/lit/ - Literature

>>11858827
>>11858968

>The issue is that this recognition itself is predicated upon sense impression and thus experience.
> If we accept the base uncertainty of sensory apprehension, then transcendental explantions are likewise affected and demonstrable/predictive explantions are to be favoured as more probable.
>If our recognition of the preconditions of experience is nonetheless delivered via experience, then it is similarly suspect and we have not escaped induction.

That's a strong argument - I think Maimon tried, and maybe succeeded (I haven't read him), to refute Kant's transcendental deduction along a similar line.

But if such recognition discovers a priori laws of thinking that are the basis of mathematical and logical proofs, Kant argues, then that recognition is reliable to the same degree of self-evident necessity that characterizes the strongest proofs the mind is capable of. There are necessary mental processes that provide a foundation to all the variable aspects of experience and thinking, including induction. When the variabilities are abstracted away, the necessary laws self-evidently remain. Rand herself was a fan of the axioms, no?

>If pure intuition modulates the sensory but is not perceived itself, then it is noumenal and there is no way to speculate about its nature with certainty.
>Is 'pure intuition' perceivable?
>If it is not, then we still only infer it on the grounds of experiential knowledge. No certainty of knowledge is established, nor certain boundary with experience.

Again, just because something isn't perceived doesn't make it noumenal. Magnetism isn't perceived, yet Kant maintains we can infer its existence based on the behaviors of other phenomena that is perceivable. As with such empirical inferences, we can justify the inference to unperceivable forms of perception (like space and time) without that making them noumenal. I'll again refer you to the Transcendental Aesthetic; one of the arguments you'll find there is that we can imagine removing all objects from within space and time, but we cannot imagine removing the empty domains of space and time themselves. Thus, they are a priori forms - that is, they are operations of the mind itself, so the mind can't get rid of them.

Kant points to this indispensability in order to defend the certainty of spatiotemporal order; pure space and pure time ARE your mind at work, so there can be nothing more certain than their characteristics. He supports this by continually giving examples from mathematics, a paradigm of certain knowledge, arguing that the certainty of mathematical proofs is derived from the spatial or temporal origins of mathematical objects - like geometric objects.