I’m curious how objectivists would respond to Kant’s criticism of certainty of perception because it could be that time and space are intuitions of perception
Starting with the thread title, we would point out that that an unsupported assertion is not an argument, it is just an unsupported assertion. Moving to the body sentence, “it could be that time and space are intuitions of perception” is also an unsupported assertion without any evidence. On the contrary, it is not possible that time and space are intuitions of perception. Dwelling perhaps unnecessarily long on the response, we might point out that perception is automatic and intuition refers to knowledge subconsciously acquired, so how in the world would it invalidate the concepts of “time” and “space” if we can instantly conclude that my hand is in front of my face now, but not 3 seconds earlier?
More generally, Objectivists require that a claim be presented in the form of a verifiable proposition, accompanied with sufficient evidence for the components of the proposition to at least waste our time in discussion. So your next move would be to present an actual proposition (go for something formalized if you can), and evidence for the various theses necessary to have a valid proof.
5 hours ago, HappyDays said:
I’m curious how Objectivists would respond to Kant’s criticism of certainty of perception because it could be that time and space are intuitions of perception.
There is no uncertainty of perception by Kant in perception unless what one is trying to perceive things as they are in themselves, which in Kant’s view, and the view of his predecessors, would require intellectual, not simply sensory, intuition. Kant held that we possess no such faculty of intellectual intuition, and Rand concurs when she rejects the ultra realism of Plato regarding universals as forms. Kant would say that one were silly to be trying to grasp things as they are in themselves rather than things as they are presented in our forms of perception or thought. Sensory perception, in Kant’s psychology, cannot err, because the senses do not make judgments. That the form in which we perceive objects is as in space and time, he argues, is because those are forms given to our experience by the constitution of our minds. Objectivists should tackle those arguments, but Kant was not saying, nor should he, that because those forms are from the side of the subject, the world we perceive is an illusion. He denies that outlook outright in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason.
Objectivism denies there are any existents which as they are, independently of consciousness, have no relations to things not themselves (ITOE 39). This is consistent with “Existence is identity,” meaning “if no identity, no existence.” Rand’s thought was that in any identity there will be relations of an existent to things not itself. So, I say, Objectivists should reject the idea, older than Kant, that there are things as they are which are things in themselves, and one should not go looking for any such thing. They do not exist.
From my present work in this area:
Kant had it
Quote
that 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 this main work The Critique of Pure Reason (1781[A], 1787**)** 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’ll address what Kant means by “intuition” in this context and what are his arguments for his position of transcendental idealism. I’ll show how to replace his 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. 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 likeness to such an object as it is in itself. Establishment of such a likeness, sameness, or difference is impossible to establish, in Kant’s view.
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. 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 (ITOE 39). Things as they are are never things without any relationships to things not themselves. Then any existent we know can only be a thing that stands in relations to things not itself. 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.
(To be continued here.)