Timeline for Are we born with Kantian Categories?
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| Sep 9, 2017 at 10:19 | answer | added | Marquard Dirk Pienaar | timeline score: 2 | |
| Apr 13, 2017 at 12:42 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
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| Dec 29, 2016 at 15:21 | comment | added | Philip Klöcking♦ | Related: Förster in *The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy, p. 127, explains why Kant thinks that judgements of tastes are understood as being universal and refers among others to 5:219. Essentially the story is that beauty is the fruitful and animating interplay and accordance of imagination and understanding (two faculties every finite rational being shares!). Same faculties means we can presuppose that others share this feeling. This implies the supposed identity of faculties to a certain extend (by Kant himself) and could easily - as a faculty - be described as "we are born with them". | |
| Dec 19, 2015 at 5:37 | answer | added | Nelson Alexander | timeline score: -1 | |
| Dec 16, 2015 at 16:38 | answer | added | sourcepov | timeline score: 0 | |
| Sep 30, 2014 at 16:19 | comment | added | Howard Pautz | @jobermark - understood and ditto here. The old mind-body problem in all its forms and derivations frequently con-fuddles discussion :)) | |
| Sep 30, 2014 at 1:08 | comment | added | user9166 | @HowardPautz I am not sure that has anything to do with limitation or its lack. It is just pushing back against the naive notion that we need the whole material world, just as it happens to be, in order to think. | |
| Sep 30, 2014 at 1:04 | comment | added | user9166 | @HowardPautz The question behind Kantian categories is whether there is are things that all though must have in common in order for us to recognize it as thought. If your thinking rocks do not have categories, Kant would suggest, we are unlikely to be able to tell that they are thinking. He imagines we do not need something as serious as time in common with a thinking being to know it is thinking, (since he is a good Christian who believes in Angels) but we need something. Basically, we need adjectives. | |
| Sep 30, 2014 at 0:58 | comment | added | user9166 | @HowardPautz Thought is not what makes observation. We do not presume quantum mechanics waited for us, to begin. So the cat and the brother might still both be dead and alive as long as the system remains isolated and closed. It was Hilbert, and half of the people in the world who miss the point of the proof, not you personally, who expected more of computing. However 'meta' these remain not false, and not dilemmas. You cannot wish them away like this. They establish real limits. | |
| S Sep 29, 2014 at 14:49 | history | bounty ended | Rex Kerr | ||
| S Sep 29, 2014 at 14:49 | history | notice removed | Rex Kerr | ||
| Sep 29, 2014 at 0:36 | comment | added | Howard Pautz | 'They are statements of limits' is precisely the meta false dilemma: "to limit or not to limit," that is the false dichotomy. Put Schroedinger's thinking brother in with the cat, but even if the wave function of the box they are in has not yet collapsed, the Copenhagen interpretation thus collapses. (And I expect my computer to make me coffee, no more ... :)) So aren't Kantian Categories similar to making statements of limits (true, false, arbitrary, or undefined) or at the same level as combinatorics, which is just a numerical analog representing boundaries (limits) ? | |
| Sep 28, 2014 at 15:14 | comment | added | user9166 | They are not false dilemmas, they are statements of limits. The Copenhagen interpretation really allows for the silly cat -- if you can't deal with that, don't use it. Hilbert's Entscheidungsproblem was a genuine question, and we got the answer we didn't want -- your computer cannot make sense even of itself, don't expect so much. | |
| Sep 27, 2014 at 22:17 | comment | added | Howard Pautz | @jobermark - had to chuckle. Indeed. Orbital dynamics is a great example of circumventing all classes of the three-body problem. To me, the Turing machine and Schrödinger´s dead-alive cat, are examples of what I'd call 'meta-level false philosophical dilemmas' - Turing "built" that infernal machine, Schrödinger "put" his dear cat in that deadly-lively box. Meta-anthropomorphism? Aren't combinatorics just powerful extensions of human thought? Gödel and Heisenburg just showed the world doesn't fit in neat boxes - it's a messy place. We just haven't gotten over that yet ... | |
| Sep 27, 2014 at 17:07 | comment | added | user9166 | @HowardPautz, how do we come by this crazy Turing machine obsession? Either Goedel, or Heisenberg basically says we do not live in any kind of Turing machine, with or without quantum oracles. If we take the whole of orbital dynamics or something just insanely more powerful than computation as an oracle, then who cares? | |
| Sep 26, 2014 at 18:52 | comment | added | user9166 | @RexKerr But I thought you were saying instincts like our spatial perception do not signify as thought in this regard, as long as they are just taking impressions. They clearly give us an internal state that gets this processing. But at least initially, there is no ability to manipulate in the sense of applying a will to choose when and how to process in this way, or to back off from the results of the process and disbelieve them. | |
| Sep 26, 2014 at 6:29 | comment | added | Rex Kerr | @HowardPautz - Being (equivalent to being) embedded in a Turing machine makes it unsurprising that we can find qualities that match those of Turing machines. That was my only point. | |
| Sep 26, 2014 at 6:26 | comment | added | Rex Kerr | @jobermark - Mental manipulation revolves around having internal states that can be decoupled from external stimuli but which are akin to them in that similar processing can occur on both. Of course you can chase the question down until you find out that we don't have a great account of what mental manipulation is, but that is pointless since we know perfectly well that it has very different properties to typical e.g. chemistry. The question is open precisely because we do not have an exquisite theory of what mental manipulation is. | |
| Sep 24, 2014 at 17:24 | comment | added | Mozibur Ullah | @jobermark:'Genes think': Strictly speaking though that is straying outside of Kants project - though thats not to say that one can't assign them some kind of subjective sense; but it would be wholly alien from ours. | |
| Sep 24, 2014 at 16:14 | comment | added | user9166 | Actually instinct is already more than a category, and is using them. Space is an instinct, whereas only quantity is a category. IMHO genes think -- after all, they solve problems -- others have a more stringent definition. But I think that even if there is a place where you pass over into thinking from mechanism, but it necessarily requires the mechanism to proceed to that point anyway, the attributes of the mechanism remain necessary for thinking and will necessarily be observed by the thinking process. The question is whether there would be a way to get to 'thinking' without it. | |
| Sep 24, 2014 at 1:32 | comment | added | Howard Pautz | @jobermark - wouldn't Kant consider non-thought based instinctual behavior also as a category? @ Rex Kerr, if being fully embedded in a mambo Turing machine makes categories uninteresting, wouldn't that also ultimately mean we have no need to question anything? Why would a cog wonder about his or her cog-ness? Interesting topic! | |
| Sep 23, 2014 at 17:16 | comment | added | user9166 | That something is discovered materially, does not mean it is necessarily simply an aspect of matter. Analysis can follow that and discover a deeper form of necessity that it already assumed. | |
| Sep 23, 2014 at 17:13 | comment | added | user9166 | Even if you do not think instinct is thought, and 'thought' arises later, it arises at a point where you have experienced enough of your own purely instinctual behavior that those forms of thought are necessarily well-modeled in your mind. You begin thinking about getting what you want when you already have the habit of wanting it. You scheme for more once 'more' means something. | |
| Sep 23, 2014 at 17:07 | comment | added | user9166 | So, what constitutes 'mental manipulation'. If you want a clear external vision of your own instincts as a precondition for thought, then most four-year olds don't think. But I see them trick me, and I resent being dumber than something that does not think. | |
| Sep 23, 2014 at 16:59 | comment | added | Rex Kerr | @jobermark - I think that it is critically important whether we include a foundational mentally manipulable model of quantity or category, or just note that we are embedded in a universe observationally indistiguishable from the output of a Turing machine. The latter renders Kantian categories utterly uninteresting, as everything is quantifiable. (Headline: "People in universe are made of the stuff of the universe.") Examining the parallels between formal epistemology and internal construction of knowledge is where the question of Kantian categories is of interest. | |
| Sep 23, 2014 at 15:51 | comment | added | user9166 | Kant's contention is that thought necessarily involves quantity (and each of the other categories). We might know, for humans, that this is a side effect of the way the body does physics. But the question is whether there is anything we could consider thought that would not require and proceed from some analog of this physiology. | |
| Sep 23, 2014 at 15:48 | comment | added | user9166 | The question is not about how the unconscious process might formulate this as a statement. It is about whether something that will eventually become conscious (human) thought is necessarily dependent upon a limited range of mechanisms. If so then, those are inescapable components of thought. Whehter you get there by looking at the brain, or by looking at things more 'spritually', you get the same list. | |
| Sep 23, 2014 at 15:41 | comment | added | user9166 | @RexKerr Go all the way. That we have evolved neurons based upon the balance of quantities of ions available, and not some other kind of system for interacting with sensory input constitutes an instinct toward quantity. It has as its effect that a foetus can judge how far to move its arm when the mother stands up, so as not to have its whole weight land on the fragile structure. We judge quantity, and we cannot escape it, because of how we are constituted. | |
| Sep 23, 2014 at 15:34 | comment | added | Mozibur Ullah | @kerr: thats at the external physical level; rather than at the interior subjective layer. | |
| Sep 23, 2014 at 15:24 | comment | added | Rex Kerr | @jobermark - It needn't be formulated quantitatively, just implemented that way. For example, our eyes absorb photons which (indirectly) reduces the flow of ions into our photoreceptor cells. Do we say this is an "instinct towards quantity"? | |
| Sep 23, 2014 at 14:35 | comment | added | user9166 | @RexKerr How would that concept of statistics work without any underlying instinct toward quantity? Something cannot be 'more likely' without 'more'-ness. How can we correlate behaviors with positive outcomes without the underlying category of quality? Something cannot be pleasant or unpleasant without the notion of 'being a certain way'. Etc. etc. for each of them. | |
| Sep 23, 2014 at 0:44 | comment | added | Howard Pautz | I wonder if the premise, that categories are required to conceptualize, is not a given. If consciousness can subsume experience - which it clearly does as the "self" can think about and research the nature of its own thinking - then categorical underpinnings are moot. Consider, how could Kant arrive at seeing categories as a priori unless he could get behind / above them, as it were? Just because Kant's semi-objectification excluded thinking as priori in his analysis (concepts of concepts) does not mean the process of observation requires definition to work. He anthropomorphized experience. | |
| Sep 22, 2014 at 21:02 | answer | added | user9166 | timeline score: 2 | |
| S Sep 22, 2014 at 18:54 | history | bounty started | Rex Kerr | ||
| S Sep 22, 2014 at 18:54 | history | notice added | Rex Kerr | Draw attention | |
| Sep 22, 2014 at 18:52 | comment | added | Rex Kerr | I don't know that the premise is true--that we require Kantian categories to synthesize concepts. Mathematical/statistical clustering provides an alternative possibility. So I'm not sure whether Kantian categories are innate...it's a good question! | |
| Sep 20, 2014 at 8:17 | comment | added | Einer | If we have experiences, the conditions to have experiences must be fulfilled. So do babies have experiences? I'd say: Yes. Are we born with them? Most def! - if you follow Kant that is. | |
| Sep 20, 2014 at 5:37 | comment | added | Mozibur Ullah | @infatuated:Kantian categories aren't 'Rational'; they're a priori; how do you suppose sensual information is organised by the infant mind? | |
| Sep 20, 2014 at 5:07 | comment | added | infatuated | My answer to that basically answers this question as well. No, we are not born by any rational concept including Kantian Categories. Rational concepts emerge from conscious distinction between sensual phenomena which in turn takes place after adequate sensual experience by the infant which usually takes months. | |
| Sep 20, 2014 at 3:15 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/#!/StackPhilosophy/status/513164525039009793 | ||
| Sep 20, 2014 at 2:36 | history | edited | Mozibur Ullah |
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| Sep 20, 2014 at 1:46 | comment | added | Conifold | Good question. Since according to Kant categories are the only way to make sense of phenomena, not just us but anything capable of learning must have them. So I am guessing yes. | |
| Sep 20, 2014 at 0:26 | history | asked | Mozibur Ullah | CC BY-SA 3.0 |