Kant, Peirce, and Meaning

[Anonymous No.21948695]

Peirce took a sledgehammer and destroyed Kant's transcendental aesthetic.
>"To imagine is to reproduce in the mind elementary sensible intuitions and to take them up in some order so as to make an image" (CE 1: 353n). The image of space (and time) is not created originally by a transcendental via the productive imagination, but is something that can be created only through the reproduction of sensible intuitions that are given in previous experiences. This is why Peirce points out that the image of space can only come after previous experiences. Insofar as this image results from a synthesis of sensible intuitions acquired from
previous experiences,it is for Peirce a concept or conception. In holding the image of space (and time) to be a conception, Peirce diverges from Kant in a second way.
>Space and time are very special types of conceptions in that they are posited hypothetically to account for phenomenon that cannot be accounted for in any other way. As Peirce put it, "space and time are hypothetical.
>[For example], Space is thus a higher order hypothetical predicate that is posited by reason to give coherence to a sensory manifold that has already been unified by various types of lower order predicates, geometrical and otherwise. "The function of hypothesis is to substitute for a great many series of predicates forming no unity in themselves, a single one (or small number) which involves them all, together (perhaps) with an indefinite number of others. It is, therefore, also a reduction of a manifold to unity"(CE 2, 218). Space (and time) can thus no
longer be thought of as the sensory conditions for cognizing an object because they themselves are 'intellectual hypotheses'15 that are already conceptual. And with this thesis, the sensible conditions of knowledge are overtaken by the logical conditions.
Kant's transcendental aesthetic, including the organization of his judgments and categories, are bound together by positing space and especially time as pure intuitions.
>Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without conceptions blind'.
By reducing space and time to empirical concepts that are synthesized by the imagination after experience, Peirce has essentially destroyed Kant's ability to explain how representations make sense of the world. No more can we "borrow" the succession of arithmetic (i.e. cause-and-effect) or the continuity of geometry (i.e. the "community" of quality in space) to ground common sense. Hume must be laughing from the afterlife.

Here's the million dollar question though. What does Peirce substitute in place of the pure intuitions? What will be the "binding thread" that weaves representations together, makes them intelligible, and gives them any hope of pointing towards knowledge?

[Anonymous No.21948701]

>>21948695
excuse the shitty blockquote formatting. I took it from an article and had to spend 10 minutes painstakingly reformatting each line.
>The Logical Method of Metaphysics: Peirce's Meta-Critique of Kant's Critical Philosophy.
>Steven Matthew Levine

[Anonymous No.21948734]

>>21948695
He didn't destroy shit, he's just saying clearly false things that show he didn't understand the book

[Anonymous No.21948924]

>>21948695
>Here's the million dollar question though. What does Peirce substitute in place of the pure intuitions? What will be the "binding thread" that weaves representations together, makes them intelligible, and gives them any hope of pointing towards knowledge?
firstness, secondness, thirdness

[Anonymous No.21948943]

>>21948734
this. America didn't send their best.

[Anonymous No.21948949]

>>21948943
>>21948734
wrong,

Kant is stupid because he arbitrarily draws the line in the sand with respect to knowledge, Hegel and Peirce are true thinkers

[Anonymous No.21948954]

>>21948734
>it's just FALSE
>why? It... it just is OKAY?!?!

[Anonymous No.21948959]

>>21948695
I think that the CI Lewis "the pragmatic a priori" is a more refined manner of making the point -- but I think that you're really just getting something like a 19th century attempt at Quine's position in 2 Dogmas. Pierce was smart but pre-analysis it was difficult for people to clearly explain their positions, hence all the ambiguity in Pierce.

[Anonymous No.21949008]

>>21948924
DAS RITE

[Anonymous No.21949013]

>>21948954
t. pierce. the retard even talks about "image of space" as if that's relevant at all to space as an a priori form of experience that makes any logical operation he does possible since without it not even separation can be conceived

>>21948949
You got filtered by the actual good thinker and taken in by meme charlatans. The line is not arbitrary since it precedes the appearance of anything and any concept. The concept of difference doesn't exist without transcendental space, transcendental space is not the image of space. Why did so many retards have trouble understanding this basic thing about Kant's philosophy?

[Anonymous No.21949025]

>>21949013
You're quibbling with language. Prove to me that your understanding of space is a pure intuition and not an empirical concept imposed on a more primordial intuition. I'll wait.

[Anonymous No.21949035]

>>21949025
>empirical concept imposed on a more primordial intuition
Empirical presumes something appears. If space were an empirical concept, it would then have to appear. But where would it appear? Only answer is in space, and thereupon we reach the realization that we're not dealing with an empirical concept, something that is apparently impossibly hard to grasp for numbskulls like Hegel and Pierce, to name a few, and their endless horde of bleating followers.

[Anonymous No.21949037]

>>21949013
>The concept of difference doesn't exist without transcendental space
nonsense
if you actually did math, programming, pure rational thought, you would see that you would be thinking in more fundamental thought-signs. As the other guy said, space and time are encodings of Pierce's categories. That is why there are three dimensions in space.

[Anonymous No.21949053]

>>21949037
You're only saying that because you don't actually understand Kant and have probably mostly devoted your time to the horde of people trying to cash in by superficial criticisms of a genuinely groundbreaking philosophy. You can't relate your thought processes to CPR correctly atm because there is no understanding if you don't immediately notice how absurd Peirce's blockheaded blathering about "image of space" is in OPs excerpt.

[Anonymous No.21949056]

>>21949035
First of all, what is space?

[Anonymous No.21949065]

>>21949053
its not absurd, its just a genuine difference in philosophy

I mean hes not saying space and time are empirical in any sort of hard sense, hes just claiming they are higher order concepts

[Anonymous No.21949078]

>>21949065
Don't worry about it. The SEP recognizes it as a problematic element of his system.
>Kant’s view that we have an intuition, rather than a concept, of space can be seen to raise a difficult problem: space is not an object, and yet intuition seems to provide us with something akin to a perception of something. As Lucy Allais puts it, intuition involves “presence to consciousness of an object” (Allais 2015, 197ff), and yet space is not an object. It is difficult to see why we should think of ourselves as perceiving space at all.

[Anonymous No.21949079]

>>21949056
Not an empirical concept, as I showed. It is something that can't ever appear, so it's literally the very opposite of what these other guys are trying to claim.

[Anonymous No.21949091]

>>21949079
>Not an...
That's a weak definition.
>It is...
What is it? What is space?

[Anonymous No.21949099]

>>21949079
its a higher order predicate, but that doesn't mean its therefore fundamental

[Anonymous No.21949270]

>>21948695
> Space is thus a higher order hypothetical predicate that is posited by reason to give coherence to a sensory manifold that has already been unified by various types of lower order predicates, geometrical and otherwise. "The function of hypothesis is to substitute for a great many series of predicates forming no unity in themselves, a single one (or small number) which involves them all, together (perhaps) with an indefinite number of others. It is, therefore, also a reduction of a manifold to unity"(CE 2, 218). Space (and time) can thus no
longer be thought of as the sensory conditions for cognizing an object because they themselves are 'intellectual hypotheses'15 that are already conceptual.
This is literally just wrong in every way. Babies lacking object permanence is proof enough that our intuition of space isn’t built from “geometrical predicates.” Not to mention the insanity inherent in that logic: how can a geometrical predicate build into an intuition of space when to space is a predicate of the field of geometry? Additionally, if somehow this were true then it does not follow that a concept cannot contain other concepts. Hitler is contained in your idea of WW2 and Nazism and cannot be divorced from the two without fundamentally altering the way that people engage with him. I.e. changing his concept in whatever context it might be.

[Anonymous No.21949289]

>>21948943
I'd hate to see yours.

[Anonymous No.21949295]

>>21949270
>This is literally just wrong in every way. Babies lacking object permanence is proof enough that our intuition of space isn’t built from “geometrical predicates.”
Explain. And desu elaborate further with your whole post. I can’t follow your reasoning. It’s too compact.

[Anonymous No.21949561]

>>21949099
>higher-order predicate
oh finally some decent philosophical discussion

[Anonymous No.21949974]

>>21949091
Why not offer something of your own to discussion since the status of space as empirical concept, and Peirce, Hume, Deleuze along with it, was refuted? Space is a condition of the appearance of any thing or series, not an appearance. Negative definition is entirely appropriate in transcendental philosophy. You can pretend to posit space empirically like the common man thinks but you can't explain it empirically without leading to antinomies, so space must be higher, a condition of empiricism. 100 years of pseudosophy refuted.

[Anonymous No.21950126]

>>21949270
>Hitler is contained in your idea of WW2 and Nazism and cannot be divorced from the two
Correct. It’s called virtuality. A circle is virtual in a sphere because you can’t cognize the sphere without a circle, but you aren’t actually cognizing a circle.

[Anonymous No.21950133]

>>21949974
The antinomy is just a result of trying to apply a priori thought to something that is determined scientifically. Our brains can design any arbitrary geometry where space either stops or doesn’t. Modern physics has shown that it can be empirically determined whether space goes on forever or stops, because it has made several hypotheses on the geometry of the universe and given conditions for their falsifiability (although none of them have been proven because it is complicated)

[Anonymous No.21950145]

>>21949270
>how can a geometrical predicate build into an intuition of space when to space is a predicate of the field of geometry?
It’s not. Modern mathematics has moved beyond Euclid.

[Anonymous No.21950169]

>>21948734
>>21948943
>>21949013
>>21949035
>>21949053
>I devoted two hours a day to the study of Kant's Critic of the Pure Reason for more than three years, until I almost knew the whole book by heart, and had critically examined every section of it. For about two years, I had long and almost daily discussions with Chauncey Wright, one of the most acute of the followers of J. S. Mill. The effect of these studies was that I came to hold the classical German philosophy to be, upon its argumentative side, of little weight; although I esteem it, perhaps am too partial to it, as a rich mine of philosophical suggestions. The English philosophy, meagre and crude, as it is, in its conceptions, proceeds by surer methods and more accurate logic. The doctrine of the association of ideas is, to my thinking, the finest piece of philosophical work of the prescientific ages. Yet I can but pronounce English sensationalism to be entirely destitute of any solid bottom.
Krautbros...

[Anonymous No.21950208]

>>21950133
>determined scientifically
There is not a single scientific theory which does not presuppose a priori space for the appearance of the contents it is concerned with. To be able to draw a Gaussian coordinate you already need somewhere for lines and points to appear. You can't escape transcendental philosophy through "science". Similarly with space-time diagrams: their appearance requires some type of a priori space, so appealing to them doesn't reach Kant's philosophy at all. Naive realists don't really grok this, so the interpretation will be incomplete since it fails to take into account the appearance of the model which supposedly describes all of space: false statement since itsvery ppearance presumes space.

[Anonymous No.21950241]

>>21950208
you miss the point. The mind can arbitrarily construct a hypothesis where space is infinite and where it is not. you cannot a priori demonstrate or not demonstrate that "space" is infinite or not, not because you get to an antinomy, but because space is made up by the mind and can be however you want it to be. The only reason people regard space as Euclidean is because it is the most useful; if some physicists thinks that hyperbolic space is more useful, he will use that hypothesis instead. the fact that we are capable of even asking the question whether the physical universe is hyperbolic, euclidean, flat, three dimensional, a sphere, or anything shows already that space is a hypothesis and its nature consists in its applicability. there simply is no "transcendental" space as you imagine it, there is only the particular idea of space that Kant had when he was writing about it. If there was one a priori transcendental space that was the precondition for imagining all other spaces, then you would not get Aristotle and Augustine drawing opposite conclusions about its nature in the first place. All this "transcendental space" really is is the thing that you imagine when you imagine things, not the end all be all of all imagination. It is indeed a very strong way of imagination that we are all very ingrained in, but we are also ingrained in all the habits of our childhood, so it being difficult to imagine space being this way and that is not evidence against our idea of space having been drawn from perception. You, like Kant, can keep saying that your idea of space is the ground of all other ideas, but if you actually observe your own cognition, you will realize that that is all nebulous and vague and arbitrary.

[Anonymous No.21950276]

>>21949974
You don't even know what space is, yet you're adamant that it is a pure intuition and not an empirical concept. Classic dogmatism. Kantians are their own hypocritical worst enemy.

[Anonymous No.21950292]

>>21950276
b-but if we say enough times that you cant imagine anything without imagining an 18th century autistic german's idea of space first then it will become true right?

[Anonymous No.21950312]

>>21950276
I literally proved it can't be an empirical concept, if we start from the peasant assumption that it is. I refuted its status as an empirical and you aren't capable of admitting this and try to act like I didn't just refute your concept of space by pointing to the antinomy that follows. Since we see that the concept of space transcends its empirical application, we must move to transcendental philosophy, a move clearly beyond the likes of yourself.

[Anonymous No.21950322]

>>21950312
how does the assumption that space is empirical lead to the antinomy? Kant literally used his own transcendental tenets to prove the thesis and anti-thesis of the antinomies

[Anonymous No.21950338]

>>21950126
Aren't you always cognizing a circle when cognizing a sphere? The borders of a sphere are a circle. You cannot cognize a sphere without cognizing its borders to differentiate it from its background.

[Anonymous No.21950339]

>>21950241
>that space is a hypothesis and its nature consists in its applicability.
No, this is not the level of philosophy in which Kant operates. For all those empirical constructs to appear, for even the concept of something usable to appear: this is the subject of the conversation, the conditions of a thing in the first place. If we are talking of conditions of things, there certainly cannot be any appeal to usefulness since the thing doesn't exist yet, it is just what has been problematized. By analyzing various peasant-senseconcepts, we can see that they can't be posited as things without it leading to antinomies, so they are therewith analyzed as non-things, conditions, forms of experience, not things in themselves.

[Anonymous No.21950368]

>>21950322
I just made the argument in the orihinal post. Space cannot appear, since it would appear in space, which leads straight to the first antinomy. The antinomy is unsolveable because on one hand positing space as finite begs the question of its appearance, and on the other hand positing it as infinite begs the question of the finitude and placement of anything in it ("synthesis to completion")

[Anonymous No.21950411]

>>21950368
why do things have to appear in something to appear?

[Anonymous No.21950447]

>>21950169
>English sensationalism to be entirely destitute of any solid bottom
So then the whole thing is worthless anyway with the exception of its method.
>>21950145
>It’s not. Modern mathematics has moved beyond Euclid.
This sounds like bullshit, but I am, admittedly, not a mathematician. Explain how it's not.

[Anonymous No.21950569]

>>21950292
I’m kekking out loud every time you reply without giving a definition of space. What’s the difficulty?

[Anonymous No.21951421]

Bump

[Anonymous No.21951458]

>>21948695
His biosemiotics are much more groundbreaking than his metaphysics.

[Anonymous No.21951520]

>>21951458
His semiotics is based on his metaphysics.

[Anonymous No.21951660]

>>21950411
Because things are limited, separate and definite. Space, however, can't be conceived in such a way, as I showed. You can have whatever conception of it but it will escape the status of a thing originally delusionally credited to it. Therefore, it's not a thing or an object of empirical observation. Same goes everything in the categories. All that transcendental philosophy can do is show this deficiency from the ground up. Can you now attempt to refute my decisive refutation of space as an empirical concept with an argument on your own?

[Anonymous No.21951899]

>>21951660
>Because things are limited, separate and definite. Space, however, can't be conceived in such a way, as I showed.
What? What does this mean and why does it necessitate that things appear in something? Things are not naturally individuated until something individuates them. It sounds like you are assuming that things are necessarily individuated, and then assuming that space is the only thing that can individuate them. I don't see how you've explained why something has to appear in something else. your "proof" that space is the transcendental condition of sensibility is just begging the question, because in order to prove that space is so you assume that everything needs space to appear to begin with.

[Anonymous No.21953201]

>>21950276
Materialists believe that when they drag an mp4 into a folder on their desktop they are literally putting one thing inside of another and not just rearranging 1s and 0s on their hard drive

[Anonymous No.21953246]

>>21950447
NTA but just look into set-theoretic approaches to geometry. You can describe geometrical objects indirectly in a non-geometrical way (although you admittedly have geometrical notions in the back of your mind when you're defining and working with these non-geometrical devices).

[Anonymous No.21953248]

>>21953246
I should add that the point is that everything thing in math basically boils down to working with sets in one way or another---even geometry which is supposed to be visual and not so abstracted.

[Anonymous No.21953322]

>>21949295
If a baby were building its intuition of space from a pure set of geometrical relations then object permanence would be implicitly understood by the very nature of the permanence of geometrical relations. It’s hard to make a clear argument when Pierce doesn’t even define what geometrical relationships he has in mind, but generally there are all types of miscalculations that people make every day which are symptomatic of a poor understanding of geometry. People get lost in the woods by absentmindedly walking downhill instead of in a set path, the quickest path for a ball to roll downhill is in a parabolic curve and not a straight line, etc. You can argue that these stem from a miscalculation of our initial geometric constructions instead of the lack of their primacy but the baby example is the clearest to me as an object1 passing behind object2 and breaking line of sight could only equate to the loss of object1’s reality if the primary mode of engagement with sensuousness is visual and not geometric-conceptual. If the primary mode were geometric-conceptual then the loss of object1’s visual would be understood in the mind eye as its passing behind object2, given that motion is understood geometrically, and it’s reappearance would cause no surprise. There’s a reason peekaboo is played with kids: they actually forget you’re behind your hands when you close them.
>>21950145
>>21953246
If our understanding of space is built from set-theory derived axioms of geometry then our perception is the qualitative interpretation of the quantitative universe. Roughly, our perception seems to be true to the quantitative facts which means that they must have been built from the quantitative substrate of the universe. This is a complete inversion of Kant’s scheme where we have to assume a priori knowledge of the universe outside of our perception in order to create a crude reflection of it. Not only does this seem implausible but also unnecessary seeing as if the biological motor of life had access to pure knowledge of the intangible why would it use that to construct a crude simulation of it which it then would use as the primary stage for consciousness? It’s both energy inefficient and anti-evolutionary, both anathema for biology.

[Anonymous No.21954389]

bump

[Anonymous No.21954564]

>>21951899
>your "proof" that space is the transcendental condition of sensibility is just begging the questio
No it's not, since it clearly shows it can't be grasped as an empirical thing, since empirical objects have to appear. For a thing to appear it needs to be separable or it has not appeared, since we cannot even call it "it". Honestly you're just playing dumb and trying to make it seem like there's an actual devate going on here and that my original proof had some actual problens, which it doesn't, since it starts out from the concept and shows its limitations as a concept, whence it is retarded to try to reduce it to another concept after this limiting, transcendental criticism.

[Anonymous No.21954582]

>>21950208
Lines and points can appear in 2D visual sense space. Not only that, but you don’t need lines and points since you can deal with all of these things in a formal system instead and not with geometric constructs. You don’t need an a priori 3D all-encompassing space.

[Anonymous No.21954601]

>>21953322
>If our understanding of space is built from set-theory derived axioms of geometry
I'm not sure what you mean here. For the most part it isn't (or at least, historically it wasn't and it still isn't for most people) but we can translate geometry into set theory and learn more about it using that approach. Just like how Algebra took the place of Geometry for so much that people don't even consider the original geometrical notions that underly our algebraic operations anymore. Like how the square of n comes from considering the area of a square of side length n---a shocking amount of people have never considered it like this and apparently haven't wondered why its also called "squaring" and not just taking a number to the power of two.

[Anonymous No.21954644]

>>21954582
Every "2D"image you see appears in a 3D space, from the standpoint of which 2D can be defined. Theoretically speaking, all our vision is reducible to 2D shapes but it is this very reducibility that requires transcendental space: 2D observer would similarly only sense, theoretically, 1D rather than 2D, and our ability to see 2D requires a distance from it attributable only to a higher level of space. If you are looking AT a 2D drawing, it means that 2D can be separate from you through a distance: it is not the same as seeing IN 2D (really 1D), in which case lines couldn't appear.

[Anonymous No.21954959]

>>21954564
So why do you assume that space is the only thing that can individuate empirical objects?

[Anonymous No.21955268]

>>21954959
What my argument shows is that space itself cannot be grasped as an empirical object, since it cannot be observed without referring to further space: so, it's not a definite thing. I'm not sure what you have in mind here: a non-spatial empirical observation of space? Or do you mean, say, a empirical observations of one's own heartbeat or just other senses, whatever: no, I don't assume this information is spatial, but that doesn't supply any support whatsoever to the argument that space itself would be an empirical concept. You'd need to show how one observes space as an empirical object appearing from among other sense data, or how perception of lines on a surface arises somehow from nasal phenomena or whatever.

[Anonymous No.21955376]

>>21955268
Based on realism, the universe is actually organized under some spacelike timelike manifold. So this means the lines and the space that makes them cognizable as lines both actually exist in the world and are inseparable from each other. So you might as well prove that every individual line can’t be taken as an empirical object because you have to already know what a like is to cognize it. If space is an empirical object then space appears the same way all other novel empirical objects appear. They actually exist in the world and their effects play on the mind until it pulls together a hypothesis about their effects that gives it an idea of them. Obviously you cant cognize space without space, but you can’t cognize any nobel object except through itself, so you might as well argue against any novel substances being empirical objects.

[Anonymous No.21955435]

>>21955376
>So you might as well prove that every individual line can’t be taken as an empirical object because you have to already know what a like is to cognize it. If space is an empirical object then space appears the same way all other novel empirical objects appear. They actually exist in the world and their effects play on the mind until it pulls together a hypothesis about their effects that gives it an idea of them.
This is not the case. Transcendental idealism actually amounts to empirical realism about the existence of objects outside us, but the fact that some objects can be observed does not mean that space is an object which can be observed.
>Obviously you cant cognize space without space, but you can’t cognize any nobel object except through itself
This seems absurd, because let's say we perceive a square, the square is not itself in any way necessary to observing something else, such as a circle. Yet to every observation of visual information space is actually necessary a priori. You can't get a similar absurdity from just any object. So we are back to your point, if it ever existed, about space as an empirical object on basis of observations on other senses.

[Anonymous No.21955459]

>>21955435
Can you even explain why you can’t apply your “proof” to literally anything?
Space is not an empirical object because it would have to appear in space
OK, Blue is not an empirical object because it would have to appear as blue

[Anonymous No.21955525]

>>21955459
Is space a thing or a property?

[Anonymous No.21955544]

>>21955459
>Can you even explain why you can’t apply your “proof” to literally anything?
I just did
>OK, Blue is not an empirical object because it would have to appear as blue
Blue isn't connected with every case of perception, and we can replace blue with anything else and call it equally much appearance. However, outside of the non-visual information of the three senses, we can't say of any visual information that it appears without reference to space. Empirically observed thing is what appears. So these two cases are totally different.