Tyrrell_McAllister comments on Philosophy: A Diseased Discipline - Less Wrong

88 Post author: lukeprog 28 March 2011 07:31PM

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Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 30 March 2011 12:07:22AM *  1 point [-]

Strictly speaking, Kant does not say we have no information about reality, he says we cannot know if we have or not.

I don't think that Kant makes the distinction between "knowing" and "having information about" that you and I would make. If he doesn't outright deny that we have any information about the world beyond our senses, he certainly comes awfully close.

On A380, Kant writes,

If, therefore, as the present critique obviously requires of us, we remain true to the rule established earlier not to press our questions be­yond that with which possible experience and its objects can supply us, then it will not occur to us to seek information about what the objects of our senses may be in themselves, i.e., apart from any relation to the senses.

And, on A703/B731, he writes,

[I]f charming and plau­sible prospects did not lure us to reject the compulsion of these doc­trines [i.e., doctrines for which Kant has argued], then of course we might have been able to dispense with our painstaking examination of the dialectical witnesses which a transcen­dent reason brings forward on behalf of its pretensions; for we already knew beforehand with complete certainty that all their allegations, while perhaps honestly meant, had to be absolutely null and void, be­cause they dealt with information which no human being can ever get.

(Emphasis added. These are from the Guyer–Wood translation.)

Comment author: Eitan_Zohar 05 April 2014 04:19:51PM 0 points [-]

Does anyone smell irony in this whole discussion? Considering the OP specifically derided the whole "discussion of old, dead guys" thing?

Ah, I wish this wasn't a three year old post. I have no idea how this site works yet, so who knows whose attention I'll attract by doing this?

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 05 April 2014 06:33:27PM 0 points [-]

At least the person whose comment you're replying to sees your reply, so you weren't speaking entirely into the void :).

Comment author: quen_tin 30 March 2011 09:54:34AM 0 points [-]

Ok, it depends what you mean by "information about". My understanding is that we have no information on the nature of reality, which does not mean that we have no information from reality.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 05 April 2014 06:07:37PM 0 points [-]

Suggestion: knowledge of what a thing is in itself , is like information that is not coded in any particular scheme.

Comment author: [deleted] 05 April 2014 06:43:27PM 0 points [-]

I suppose it's a virtue of that interpretation that 'information that cannot be coded in any particular scheme' is a conceptual impossibility (assuming that's what you meant).

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 05 April 2014 07:01:46PM 0 points [-]

Yes. You can make such an interpretation of the ding-an-such.

For my money, that lessens its impact.

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 30 March 2011 04:36:23PM 0 points [-]

I agree that we get information from reality. And I think that we agree that our confidence that we get information from reality is far less murky than our concept of "the nature of reality".

Kant, being a product of his times, doesn't seem to think this way, though. Maybe, if you explained the modern information-theoretic notion of "information" to Kant, he would agree that we get information about external reality in that sense. But I don't know. It's hard to imagine what a thinker like Kant would do in an entirely different intellectual environment from the one in which he produced his work. I'm inclined to think that, for Kant, the noumena are something to which it is not even possible to apply the concept of "having information about".

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