expression “transcendental synthesis” to describe the necessity of intellectual acts of judgment on sensory appearances to achieve perception.
I would need to write a great deal more to provide a clear and compelling case for the claims that follow, but for a single paragraph synopsis, here goes...
The crucial importance of some form of judgment in the conversion of raw sensation into the kinds of perceptions we continually seem to have offered Kant leverage in his effort because judgment is an intrinsic part of even transient perceptual experience rather than being something detached from it; therefore, the use of judgment was no less warranted than the use of the sensory appearances (including imagination) and they only functioned well in combination. He offered an argument that the nature of our perceptions regarding things we interact with in our environment, external to what is under the complete and direct control of our minds (e.g. imagination), supports the existence of “physical objects” meeting desired criteria as well as the larger context of a lawful physical universe. Moreover, to function effectively and achieve goals, our kinds of minds require interaction with an external physical world (taking this as a premise Hegal offered additional arguments against solipsism based on the means by which humans learn from one another). While the types of abstract judgment he cites as being possible based on the demonstrated ability of people to do them may not be exhaustive or universal they provided warrant for the kinds of theoretical work Kant and other intellectuals had done, as well as the practice of scientific inquiry.
- Are all the arguments in each case water-tight?
That’s doubtful. Kant’s idealism certainly was flawed.
- Are there fatal flaws?
I haven’t noticed them in the arguments on which I focused and the cases can be considered separately rather than a completely interdependent system.
- Why bother with all this?
Aside from the modest utility of the functionalist phenomenological insights (and avoiding flawed models of our own minds), any epistemology that starts at a shallow level with “sense data” (sensory perception, w/o considering the functional judgment involved in transforming sensations into perceptions) remains open to the similar lines of attack as used by Hume and other skeptics. Kant’s world-access realist work not only outlined the limits of human reason (the physical universe) but defended against skeptical attacks our warrant in claiming to be capable of gaining and possessing knowledge.