Space Not Relative to Its Discernment

[Boydstun]

Space Not Relative to Its Discernment

~Part 1~

I firstly quote a stretch from the third dialogue of Berkeley’s Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1734). I refute some of Berkeley’s positions set out therein. In later installments, I expose a wrong turn taken in the traditional Objectivist reply to Berkeley—a kind of reply throwing out the baby with the bathwater when rejecting the primary-secondary distinction of qualities—as well as the handicap that wrong turn brings to such Objectivists’ counter of Kant’s theoretical philosophy.

The name Hylas is from the Greek meaning “matter.” This character is at the outset of the first dialogue a believer, as regular folks, in the existence of matter. The name Philonous is from the Greek meaning “lover of mind.” Philonous has the views of Berkeley, such as that anything we perceive is mind, not matter apart from mind (ours, an animal’s, or God’s). Phil will bring Hylas around, of course. Both characters are used to raise natural objections to Berkeley’s views, and both are used to muster arguments for overcoming those objections.

Quote

 

Philonous: Do I not know this to be a real stone that I stand on, and that which I see before my eyes to be a real tree?

Hylas: Know! No, it is impossible you or any man alive should know it. All you know is that you have such a certain idea or appearance in you own mind. But what is this to the real tree or stone? I tell you what that colour, figure, and hardness, which you perceive are not the real natures of those things, or in the least like them.The same may be said of all other real things or corporeal substances which compose the world they have none of them anything in themselves, like those sensible qualities by us perceived, We should not therefore pretend to affirm or know anything of them, as they are in their own nature.

Philonous: But surely, Hylas, I can distinguish gold, for example, from iron; and how could this be, if I knew not what either truly was?

Hylas: Believe me, Philonous, you can only distinguish between your own ideas. That yellowness, that weight, and other sensible qualities, think you they are really in gold? They are only relative to the senses, and have no absolute existence in nature. And in pretending to distinguish the species of real things by the appearances in your mind, you may perhaps act as wisely as he that should conclude two men were of a different species because their clothes were not of the same colour.

. . .

Philonous: But is it not strange the whole world should be thus imposed on, and so foolish as to believe their senses? And yet I know not how it is but men eat, and drink, and sleep, and perform all the offices of life, as comfortably and conveniently, as if they really knew the things they are conversant about.

Hylas: They do so; but you know ordinary practice does not require a nicety of speculative knowledge. Hence the vulgar retain their mistakes, and for all that, make a shift to bustle through the affairs of life. But philosophers know better things.

Philonous: You mean, they know that they “know nothing.”

Hylas: That is the very top and perfection of human knowledge.

Philonous: But are you all this while in earnest, Hylas, and are you seriously persuaded that you know nothing real in the world? Suppose you are going to write, would you not call for pen, ink, and paper, like another man; and do you not know what it is you call for?

Hylas: How often must I tell you, that I know not the real nature of any one thing in the universe? I may indeed upon occasion make use of pen, ink, and paper. But what any one of them is, in its own true nature, I declare positively I know not. And the same is true with regard to every other corporeal thing. And, what is more, we are not only ignorant of the true and real nature of things but even of their existence. It cannot be denied that we perceive such certain appearances or ideas; but it cannot be concluded from thence that bodies really exist. Nay, now I think on it, I must agreeably to my former concessions farther declare, that it is impossible any real corporeal thing should exist in nature.

 

(Berkeley 1734, 208–10)

Against Berkeley and his dialogue-characters, I say: The notion of “knowledge” here and elsewhere in Berkeley is an aristocratic one, such as has been the breed held worthy of close attention from both dogmatists and skeptics, and from both empiricists and rationalists, among philosophers down since the Greeks. It holds philosophers’ disdain for and care-not-to-recognize-as-knowledge the type of knowledge which is precedent and continual undergirding of more abstract knowledge. That more basic knowledge, earliest in the development of every human and depended upon throughout life, is: know-how. (See further, Stanley 2011).

One comes to know how to stand and crawl and walk and focus one’s eyes and later how to speak one’s natural language and, if extra fortunate, how to read and write one’s language. All of those are knowledge of the know-how sort. Any sort of knowledge ending in denial that such know-how is knowledge is just so much the worse for one’s notion and theory of more abstract forms of knowledge, metaphysical, scientific, or mathematical. Berkeley was intellectually cultured in the snob-knowledge tradition, although, come to his own philosophy, he presents as in step with common sense and out of step with doctrines of the academics (1734, 154–55).

I have noticed that knowing that one is standing is based in part on knowing how to stand. Knowing one is standing before something is based in part on know-how of infant crawling intermittent with know-how of visual observation along the way. Knowing that something is a real stone depends in part on wordless know-how of its solidity in contrast to inability of a liquid to support standing upon, in part on its heat transfer properties when one is barefoot, and for some fortunate people, how to cleave the stone with a chisel and hammer.

(Those things are known more completely at the conceptual, scientific level. For example,  scientifically we know solidity is not due to what seems, in first thought, greater resistance to compression than had by a liquid, but due to greater resistance to shearing stresses in a solid compared to a liquid. Water is virtually incompressible. The reason we cannot walk on it is because of lateral and rotational slippage of its portions.)

Knowing that what is out my window before my eyes is a real tree includes my know-how in having climbed the tree and know-how of various levels of memory and their coordination. Knowing where my eyes are and that they make for vision includes my know-how of opening and closing them and attempting observation and in the know-how of putting on my glasses.

To claim to know that the physical, mind-independent world does not exist as mind-independent is to claim that any know-how required for one’s abstract claim does not exist. To claim to know that the physical, mind-independent world does not exist is by performative implication to claim to know that nothing exists. That includes the one who makes the claim.

“Know! No, it is impossible you or any man alive should know it [know it a real stone that I stand on, and that which I see before my eyes to be a real tree]. All you know is that you have such a certain idea or appearance in you own mind” (Berkeley 1734, 208). That final sentence is a philosophical proposition Objectivism and other philosophies reject. Objectivism argues for replacement of that veil-of-perception view with a non-representational direct realism in sensory perception and a physical-world-grasping account of conceptual thought and by the primacy of existence over consciousness.

Additionally, I argue: The “in” relation between content of mind and things outside one’s mind is simile with what is in one’s body and what is outside it, such as that stone on which one is standing. It is only by such simile with physical inside-outside relations that one has any sense to talk about inside-outside one’s mind. Throw away the physical world in which there are physical relations, notably containment relations, and it becomes nonsense to claim “All you know is that you have such a certain idea or appearance [of the stone or tree] in your own mind.” Nonsense can be grammatically correct, yet nonsense on purported mind-world relation (cf. Peikoff 2023 [1972], 525, 527).

“It cannot be denied that we perceive such certain appearances or ideas; but it cannot be concluded from thence that bodies really exist. Nay, now I think on it, I must agreeably to my former concessions farther declare, that it is impossible any real corporeal thing should exist in nature” (Berkeley 1734, 209).

Rand erred in taking “existence” in her most basic axiom “existence exists” as not specifically meaning physical existence, particular and concrete, set in mind-independent spatial and temporal relations (Rand ITOE App. 245–46; Peikoff 1991, 5; Boydstun 2021, 83–84). She should have taken the notion and concept existence across cognitive development (same old referent, physical existence, all across) in the manner in which she took the notion and concept man across that development (ITOE 43–45).

“Existence” in Rand’s most primitive axiom “Existence exists” should be understood most wisely as physical existence. We have no word-labeling of objects and actions in our earliest experiences, but the most exact and effective specification of what was primary object of our discernment at our beginning and ever after is physical existence. Then displacing primacy of consciousness with primacy of existence immediately displaces Berkeley’s doctrine of the nonexistence of matter. Sewing the qualifier “physical” into the character of “existence” is good in thinking exactly what is meant by “existence” when it comes to countering the likes of Berkeley: One means mind-independent objects and activities, which we are capable of becoming aware of as they are, including the mind-independent relationships in which they stand. Idealism and God are then immediately out of court by (i) Rand’s “Existence exists” as primary to everything, together with (ii) her specification of the most basic nature of consciousness, awareness of existents, physical existents. 

(To be continued.)

References

Berkeley, G. 1734. Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. In Clarke 2008.

Boydstun, S. 2021. Existence, We. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. 21(1):65–104.

Clarke, D. M. 2008. George Berkeley – Philosophical Writings. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Peikoff, L. 1991. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. New York: Dutton.

——. 2023 [1972]. Founders of Western Philosophy – Thales to Hume. A transcription of lectures, edited by M. S. Berliner. Santa Ana, CA: Ayn Rand Institute Press.

Rand, A. 1990 [1966–67]. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. (ITOE) Supplements added by Leonard Peikoff and Harry Binswanger. New York: Meridian.

Stanley, J. 2011. Know How. New York: Oxford University Press.

[Boydstun]

~Part 2~

Quote

 

Hylas: In truth the senses perceive nothing which they do not perceive immediately, for they make no inferences. The deducing therefore of causes or occasions from effects and appearances, which alone are perceived by sense, entirely relates to reason.

Philonous: This point is then agreed between us, that “sensible things are those only which are immediately perceived by sense”. You will farther inform me, whether we immediately perceive by sight anything beside light, and colours, and figures . . . .”

Hylas: We do not.

 

(Berkeley 1734a, 158)

Berkeley has his gentlemen then examine closely the sensations of painful heat and cold and the moderate sensations of warmth and coolness. He argues that in the painful occasions the pain is only in our perceiving senses, not in the objects which are themselves incapable of perceiving. Pain of burning is no more in a fire than pain of a pricked finger is in a needle. Supposed material substances cannot possess qualities that are pains. Then too, material substances could not possess a quality of intense heat causing a burning pain. Intense heat is not distinct from the burning pain, according to Berkeley. That being so, the same is so for any of the intense, painful sensations, such as in coldness, taste, or odor (ibid., 158–61).

I notice that burns are an easy win for a verdict of not being in the fire because of support alongside the preceding argument: the injured burned area of one’s body will continue to burn after the fire is distanced or extinguished. Berkeley would not have easy sailing were he to take up arguing explicitly against the pain being not in the burned area of the body, but only in the mind (ibid. 162). 

Concerning the indistinctness of intense heat and the pain of burning, Berkeley was correct to apply the rule that causal relations are between distinct things. Therefore, intense heat cannot stand in a causal relation in the occasion of having a burning pain. But to maintain that these two things—a quality of intense heat in an object and a burning pain—are one thing is a thesis Berkeley hangs on really an ambiguity in everyday thought and language and on his insistence that sound thought stick to using common, run-of-the-mill language, rather than rarified philosophical vocabulary. The definite difference between a quality of heat in objects and pain in one contacting such a body and of what that difference consists would require: further advances in science beyond Berkeley’s time, the new conceptions and terminology of science, and sloughing off a supposed superiority of common parlance (Kandel et al. 2013, 530–53).

Against moderate levels of heat or cold being in material substances, Berkeley raised a fact. Draw a bucket (A) of water (which will be cool) from the well in summer, and let A sit on the porch a good spell. Draw another bucket (B) of water, pour it into a pot, and heat it on the wood stove. Draw another bucket (C) of water from the well. Place it and the other two on the kitchen table. For a minute, hold your left hand in B and your right hand in C. Then place both hands into A. Your left hand will feel cool and your right hand warm. But the water in A cannot have both a moderate quality of being warm and a moderate quality of being cold at the same time. Therefore, by the lights of Berkeley, there is not a quality of heat or cold in water (1734a, 158–64). 

Berkeley raises similar facts yielding a like conclusion concerning the senses of taste and odor. Concerning sound Berkeley argued that such a thing is not in the mindless undulating air. Furthermore, motions are seen or felt, but not heard (ibid. 164–66). Berkeley upheld the idea that we should not identify sounds we hear with undulations of air or sources of the undulations. This is not what anyone was doing or needed to do in discovering the external, material causes or occasions of hearing sounds. Sound is a bigger challenge, I suggest, in Berkeley’s quest to show all sensible things “are nothing else but so many sensible qualities or combinations of sensible qualities” (ibid. 158). Mechanics of sound in media and at the ear were dawning in his era. It strikes me that the more detail yielded by scientific research on the intimate physical causes of sense experience, the less easy it is to maintain firm impossibility of animal-body sensory receptions yielding conscious sense and mind.

The objects of hearing do not include the vibrations of media reaching the ear, which is proximate cause of the audition. Berkeley’s posing a view otherwise is prelude to his false posit that reception of light at the retina is among the objects in vision; that is a setup for the model that were we to perceive anything material, what we could directly perceive would be only the proximate material cause of the activation of the sensory system. Wrong. When the squirrels or I reach for a pear in the tree, it is the pear we reach for, not the exertions of our muscles or actions of sarcomeres within them. The objects of hearing are events and things in the environment, and communications from conspecifics, beyond stimuli at the sensory receptors (cf. Kelley 1986, 160–62).

In Berkeley’s view, conscious awareness is child only of conscious awareness (1734a, 189). It cannot come most basically from physical causes. Berkeley goes with some occasionalism: heard sounds in us is caused by God putting them in us upon occasion of undulating media such as air. A physical thing such as undulating air cannot, in Berkeley’s view, be the base cause of heard sound (ibid. 164–66; see also O’Callaghan 2009, 33–36; Sorensen 2009, 133).

Berkeley was off the beam of truth from the get-go by his primacy of consciousness (ever-present God) over physical existence. Additionally, advancing science—by Duvernay, Helmholtz, and right up to today (see e.g. Kandel et al. 2013, chap. 30; Grossberg 2021, 404–79)—is the day-by-day wreckage of any lingering credence in Berkeley’s idealism. The physical pathways from nervous receptors to specific cerebral cortical areas and their activities no longer leaves the making of heard sounds (or other occasions of consciousness) by neuronal network activities as only a plausible promissory note. Consciousness is identically certain neuronal network activities, I say. We as conscious minds, real and precious, are those particular processes taking in data from the world and other persons and setting it in connection with various levels of memory and prospective possible actions. We being perceptually conscious simply is we being some of the activities of our brains with each brain’s processing of information from things external to itself. (Note this identity possibility for pain in Nahmias 2005, 311–12, and in Polger and Sufka 2005.)

Today we have scientific explanation of all the experiential phenomena of heat, painful or moderate, raised by Berkeley (and raised in earlier catechisms of skepticism). We have knowledge of the body’s cells and their processes, knowledge of the excitable cells composing nerves and muscles, knowledge of nerve-cell receptors in neuronal circuits for pain, and knowledge of nerve-cell receptors registering rate of heat flow into or out of the body vis-a-vis surrounding media (Kandel et al. 2013, chaps. 22, 24). This last explains physically the phenomenon with felt moderate thermal sensations in the case of the three-bucket demonstration. (This explanation is spelled out in my dialogue Garden Light between Joey and Izzy.)

Early materialist posits of atoms and their features as causes of sensations was without scientific backing. The speculation in days of yore that there are atoms and that pain is caused by atoms having knifelike edges was as speculative as Berkeley’s particulars of idealism. Without the modern discoveries of electricity and electrical circuits, excitable living cells, specific receptor cells, and the neural network activities into which activations of receptors feed, one could not come close to plausible assertion that pain, when functioning properly, consists of a material response to material stimuli. To argue against mechanical philosophies today (which is my own sort of philosophy) using arguments against the mechanical philosophies at the time of Berkeley would be—in an image from Peirce—like using a pea shooter against Gibraltar (Craver and Darden 2013). 

Berkeley would have awareness of the trees outside my window be a composition from simple, elementary bits of conscious awareness such as the colors of the leaves and branches and their sizes and shapes and locations in the scene, the shininess of the various sorts of leaves, and the motions of the branches and leaves in the breezes (1734b, 83). Such activities of our minds, Berkeley conjectured, is from our concurrence in the mind of God, which is taken as the irreducible primitive. Berkeley argues that the conviction that there are occasions of material existents entirely independent of any attending ideas and mind in the occasion is a delusion.

Berkeley observed that our eyes represent the colors of objects differently according to our health, our distance from the objects, or the use of viewing lenses. Such alterability, Berkeley reasoned, shows that colors are not traits of external objects of themselves. Summarizing the optics and medicine to his day, Berkeley says that light shakes the optic nerves, and this occasions sensations of color. But light is supposedly an extended corporal substance and therefore cannot be in the mind or identified with colors in the mind. Color we experience can no more be identified with some physical vibrations of nerves than heard sounds can be identified with undulations in the air, in Berkeley’s account. His rejection of any activities of consciousness arising from physical processes among nerves becomes completely untenable today in the face of pertinent modern science. Sounds as heard can today indeed be identified with physical activities of brain, and those nervous activities being modulated by vibrations of air (or water) on nerve receptors in the inner ear.

From the supposed pure-consciousness ontology of the the so-called secondary qualities, (such as burning, warmth, sound, and color) in sensory experience, Berkeley tried to show the primary qualities such as shape, size, solidity, and motion are also modes of consciousness. His thesis to be argued is that “extension . . . which exists without the mind is neither great nor small, the motion neither swift nor slow, that is, they are nothing at all” (1734b ¶12). Presumably, since all attributes we take for attributes of mind-independent matter are contained in the mind of God, Berkeley need not set them in the mind of man. Rather, man’s mindedness of them would really be occasions of communion between the mind of man and the constant mind of God.

Berkeley claimed that we cannot imagine the primaries but that they are draped in the secondary. Well, many of us can, and that is the refutation of that line of argument to a pure-consciousness ontology of shape and size and motions in space and of space per se. When we do Euclidean geometry—say, consideration of two intersecting straight lines and the plane they determine, the imagined lines need have only contrast in grayness with grayness of the imagined space; contrast in opacity with transparency of the imagined space; or contrast in being selected by imagined kinematical tracing instruments. And the determined plane in the space is only the locus of points determined by and containing both of those lines, so, tied to those imagined lines.

That something is reached by abstraction is no showing that what is reached is not concrete (or potentially concrete, such as any patentable invention in the making or any empirically testable implication of a scientific model). Part of what we mean by “concrete” is that such a thing is in space and time. We should not want to say then that space is in space, but that concretes are in space and that spatiality is an inseparable condition of concretes. Let me say then that space is concrete-biding and not merely abstraction.

As Descartes and Newton maintained, such lines and planes of synthetic, Euclidean geometry are in all the space in which we live, whatever objects and object colors or spins or heat flows are also in that space. Space and its aspects, such as lines and planes, are not constitutive of or cause of those objects and their features; but lines are physical and mind-independent, as instanced by the spin axis of the earth. Berkeley’s handicap in geometric imagination and his rococo style of space, I suggest, is merely a self-deception twist in a mind for purporting an idealist ontology, like all the self-deceiving twists made habits of a mind to never dare the real possibility of the world purely physical and without a super-companion in purely incorporeal, endless consciousness.

Peikoff 1972 bought into Berkeley’s position that in real experience and geometry-imagination there are no primaries without secondaries (492). On that concession, it follows (tenuously) that if the secondaries are only modes of consciousness, the primaries are also only modes of consciousness. Peikoff, of course, rejected the idea that primaries such as space and motion are only modes of consciousness. He counted Berkeley’s reeling of the primaries into the boat of subjective idealism by hook on their supposed necessary drapery of the secondaries, which Berkeley had already rendered pure consciousness (1734b ¶¶ 9–11), as a sound inference to the conclusion that primaries and secondaries must have the same ontological status, purely in the mind or purely in the world (including one’s body as part of the world, part of what is independent of consciousness). I observe that it is not plausible that pain is only in the world, not at all in the mind (cf. 1734a, 174). And space had better not end with the same ontology as pain, not on you life, I say. I reject the concession Peikoff made in this argument of Berkeley’s.

There is, I maintain, scientifically informed reason to reject the primary-secondary quality distinction and criteria for the distinction as they (re)emerged from Galileo and to its cast by Berkeley. There are no occasions of pure-consciousness, purely incorporeal sensations, such as warmth or pain, nor pure-consciousness percepts, such as my view of trees outside my window. Moreover, there is no such inseparability between a line and its occupation by matter possessed of some or other color, such as Berkeley had fancied. As a matter of fact, a line and its occupation are always distinct things, a real distinction in the physical world though the mass-energy be coincident with the line.

Berkeley made the following objection to the conception of things existing independently of any mind: You cannot conceive of such things without conceiving them (1734a, . . . ). That is no showing against this account: conceiving such a mind-independent standing of some things is an inheritance in such a conception of the standing of some things in perception presented in the perception as things independent of the perception.

Berkeley continually supposed that any object of consciousness purported to be an existent independently of consciousness is an object purported to exist “absolute and in itself”, which he took as something invariant and without relation to things not itself. Such a thing is a straw thing of an existent independent of consciousness. All existents—Rand correctly observed—stand in relations with things not themselves (ITOE 39). Berkeley’s is also a backwardness of philosophy by not understanding that independence in a thing’s relations to consciousness is a case of independence more generally of a thing’s relations to other existents not itself.

Berkeley tried to block the reality of mind-independent matter implicated by Newton’s mechanics (1734b ¶¶106, 110,115). Berkeley was still in the old philosopher’s mode of not understanding the First Law (the principle of inertia, from Galileo, improved by Descartes, and perfected by Newton with the right conception of force), still thinking that even inertial motion requires a continual cause. Then too, Berkeley was backward in thinking that Galilean frame-relativity of motion shows that motion is in fundamental relativity to consciousness. (Peikoff imbibes of this same confusion as of 1972 (493), but talking of frame-relativity in special relativity, instead of that relativity in Galileo and Newton.) Berkeley even argued that the choice we have of units in measuring an extension (inches, feet, yards, which we all realize is a choice) shows the thesis that extension requires mind.

Berkeley’s assumption of the intelligibility of mathematics is inconsistent with his denial of any sort of mind-independent matter and extension. “The mathematicians are, as other men, [in error] from the doctrine of abstract general ideas, and the existence of objects without mind” (1734b ¶118). On that, sit the Bishop down in the class of Smith 2010.

Mind-dependence of space touted by Berkeley made for mistaking Kant 1781 as close intellectual kin of Berkeley, with Kant simply moving the mind-dependence entirely to our human minds, human consciousness. Kant soon and adequately corrected misclassification of his idealism as the sort from Berkeley, as we shall see in a later Part.

Rand remarked on the primary-secondary traditional distinction informally within her epistemology seminar (1969–71) transcribed in Rand 1990 (279–82). She rejected that distinction because she understood it to be based on differences in our perceptual systems for perceiving things, and she held we should not impute such (broad) classifications of kinds in perceiving things in the world to classifications of kinds of qualities in the world. She seemed to think also that philosophers endorsing such a distinction where relying on a view of perceptual systems as not having definite determinate manners of operation in response to stimuli, and anyway she thought we should own up to the fact that we perceive both color and length through some perceptual processing, but that processing does not render its products non-veridical with respect to the world.

Those are all good points, although, it is unclear if anyone held the distinction as based on what Rand described. Her points may be of some pertinence to the distinction drawn and endorsed by Thomas Reid, who took the primary qualities to be those given to us as directly informing us of how a quality is in a thing itself in the world, whereas secondary qualities are affections in us, but with great obscurity as to what they are of themselves in the world.

On the history of the varieties of the primary-secondary distinction from the Greeks to Scholasticism to the early moderns to Helmholtz, see the collection of papers in Nolan 2011. Hobbes is neglected therein, but receives good attention in Peikoff 1972.

 (To be continued.) 

 

References

Aydede, M., editor, 2005. Pain: New Essays on Its Nature and the Methodology of Its Study. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Berkeley, G. 1734a. Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. 3rd ed. In Clarke 2008.

——. 1734b. A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. 2nd ed. In Clarke 2008.

Clarke, D. M. 2008. George Berkeley – Philosophical Writings. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Grossberg, S. 2021. Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain – How Each Brain Makes a Mind. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kandel, E. et al. 2013. Principles of Neural Science. 5th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Kant, I. 1781. Critique of Pure Reason. W. Pluhar, translator. 1996. Indianapolis: Hackett.

Kelley, D. 1986. The Evidence of the Senses. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 

Nahmias, E. 2005. The Problem of Pain. In Aydede 2005.

Nolan, L., editor, 2011. Primary and Secondary Qualities. New York: Oxford University Press.

Nudds, M. and C. O’Callaghan, editors, 2009. Sounds and Perception: New Philosophical Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.  

O’Callaghan, C. 2009. Sounds and Events. In Nudds and O’Callaghan 2009.

Peikoff, L. 1991. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. New York: Dutton.

——. 2023 [1972]. Founders of Western Philosophy – Thales to Hume. A transcription of lectures, edited by M. S. Berliner. Santa Ana, CA: Ayn Rand Institute Press.

Polger, T. W., and K. J. Sufka 2005. Closing the Gap on Pain: Mechanism, Theory, and Fit. In Aydede 2005.

Rand, A. 1990 [1966–67]. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. (ITOE) Transcribed oral supplements appended by L. Peikoff and H. Binswanger. New York: Meridian.

Smith, K. 2010. Matter Matters – Metaphysics and Methodology in the Early Modern Period. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sorensen, R. 2009. Hearing Silence: The Perception and Introspection of Absences. In Nudds and O’Callaghan 2009.

[Boydstun]

~Part 3~

Berkeley took on a fight against a version of the primary-secondary distinction among qualities concocted by him for his aims. It was not the distinction as famously formulated by Locke, but as formulated by Galileo. In that earlier version of Galileo (and Descartes), the primary qualities, such as solidity, shapes, sizes, locations, motions of atoms, and interactions of such propertied atoms with each other, are realities in principle accessible by consciousness, but they exist independently of anyone’s consciousness of them. That the qualities classed as secondary are derivative of the one’s classed as primary was not part of science, though it was the conviction of accomplished scientists in the early modern era. Therewith Aristotle’s primitive qualities of wetness-dryness and cold-hot were demoted.

Galileo had supposed the secondary qualities, such as color or heat, to be produced by the primary qualities, but to be entirely subjective effects. Secondary qualities were in existence only where there were living, sensitive beings. Indeed the secondaries were appearances, as distinct from real things. “They reside only in consciousness” (Galileo 1623, 65). That was a modern picture useful to Berkeley for insinuating God into the mechanistic, materialistic program of modern science while not challenging the overturning of Aristotle by that program.

Today it seems strange to think of our sensory responses to stimuli as not real when occurring simply because such subjective episodes are not in the world absent our senses. For example, we take after-images for real and uncover their causes in our visual system (Cytowic 1995, 221; Grossberg 2021, 281–82). The great difference between Galileo and Berkeley is that for Galileo physical sensory responses can give rise to mental phenomena, whereas for Berkeley the physical cannot affect nor effect the mental. Perception of space and its aspects are, by the lights of Berkeley, not perception of something as it is independently of consciousness.

Locke had taken the primary qualities—bulk, figure, situation, motion or rest—to be in the conscious subject as they are directly manifest to be in bodies. Locke had taken the secondary qualities in the conscious subject as having been from some power in aggregations of primary qualities (EU I.VIII.6–26) So, as a power of the primary qualities, secondary qualities are in the mind-independent world. The secondary qualities as experienced must be distinguished from the powers of primary qualities producing them. The primary properties and their powers are in mind-independent space. Spatial relations such triangles as they are in the mind-independent world are just as they are in the mind. Objects such as a water droplet or a hoe are in the world in mind-independent spatial relations. Space and its contents are the mind-independent world in Locke’s considered view (and in Rand’s and in mine) and in common sense.

Locke had called the primary qualities real because they are features in the world independently of our discerning them. By way of contrast, he had called secondary qualities, as experienced, as in conscious awareness, sensible qualities. Locke had not cast secondary qualities as illusory. By not terming them real, he was only saying they are, as we experience them, not something in objects themselves. Activities of minute atoms causing sensations in us are in objects themselves.

Locke supposed our senses can only be affected by impulses. Wrong. Moreover, the early modern imputation of shape and size to elementary hypothetical particles has proven to be an over-stepping. There are other ways by which those properties arise at the macroscopic level. Reliance on “primary qualities” in macroscopic bodies is secure for installing a candle in a holder or a lightbulb in a socket without imputing those qualities to the elementary atoms composing those macroscopic bodies.

Success in installing candle or lightbulb requires certain macroscopic physical constraints and know-how. Those are the conditions from and in wide reality in which our bodies and minds are situated. All other claims of knowledge of world and mind-dependencies succeed as truth only upon such know-how and its constraints, including the mind-independent concrete-biding situation that is space.

(To be continued—next, Kant.)

References

Cytowic, R. E. 1995. The Neurological Side of Neuropsychology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Galileo, G. 1623. The Assayer. S. Drake, translator. In Popkin 1966.

Grossberg, S. 2021. Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain – How Each Brain Makes a Mind. New York: Oxford University Press.

Locke, J. 1690. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (EU). Two volumes. 1959. New York: Dover.

Popkin, R. H., editor, 1966. The Philosophy of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. New York: The Free Press. 

 

Edited October 11, 2024 by Boydstun

[KyaryPamyu]

On 10/11/2024 at 1:37 PM, Boydstun said:

To claim to know that the physical, mind-independent world does not exist is by performative implication to claim to know that nothing exists. That includes the one who makes the claim.

Saying that the physical world exists is not identical with saying there is a mind-independent world. For example, if the physical world were simply qualia, and only qualia, then it would still exist—as qualia. It would still enjoy the dignity of existence and reality; it would still require so-and-so physical organs in order to be sensed; but it would not be mind-independent. I'll elaborate on this next.

In the literal meaning of the term (and also in the common idealist meaning), a "mind-independent" thing is an X which has nothing to do with someone's mental life. For example, when we say that past scientists and philosophers were ignorant of various modern theories, we mean that they were oblivious to them, i.e., that those theories were independent of their minds, in the truest possible sense. If idealism would use Objectivist terminology, it would say that, just as the statement "I don't exist" is self-contradictory, the statement "X is mind independent" is self-contradictory. If you can talk about X, it is de facto part of your mental life; its so-called mind-independence is an empty concept. Hence, everything a mind can say about the relation between world and senses, existence and consciousness, is by courtesy of mentation.

There are some who are not content with the idea that the physical world is perfectly real as qualia, or that the relationship between objects and sense organs is perfectly real as an aspect of mentation. Hence, they demand that this reality must also be duplicated as an existent apart from the domain of mind. Rather than granting reality to the mind, they wish to turn mind into the relatively unreal and phantasmagorical counterpart of another kind of substance (matter) whose character is different in all respects from thought, feeling, image and the likes.

There's nothing that implies talking about the mind is easy. If children and adults speak of the mind in physical terms, this only goes to show how much of a challenge it is to tackle this subject. One may speak as much as he wants about objects entering the mind as honey bees enter the hive. This will not create physical holes in the mind, because mind has no diameter, shape and texture; at best, it can underscore why an "aristocratic" approach to knowledge might be relevant when talking about the mind, which encompasses not just subject and object but both in their relation.

In my opinion, metaphysics is not merely about pure knowledge, but about satisfying a need of the human soul. If someone believes that a certain metaphysics undermines the values she personally holds (e.g. individualism, freedom, science, etc.), she can always come up with a counter-argument for it, one that seems infallible to her—but quite the opposite for the "opposite camp." Because when we refute a philosophy, we do so by means of another philosophy, our own, whose validity we have already decided in advance. It's relatively easy to disprove something when we've already accepted the opposite view. Objectivism perhaps tries to imply otherwise by positing the axioms of philosophy (not of my philosophy, or yours, or anybody's—but rather the axioms of philosophy as such!). Does Berkeley not grant that mind exists, that its identity is as he describes it in his writings, or that it manifests as relations of subjects and objects? Whether he does or not is irrelevant, because the aformentioned is not what Objectivism wants those axioms to mean. So, they don't mean that.

[Boydstun]

Berkeley certainly held that there is something existing independently of our knowing it, and that something is God, a mind. He held to an occasionalism in which God puts into one's conscious experience a burning when one grabs the hot handle of a heated iron skillet. What we have in our conscious experience has to come from some consciousness, not from anything independent of any mind whatever, in the view Berkeley champions. He does not think the arguments back and forth are without potential for changing human minds. He has to use physical things to talk or write, of course, and then with those, springing from ordinary mutual understanding of them, persuade his readers that they are not physical after all.

To that end Berkeley addresses the advancing science of his time, correctly discerning the materialist direction it was tending. For his time, that included arguing in specific ways against atomistic and mechanical philosophy of nature. For the case of Newton, that meant arguing the unreality of mass and force. Our atomism and our mechanics of physics and engineering today, for a sweep of philosophy of nature such as Berkeley's, would include all of the areas of physics and engineering and chemistry and biology. Advances in those are advances in mechanism, which is a broader notion than he or his predecessors could imagine. Unimaginable then too would be the medical remedies I receive against siezures, osteoporosis, and so forth. (The most cautious of the atomists, in natural philosophy of those times, with respect to imputing macroscopic features of bodies to purported atoms and expecting to find mechanisms therewith for macroscopic phenomena, seems to be Gassendi.) To mount a defense of idealism, as proclaiming unreality of all "matter" (mass-energy), today, one would have to take up the specifics of mechanisms (in our modern broader meaning) in neuroscience and so forth parallel to the big effort of Berkeley.

With respect to my particular case, it is not plausible that I'll be among those becoming persuaded that "To be is to be perceived" or that mind-independent mass-energy does not exist. Or that space without discernment of some mind or other does not exist. I have explained where Berkeley goes wrong: his presumption that only mind can affect or effect mind. With modern neuroscience in the books I cited (Kandel; Grossberg), that presumption is less plausible than ever. The more fun thing is yet to come: Kant on space and geometry, and where are his errors in his arguments on those. (What errors in Kant's theoretical philosophy, by the way, one should uproot as if one's life depended on it are not those mistaken ones heard from the founders and main-expositors of the Objectivist philosophy.*) By the end of this essay, we'll have in hand as well development of mathematical analysis and synthesis to the time of Kant and its relation of those to his analytic-synthetic distinction of judgments. That will enrich the finish of my other essay in progress "Necessity and Form in Truths".

Edited October 12, 2024 by Boydstun

[Doug Morris]

On 10/12/2024 at 3:57 PM, KyaryPamyu said:

if the physical world were simply qualia, and only qualia, then it would still exist—as qualia.

How could this even be possible?

On 10/12/2024 at 3:57 PM, KyaryPamyu said:

Rather than granting reality to the mind, they wish to turn mind into the relatively unreal and phantasmagorical counterpart of another kind of substance (matter)

What, exactly does this mean?  What basis do you have for concluding it?

 

[Boydstun]

~SIDEBAR~

In a letter to Des Bosses (1715), Leibniz remarked on Berkeley: "The one in Ireland who attacks the reality of bodies does not seem to bring forward suitable reasons, nor does he explain himself sufficiently. I suspect that he is one of that sort of men who wants to be known for his paradoxes."

Leibniz wrote (winter 1714–15) on the last page of his copy of Berkeley's A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge:

Quote

There is much here that is correct and close to my own view. But it is expressed paradoxically. For it is not necessary to say that matter is nothing, but it is sufficient to say that it is a phenomenon, like the rainbow; and that it is not a substance, but the resultant of substances [monands, in Leibniz's account], and that space is not more real than time, that is, that space is nothing but the order of coexistents, just as time is the order of things that have existed before.

Leibniz in his published writings often referred to the empirical world as a phenomenon such as the rainbow. Descartes had explained how the rainbow is formed, based on optics. Leaving aside Descartes's conjectures concerning micro-operations of light, he got the explanation right, and the formation of rainbows had as solid an explanation as anything in science. By taking the empirical world as a phenomenon such as a rainbow, Leibniz is not insinuating anything shaky about the empirical world. Kant picks up that talk of the empirical world as phenomenal, but his contrast of phenomena is not to some sort of underlying substance such as monads; rather, Kant's contrast is to things as they are in themselves apart from anyone's apprehension or comprehension of them. Newton had distinguished apparent motions of celestial bodies (phenomenon) from their true motions (which explain why we discern those apparent motions telling us by our intelligence what are the true motions). Philosophers' boosting of a phenomenal/true within the empirical world to a grandiose "phenomena" as the whole empirical world put in contrast to murkier and supposedly deeper things behind the empirical world was an unfortunate error and an unsuccessful resistance to the growing success of the scientific revolution.

[Boydstun]

Space Not Relative to Its Discernment

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3

~Part 4~

Kant opposed the empirical idealism of Berkeley. Kant took Berkeley to have assumed that space has its own actuality, but that there are no extended material things in space, where such things are conceived as existing independently of any consciousness of them (A491 B519). Kant was incorrect, as we have seen, in taking Berkeley as thinking of space as having its own mind-independent actuality. Kant put this falsity forth as a distinction between Berkeley’s idealism and transcendental idealism, which is Kant’s own form of idealism. In truth both philosophers denied that space is a thing existing independently of operations of consciousness.

Kant correctly noted that Berkeley took things coming up in inner sense to be actual things ordered in time and took time to be actual, although nothing independent of consciousness (ibid.). In his own idealism, Kant had it that

Quote

the objects of outer intuition, just as they are intuited in space, are also actual; and that all changes are actual in time just as inner sense presents them. For since space is already a form of the intuition that we call outer, and since without objects in this space there would be no empirical presentation at all, we can and must assume in it extended beings as actual—and the same is the case also with time. But this space itself, together with this time, and along with both of them all appearances are yet in themselves no things; rather, they are nothing but presentations, and cannot exist at all outside our mind. (A491–92 B520)

Kant had argued earlier in that main work Critique of Pure Reason (1781{A}, 1787{B}) that we discern the objects and actions in perception as intuitions and we engage the space and time in which those objects and actions are presented as intuitions. Moreover, in his account, space and time are forms for any intuitions presented as outer. And for Kant, famously, those forms of intuition are at hand from the constitution of the mind; they are not forms already in the world. Time is the form of any inner intuitions, and time is also one of the forms for all outer intuitions. Space is the other necessary form of all outer intuitions.

I mentioned a mistaken difference between Berkeley and Kant on space. Here is a true difference: Kant has space as a form under which sensations are given order in their presentations to us.

Leibniz had held that space “Does not depend upon such and such situation of bodies, but it is that order which renders bodies capable of being situated, and by which they have a situation among themselves when they exist together” (1716, 27; further, Khamara 2006; De Risi 2007, 167–225, 382–428). This statement is made in the course of Leibniz’s exchange with the Newtonian Samuel Clarke, and throughout these arguments by Leibniz, he is proceeding while granting for the sake of argument certain tenants which he actually rejects. The quotation I selected for Leibniz’s usual casting of space as an order of existence shows Leibniz giving a more independent status to space than Leibniz awards it in his full view. Spatial relations, in his full intellectual viewpoint, are not primitives, but are reducible to monadic properties, and objects in space, on which the existence of space depends, and those objects themselves depend on non-spatial monads. Material objects, thence space, were created by God, of course. But for God’s creative powers, space would not exist. Nevertheless, Leibniz does not have space so directly dependent on mind (God or immaterial monads) as either Berkeley or Kant. In his mature philosophy, Kant had no monads or other underlying substance, and he replaced Leibniz’s undergirding of objects and space as reliable “phenomena” born of monadic substance, replaced with objects and space as “objective” presentations, backed with things in themselves, with the spatial aspect as ordering form from human mind.

That Kant should find all sensory experience to be ordered in space and time is to me not surprising because such setting is what we have in mind and mean by something being a concrete, and it is only concretes (with their belonging-formalities) that we have before us as objects of sensory perception. One does not have to appeal to a necessary contribution of the forms space and time as forms of outer intuition and as from one’s mind. I have lately called space concrete-biding. Space is part of the existence of concretes, the preeminent kind of existents in Rand’s philosophy and in mine. Space exists, independently of mind, and with the necessity that Existence exists. In my metaphysics, space is in the category Situation. I have given arguments for the axiomatic standing of existents being situated.[1] Such an established axiomatic standing is the replacement for Kant’s conception that spatiality of objects of sense are a priori conditions of sensory perceptions. The roles that Kant gives to his items that are a priori can be taken on, I maintain, by certified axiomatic standings, in Rand’s sense of philosophic axioms.

Kant writes of things as they are in themselves. Within that rubric (ding-an-sich) is included the notion of things as they are independently of any cognizance of them. But in both Kant and in predecessors of Kant, there is a persistent slippage from thinking of things as they are in themselves to things as they are without any relations they have to things not themselves. Rand correctly attacked that latter notion as an empty class. Things as they are are never things without any relationships to things not themselves.[2] Then any existent we know can only be a thing that stands in relations to things not itself. (The totality of all existence is exceptional by having only relation to its parts.) Wherever Kant writes of things in themselves, we should sensibly replace it with things as they are, including their specific potential relations to things not themselves, which includes their specific potential relations to knowers. There is no further level behind an existent as it is, such as the level “thing in itself” in Kant’s sense.

Kant allows that from what is actual in direct experience, one can properly, under a few layers of a priori laws, infer actualities of things not directly experienced. But what is actual in Kant’s idealism is what is bumped into as it is in our cognition without established specific grasps of the actual object as it is in itself, which is taken as significant limitation of the power of reason by Kant. In truth Kant’s things in themselves are nothing. Things as they are, things with external relations, are everything.

In the sequel, I’ll address what Kant means by “intuition” and “form of intuition” and what are his arguments for his position of transcendental idealism concerning space. I’ll discuss Kant’s dissolution of the primary-secondary quality distinction in his idealism, in contrast to Berkeley’s dissolution of it in his idealism. I’ll show how to replace Kant’s transcendental, formal idealist perspective with realism of space, ready in the world, in all its parts, at all times, even without anyone’s discernment of some particular part of it at present.* 

(To be continued.)

Notes

[1] “A counterexample is an example. An example is embedded in a situation. Then too, the existents in the example are situated with a mind and its body. There can be no existents in a counterexample that are not capable of being situated. Existence is situation” (Boydstun 2021, 90).

[2] “If anything were actually ‘immeasurable’, it would bear no relationship of any kind to the rest of the universe, it would not affect nor be affected by anything else in any manner whatever, it would enact no causes and bear no consequences—in short, it would not exist”  (ITOE 39).

References

Ariew, R. 2000. G. W. Leibniz and Samuel Clarke – Correspondence. Indianapolis: Hackett.

Boydstun, S. 2021. Existence, We. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 21(1):65–104.

De Risi, V. 2007. Geometry and Monadology. Basel: Birkhäuser.

Kant, I. 1781, 1787. Critique of Pure Reason. W. S. Pluhar, translator. 1996. Indianapolis: Hackett.

Khamara, E. J. 2006. Space, Time, and Theology in the Leibniz-Newton Controversy. Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag.

Leibniz, G. W. 1716. Fourth Letter to Clarke. In Ariew 2000.

Rand, A. 1966–67. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (ITOE). Expanded 2nd ed. H. Binswanger and L. Peikoff, editors. 1990. New York: Meridian.

Edited October 25, 2024 by Boydstun

[Boydstun]

Space Not Relative to Its Discernment

~Part 5~

Kant’s concept of a sensory intuition is not identical with our more recent concept of a sensory percept. (I'll begin that point here and continue it in Part 6.) Spatial relations are part of the deliverances of a sensory percept. The ventral stream of cerebral cortex processing feeds to our perception and recognition of objects in a percept while the dorsal stream feeds percept information concerning location of objects in space and how to act on objects. A percept is the resulting state of conscious awareness, our primary form of awareness of the world. The ventral and dorsal processing streams occur in mammalian brain. The two streams have distinct computationally complementary processing patterns, these two patterns are interlocked with each other, and a balance between the two must be maintained for getting a percept.

Sensory elements are supplied from a scene in the world to sense-receptors, causing alterations of receptor state. Nervous receptions of those elements are processed by the brain, reassembling them in a split second for perception of objects and motions in the source scene. Our perceptual consciousness begins with those percepts produced, including the flow from percept to percept, with lower levels of memory forming our episodes of perception. Cognitively, our percepts are our direct awareness of the world, and our discoveries of their pre-conscious formation processes and equipment are made from direct and instrument-aided percepts and reasoning over those (not from introspection concerning our mentality in our experience).

Visual percepts include not only detection of qualia, such as brightness and color differences between object and background, but aspects such as the following vertical centerline in what is called an amodal percept. Both sorts of deliverances in percepts are advantages for success in survival.

                                  ————————

————————

                                  ————————

————————

                                   ————————

————————

                                  ————————

How enormously different is this conception of the process of getting our perceptions, different from conceptions of that process in the time of Kant, all the centuries before him and a couple more after him! The empiricist conception that we passively receive the world in perception like wax receiving a stamp was an image with which perceptions could be comprehended as faithful to the world. We can today concur that there is a passivity and fidelity in our percepts, but the closer analogue-image for that is not one available for the thinkers of yore.

When one tunes a radio to receive a broadcast e-m wave frequency and the information placed on those e-m waves at the transmitting station, the receiver in the radio is passively, faithfully receiving the signal as it is delivered to the receiver. But we know the receiver has to be turned on to have its antenna live by circuits with their capacitors and inductors active for receiving the signal. Our nervous system is much more complicated than that, but the general schema has some parallel: information from external sources is received and processed by the awake brain, tracking what was sent by the source, not radically unfaithful or replaced with a receiver-generated signal appearing to have been received. And this receiving function requires suitable structures and their right activation.

Percepts are the elements from which conceptual awareness is made, and I’ll be arguing that this is so for not only concepts in everyday human life, in science, and in philosophical accounts; but also in mathematical knowledge. Space presented in a percept will have in that perceptual consciousness parts of space in relation to larger parts, such as the portions of space in an empty measuring cup in relation to the whole cup. Presented in the percept also is the divide between space inside the cup and space outside the cup. Filling with milk to one-half cup gives also in sensory percepts the divide between space empty and space filled.

Kant would insist that thinking of space as given in percepts, cognized in just the way we cognize the measuring cup and the episode of pouring milk into it, must be false. He would be correct, but for the wrong reasons.

From the day one was born, one was orienting one’s head in different directions in response to lights and sounds located in the surrounding space. It was a milestone in one’s development to be able to center space on locations of objects and persons not one’s own location. From then on, one sees and hears and moves with apprehension of the surrounding space as arrayed with various objects, including oneself, with various locations all together moment by moment. A normal sufficiently mature human can draw a map of that layout on the ground.

(To be continued.)

Edited November 2, 2024 by Boydstun

[Boydstun]

Interlude between Parts 5 and 6

Over several decades, I have sorted what is incorrect or inadequate from what is really fine in Ayn Rand’s philosophy. That is natural in reading and absorbing any philosophy. In the history of philosophies with some elaborated comprehensiveness to them, large portions of older philosophies amount to doctrines for which we now look mainly to modern science for best light. What had been known as natural philosophy gave over to physical sciences.

Kant’s philosophy, by his own election, is known by three names: transcendental, critical, and formal idealism (1783, 4:375). Each names a major aspect of his mature, famous philosophy. What is in my sights in the present study is his formal idealism. Kant takes up that descriptive name for his position by way of contrasting his idealism with Berkeley’s. The latter idealism, Kant calls a material sort of idealism because it denies the existence of mind-independent matter. Kant does not make that denial. His argument is rather against the mind independence of the spatial relations in which matter is encountered. Space seems given as in the world independently of our minds apprehending the world, but, Kant argues, that is not the true character of space.

It is by reflection on space that Kant begins argument for his system of formal idealism. Naturally, he writes within the stage that mathematics and science had attained by his time. He is mindful of the differing philosophical characterizations of mathematics preceding him. Then too, Kant grapples with the opposing views on space held by Leibniz and Newton.

A big embarrassment eventuated for Kant’s doctrines on the nature of space in his formal idealism. Kant’s characterization of space and our cognitions concerning it expressly entailed that Euclidean geometry was the only possible sort of geometry. Several years after Kant, the hyperbolic and elliptic geometries were discovered. Something was amiss in Kant’s theory, we know by that later development alone. I want to uncover Kant’s erroneous thinking on mathematics directly from consideration of his arguments. 

Some of the axioms for hyperbolic and elliptic geometries are also common to Euclidean geometry. My expectation is that characterizing those common axioms under color of Kant’s conception of mathematical knowledge is as unimpressive as his attempt to bring time under that coloration. That is, I expect to find that Kant’s winning suit for persuading so many that his philosophy of geometry and space (thence his formal idealism more widely) was correct was how his account was the best going for how we derive theorems in Euclidean geometry by labeled constructions and inferences over them. Such theorems require more than the axioms common to Euclidean, hyperbolic, and elliptic geometry.

In ways perhaps evolving, philosophy has its own characteristic way of taking things in and processing them. Distinctively, philosophy delivers a widest comprehension of all that is, assimilating new results from the special sciences and mathematics, and bringing it all onto the paths and networks of human life with death its absolute assured ending and always-condition. Then too, today, working with experts in the special sciences, philosophy is co-contributor to disambiguation of some leading concepts in the special sciences (such as “representation” and “mechanism” in neuroscience). Occasionally, a new result from science bears clearly on some broad principle that many philosophers have long settled on concerning all existents. I have sometimes been able to dig in a bit and follow enough of the science to resolve whether the philosophy principle truly needs alteration. Examples would be the philosophical tenets that attributes and actions always belong to entities.

Part of my task in studying philosophies, past and present, is to view them when refreshed in the advances of pertinent modern science I have grasped and to see how the philosophy fares and perhaps yet lives when the updated, modern science is incorporated into the philosophy’s comprehensive organization. For any philosophy, then, in its philosophy of mind and epistemology, neuroscience and developmental cognitive psychology must be among inputs the refreshed philosophy enfolds. Our physics, chemistry, and biology must refresh old metaphysics. Our biology, psychodynamics, and anthropology are necessary inputs for refreshed, most-solid ethical theory.

Which particular areas of science and mathematics are pertinent to a philosophy depends on specifics in the particular philosophy. This was the situation in my refreshment of Rand’s distinctive analysis of concepts in terms of measurement-omission (Boydstun 2004). For that refreshment and making more precise and more solid, I needed to study modern measurement theory, modern geometry, and developmental cognitive psychology.

General metaphysics should aim for specific location and circumscription of all content of science and mathematics. Practically speaking, I find the best I can do towards that goal is, while remaining at the high traditional philosophic level of generality, bring science and mathematics to bear with alertness for contradictions and other connections. General metaphysics should bring all within its wide compass into a single comprehension of the plain world in which we reside and act. General metaphysics is a grasp of widest reality, best we can muster. In Rand’s or my general metaphysics, that widest everywhere reality is existence and its broadest divisions, including divisions of (existence is) identity into broad categories, division of existence into actual and potential, and division of existence into concrete and not-concrete.

Partly at odds with Rand, I have identified existence with the physical. Two strands of physics have formulated the appropriate most general concepts and principles of physics: mechanics and thermodynamics. Right general metaphysics must be consistent with those, of course, but must be also reflections informed by them. Works in physics on how macroscopic matter arises from quantum mechanics of molecules composing macroscopic matter and work in chemistry on how chemical bonds and molecular spatial configuration arise from atomic quantum mechanics are the close intellectual kin and friend of metaphysics in the task of integrating all into the plain world in which we reside and act.

The last ten years, I have aimed at formulating my own philosophy logically adequate to be a replacement for Rand’s. At the same time, for my satisfaction, mine must be logically adequate to replace the mature philosophy of Kant. That means I must develop a philosophy of mathematics replacing Kant’s.

One must master a philosophy if one is to be truly sorting what is correct and incorrect in it. Kant’s basic metaphysical stand in KrV is that there are things as they are in themselves (ding an sich selbst), which are unknowable to us, and there are things as they are gotten in our cognitions, with the latter being grounded, through sensations, by the former. That is a little surprising since grounding is a relation of a thing to something not itself. Nevertheless, that is Kant’s steadfast mature framework.

Readers of mine know that I shall count a thing as nothing at all if the thing is purported to exist with no relations to things not itself. Correcting Kant, I suggest replacing his thing-in-itself-which-amounts-to-nothing for ground of our cognition, replacing that zero with merely the sum of things known and unknown of existents. Let that existing thing be ground of our cognitions. Let us replace thing-in-itself with thing-as-it-is, a thing to which we stand in relation without murkiness. Let us stay in the world as it is, and, within that: refute Kant’s arguments of why his formal-idealist account of space and of synthetic geometry is required. That refutation and replacement of Kant’s account of space is my aim in the sequel of this study “Space Not Relative to Its Discernment.”

(To be continued.)

[Boydstun]

References for “Interlude”

Allison, H. and P. Heath, editors, 2002. Immanuel Kant – Theoretical Philosophy after 1781. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Boydstun, S. 2004. Universals and Measurement. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 5(2):271–305.

Kant, I. 1781, 1787. Critique of Pure Reason (KrV). W. Pluhar, translator. Indianapolis: Hackett.

——. 1783. Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics. G. Hatfield, translator. In Allison and Heath 2002.

Edited November 20, 2024 by Boydstun

[Boydstun]

To my final paragraph of “Interlude” I should add that my suggested substitute for Kant’s thing-in-itself as ground of our cognitions is perhaps what Kant had in mind for that grounding anyway in an inconstant way. My first serious exposure to Kant was in my senior year of college (1971), when I took a graduate seminar on Critique of Pure Reason under Prof. J.N. Mohanty. He was from India (he has an autobiography titled From the Ganges to the Red River), and his Ph.D. was from Göttingen, Germany. Many years later, some of his students put together a book of his notes for lectures he had made on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. 

In those lectures, while treating the Transcendental Aesthetic, which will be major in my engagement with Kant on space, Mohanty says:

“Kant has three usages of ‘object’ –(i) The indeterminate object (ii) the determinate object (iii) the thing in itself. Though he should not say that the thing in itself is an object because it is not knowable. So when Kant says that sensation is produced by the object he can only talk about the indeterminate object. He cannot say, e.g., the chalk produces it. But he can say there is something out there which produces it. But that something out there cannot be the thing in itself, because the concept of causality on his theory does not apply to the thing in itself.” (46)

—J.N. Mohanty Lectures on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (2014)

So my suggested substitute might be not so very distant from how Kant was really conceiving the cause of sensations.

[Boydstun]

 

Mathematical works in Kant's personal library were these.

On the Greek mathematical tradition as background to Kant, see Chapter 6 of Kant's Mathematical World – Mathematics, Cognition, and Experience (2022) by Daniel Sutherland.