Kant is hard to pin down on these issues. I agree with your assessment Jeff,
and I did order Smyth’s books that you mentioned (thanks!). But here is a bit
of what I say of Kant in DMM:
"Apart from Kant's ontological commitments, I find this an appealing
perspective. In fact it is easy to see the roots of American Pragmatism in
Kant's writing, in particular in his views of realism and the limits of human
knowledge. Kant's notion of a priori categories are perhaps best translated in
my terms into the idea of an inborn ability of humans to generalize and learn
by any means. Kant rightly observed in effect that without a learner there is
no learning. Thus humans must be born to be learners – individual humans have
innate capacities to adjust to the world that they encounter (as all living
creatures do). His view is that such learning is partially the application of
highly specific categories to shape our perceptions. But statistical learners,
even computer simulations, show that not all learning requires specific
concepts.
Moreover, as we see later on, Kant's notions of the
interrelationship between experience and intelligence fail to consider other
mediators between the external world and the mind. First, like many before him,
and most after him, Kant saw the mind rather than the individual as the locus
of learning (which is why he had little to say about interactions between
reasoning, emotions, and physiology). Second, Kant overlooked the richness of
potential unconscious tacit knowledge, acquired during one's life – failing to
recognize the vast amount of learning that is subliminal ("subceptive
learning", Rogers (1996 [1961])). Third, some of Kant's discussion of
subjective vs. objective knowledge seems best recast in terms of emotion and
perception, i.e. complementary modes of relating to an object, which may be
objective or subjective and which do not follow from properties of the object
itself but from the role of experience-based dark matter in our relationship to
the world in which we live and form a part. For example, take his illustration
of the perception of a house, in comments on Leibniz:
"The I think must be able to accompany all my representations; for
otherwise something would be represented in me that could not be thought at
all, which is as much as to say that the representation would either be
impossible or else at least would be nothing at all." (Kant B162)
Thus at once Kant writes off dark matter of the mind as "nothing at
all" because it is not and often may not or even cannot be the object of "I
think," nor is it simply representational. Obviously, "knowing-how," therefore,
does not follow under a Kantian conception of apperception. But neither does
knowledge of grammatical rules, taste in clothes, likes in foods, prelinguistic
experiences as a child, muscle memory and so on. Kant's view of apperception
therefore seems acutely inadequate …”
> On Apr 8, 2019, at 12:08 PM, Jeffrey Brian Downard <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
> John, Dan, List,
>
> In holding that our presentation of space as a whole has an a priori in
> character, I do not believe that Kant was arguing in the first Critique that
> we have a biological instinct to see things in a Euclidean way. Again, I
> believe that Smyth's Forms of Intuition: an Historical Introduction to the
> Transcendental Aesthetic provides an interpretation that is sensitive to the
> texts and the sources from which Kant was drawing in developing these
> arguments. It is worth noting that from early on (e.g., see "Questions
> Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man"), Peirce interprets Kant's
> account of our experience of space in a similar way and points out in a long
> footnote that his own remarks about our perceptions involving spatiality and
> temporality should not be interpreted as contrary to Kant's views on the main
> points.
>
> Attributing to Kant the view that the a priori character of the presentation
> of space implies that we have a biologically "instinctive" theory of space
> that is inherently Euclidean in character runs directly at odds with the fact
> that Kant was engaged in close discussions with Lambert who developed a
> fairly extensive system of perspective geometry. In the transcendental
> aesthetic, Kant is asking "what are the formal conditions for mapping in our
> common sense and our scientific cognitions from one temporal or spatial
> perspective onto another?" As far as I am able to determine, Peirce's
> phenomenological theory is an attempt to generalize on this sort of question.
> For both Kant and Peirce, biological explanations of what is or is not
> instinctive will not answer philosophical questions about the formal
> relations that are necessary for making valid inferences.
>
> Having said that, I acknowledge that Peirce is keen to provide explanations
> in philosophy that (a) fit with our common sense and (b) can be tested in the
> special sciences such as biology.
>
> --Jeff
>
>
> Jeffrey Downard
> Associate Professor
> Department of Philosophy
> Northern Arizona University
> (o) 928 523-8354
> From: Dan Everett <[email protected]>
> Sent: Monday, April 8, 2019 8:33:28 AM
> To: John F Sowa
> Cc: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Recovery from blindness (was Phaneroscopy and logic
>
> John,
>
> Great stuff.
>
> There is a huge amount of information that Kant was wrong about these things.
> Someone today mentioned Michael Polyani’s work on personal knowledge/tacit
> knowledge. And, at the risk of being a bore, there is my book, Dark Matter of
> the Mind:
> https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Matter-Mind-Articulated-Unconscious/dp/022607076X
> <https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Matter-Mind-Articulated-Unconscious/dp/022607076X>,
> in which I survey a lot of the literature, proposing my own theories (not as
> much interaction with Peirce as there should have been, I am sure).
>
> There is also a point that Kant missed entirely and that Peirce had little
> chance to observe: cross-cultural variation.
>
> Dan
>
>
>> On Apr 8, 2019, at 11:17 AM, John F Sowa <[email protected]
>> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>>
>> This morning, I remembered some case studies of people who were
>> blind from early childhood and later recovered their sight.
>>
>> Those studies cast doubt on Kant's claim that people have a
>> complete innate theory of space and time. The brain may have
>> innate structure that facilitates learning about space and time,
>> but a lot of experience is necessary to fill in the details.
>>
>> For example, Sydney Bradford lost his sight at age 10 months,
>> went to a school for the blind, and had a successful career
>> as a machinist. He lived independently, could make his way
>> through traffic, and took public transportation to work.
>>
>> Then at age 52, he had an operation that restored his sight.
>> Instead of being a confident, independent blind man, he became
>> a fearful, depressed man, who was terrified of crossing a street
>> in traffic, even with a friend holding his arm.
>>
>> For a Wikipedia article about Sydney B. and others, see
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovery_from_blindness
>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovery_from_blindness>
>>
>> For a 44-page article with much more detail about SB, see
>> http://www.richardgregory.org/papers/recovery_blind/recovery-from-early-blindness.pdf
>>
>> By the way, that site has links to other articles by Richard G.
>> For example, see the attached "impossible" figure. But it's
>> possible to construct an actual 3D object that looks like that.
>> See the article
>> http://www.richardgregory.org/papers/brainmodels/illusions-and-brain-models_all.htm
>>
>> Peirce wrote a lot about illusions, and he would have loved to see
>> that object. It has implications about form, index, and percepts.
>>
>> John
>> <impossible.gif>
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