I think the main problem with this is that it requires the wooden block rotation to be an empirical fact. It seems like with enough sense of space, it wouldn’t require empirically observing rotating blocks to predict that a square rotating in space 90 degrees about its center remains the same. This is derivable in Euclidean geometry.
The “sense of space” is empirical data. It is not derivable from Euclidean geometry, but results from the empirical fact that the space we live in is Euclidean (on human scales).
Even if it’s embedded in our nervous system at birth (I do not know if it is), it’s still empirical data. If space were not like that, we would not have (evolutionarily) developed to perceive it like that. Did Kant have the concept of knowledge that we are born with, which nonetheless is contingent on how the world happens to be?
Seems like an overstatement.
I’ll grant Coulomb’s law for electromagnetism, but geology and chemistry were mainly catalogues of observations, and philosophical aspects of steam engines had to wait for 19th century thermodynamics. Geology was producing the idea of a discoverable timeline for the Earth’s changes, and chemistry was groping towards the idea of elements, but that is small potatoes compared with their development in the 19th century for chemistry and the 20th for geology. The 19th century in geology was mainly filling in the timeline in more and more detail across more of the Earth, and some wrong estimates for its age.
Did Kant have the concept of knowledge that we are born with, which nonetheless is contingent on how the world happens to be?
I am not sure how much he has this. He grants that his philosophy applies to humans, not to other possible minds (e.g. God); it’s a contingent fact that, unlike God, we don’t produce things just by conceiving of them. And since he thinks spacetime is non-analytic, he grants that in a sense it “could” be otherwise, it’s just that that “could” counterfactual structure must branch before we get empirical observations. But he doesn’t much discuss the historical origins of why we have a human-like world representation, he just notes that we must have had one to some extent before we got sense-data. A possible materialist criticism of this model is that we can learn about these pre-empirical world structures through empirical psychology research on other minds, not just by making backwards (“transcendental”) inferences from the world representation that we presently have and can access introspectively.
The “sense of space” is empirical data. It is not derivable from Euclidean geometry, but results from the empirical fact that the space we live in is Euclidean (on human scales).
Even if it’s embedded in our nervous system at birth (I do not know if it is), it’s still empirical data. If space were not like that, we would not have (evolutionarily) developed to perceive it like that. Did Kant have the concept of knowledge that we are born with, which nonetheless is contingent on how the world happens to be?
I’ll grant Coulomb’s law for electromagnetism, but geology and chemistry were mainly catalogues of observations, and philosophical aspects of steam engines had to wait for 19th century thermodynamics. Geology was producing the idea of a discoverable timeline for the Earth’s changes, and chemistry was groping towards the idea of elements, but that is small potatoes compared with their development in the 19th century for chemistry and the 20th for geology. The 19th century in geology was mainly filling in the timeline in more and more detail across more of the Earth, and some wrong estimates for its age.
I am not sure how much he has this. He grants that his philosophy applies to humans, not to other possible minds (e.g. God); it’s a contingent fact that, unlike God, we don’t produce things just by conceiving of them. And since he thinks spacetime is non-analytic, he grants that in a sense it “could” be otherwise, it’s just that that “could” counterfactual structure must branch before we get empirical observations. But he doesn’t much discuss the historical origins of why we have a human-like world representation, he just notes that we must have had one to some extent before we got sense-data. A possible materialist criticism of this model is that we can learn about these pre-empirical world structures through empirical psychology research on other minds, not just by making backwards (“transcendental”) inferences from the world representation that we presently have and can access introspectively.