Kantian Error

Place, Time, and Universals

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Consider the following three statements:

1. The chair and keyboard that I am currently using are both here in this room.

2. The chair and keyboard that I am currently using both exist in January 2019.

3. The chair and keyboard that I am currently using both came in the color black.

All three claims, considered as everyday statements, happen to be true. They also have a common subject, and something common about the predicate, namely the “in.” We have “in this room,” “in January,” and “in the color black.” Now someone might object that this is a mere artifact of my awkward phrasing: obviously, I deliberately chose these formulations with this idea in mind. So this seems to be a mere verbal similarity, and a meaningless one at that.

The objection seems pretty reasonable, but I will argue that it is mistaken. The verbal similarity is not accidental, despite the fact that I did indeed choose the formulations deliberately with this idea in mind. As I intend to argue, there is indeed something common to the three cases, namely that they represent various ways of existing together.

The three statements are true in their ordinary everyday sense. But consider the following three questions:

1. Are the chair and keyboard really in the same room, or is this commonality a mere appearance?

2. Do the chair and keyboard really exist in the same month, or is this commonality a mere appearance?

3. Did the chair and keyboard really come in the same color, or is this commonality a mere appearance?

These questions are like other questions which ask whether something is “really” the case. There is no such thing as being “really” on the right apart from the ordinary understanding of being on the right, and there is no such thing as being really in the same room apart from the ordinary everyday understanding of being in the same room. The same thing applies to the third question about color.

The dispute between realism and nominalism about universals starts in the following way, roughly speaking:

Nominalist: We say that two things are black. But obviously, there are two things here, and no third thing, and the two are not the same thing. So the two do not really have anything in common. Therefore “two things are black” is nothing but a way of speaking.

Platonic Realist: Obviously, the two things really are black. But what is really the case is not just a way of speaking. So the two really do have something in common. Therefore there are three things here: the two ordinary things, and the color black.

Since the Platonic Realist here goes more against common speech in asserting the existence of “three things” where normally one would say there are “two things,” the nominalist has the apparent advantage at this point, and this leads to more qualified forms of realism. In reality, however, one should have stopped the whole argument at this point. The two positions above form a Kantian dichotomy, and as in all such cases, both positions affirm something true, and both positions affirm something false. In this particular case, the nominalist acts as the Kantian, noting that universality is a mode of knowing, and therefore concludes that it is a mere appearance. The Platonic Realist acts as the anti-Kantian, noting that we can know that several things are in fact black, and concluding that universality is a mode of being as such.

But while universality is a way of knowing, existing together is a way of being, and is responsible for the way of knowing. In a similar way, seeing both my chair and keyboard at the same time is a way of seeing things, but this way of seeing is possible because they are here together in the room. Likewise, I can know that both are black, but this knowledge is only possible because they exist together “in” the color black. What does this mean, exactly? Since we are discussing sensible qualities, things are both in the room and black by having certain relationships with my senses. They exist together in those relationships with my senses.

There is no big difference when I ask about ideas. If we ask what two dogs have in common in virtue of both being dogs, what they have in common is a similar relationship to my understanding. They exist together in that relationship with my understanding.

It might be objected that this is circular. Even if what is in common is a relationship, there is still something in common, and that seems to remain unexplained. Two red objects have a certain relationship of “appearing red” to my eyes, but then do we have two things, or three? The two red things, or the two red things and the relationship of “appearing red”? Or is it four things: two red things, and their two relationships of appearing red? So which is it?

Again, there is no difference between these questions and asking whether a table is really on the left or really on the right. It is both, relative to different things, and likewise all three of these methods of counting are valid, depending on what you want to count. As I have said elsewhere, there are no hidden essences, no “true” count, no “how many things are really there?”

“Existing together,” however, is a reality, and is not merely a mode of knowing. This provides another way to analyze the problem with the nominalist / Platonic realist opposition. Both arguments falsely assume that existing together is either logically derivative or non-existent. As I said in the post on existential relativity,  it is impossible to deduce the conclusion that many things exist from a list of premises each affirming that a single thing exists, if only because “many things” does not occur as a term in that list. The nominalist position cannot explain the evident fact that both things are black. Likewise, even if there are three things, the two objects and “black,” this would not explain why the two objects are black. The two objects are not the third, since there are three. So there must be yet another object, perhaps called “participation”, which connects the two objects and blackness. And since they both have participation, there must be yet another object, participation in general, in which both objects are also participating. Obviously none of this is helping: the problem was the assumption from the start that togetherness (whether in place, time, or color) could be something logically derivative.

(Postscript: the reader might notice that in the linked post on “in,” I said that a thing is considered to be in something as form in matter. This seems odd in the context of this post, since we are talking about being “in a color,” and a color would not normally be thought of as material, but as formal. But this simply corresponds with the fact that it would be more usual to say that the color black is in the chair, rather than the chair in the black. This is because it is actually more correct: the color black is formal with respect to the chair, not material. But when we ask, “what things can come in the color black,” we do think of black as though it were a kind of formless matter that could take various determinate forms.)

Ontological Becoming

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Most likely I will follow up on the chain of thought started in the last post, at some point. At the moment, however, this post (and possibly a few more) will be clarifying some earlier questions.

In this post on causality, I said that the discussion of “true ontological becoming” was not really relevant, and it was not. Nonetheless, there is no harm in explaining the point. Atheism and the City is attempting to maintain a position somewhat like that of Parmenides. The theory of relativity leads in a fairly natural way to a view which includes something along the lines of a four dimensional block universe, or an “eternalist” view. Things appear to change, but as Parmenides claims, this is an illusion. Everything already exists. This might be somewhat different from Parmenides insofar as Parmenides seems to assert that differences are pure illusion, while the eternalist view usually says that when you see different times, you are seeing various aspects of the eternally existing reality.

I said in the post on causality that eternalism vs. presentism is an example of a Kantian dichotomy; both positions , to the degree that they are opposed, rest on a misunderstanding of the relationship between the mind and reality. I will not try to prove this in a fully general way at the moment, but show how this is true with a simplified model of reality.

In the first place, if we want to take these positions seriously, neither one should be understood as saying that we do not have the experiences that we do have. You might think that eternalism would deny that we ever experience things changing. But that is not what Atheism and the City (and other eternalists) actually say:

On my view of causality, if you threw a brick at a glass window it would shatter, if you jumped in front of a speeding train you’d be smashed to death by it. The difference between my view of causality vs the typical view is that on my view causes do not bring their effects into existence in the sense of true ontological becoming.

There is no denial of our usual experiences, but rather it is affirmed that we have them. It is the claim about the true nature of things that is different from the claim of the presentist. Both positions admit that we see things like bricks breaking windows and train destroying objects that they hit.

Consider two simplified universes: an eternalist one and a presentist one. In the eternalist universe, suppose that there are three times, a beginning, a middle, and an end, and an observer that watches time pass and knows the nature of their universe. Things appear to change, but they deny that there is “true ontological becoming.” All times, according to them, exist, but they experience them as a sequence.

In the presentist universe, on the other hand, there are still three times, but they exist only in sequence. The observer here passes through time and knows that they do so.

My position is that these are two different descriptions of precisely the same thing, and asking which universe you are in is like asking whether a table is on the right or on the left. Why is this the case? The basic reason is that the network of relationships described in the (supposedly) two situations is the same, and since this network is form, the form or nature of these two situations is entirely the same.

Let’s look at this in more detail by considering the points where the positions supposedly disagree. Let’s take our observers in the middle of the time period. They try to describe their disagreement:

Eternalist: I appear to be in the middle period, but really I am in all periods. The middle currently appears to exist, but in fact beginning, middle, and end exist.

Presentist: The middle period alone currently exists. The beginning and end do not, although the beginning once existed, and the end will exist later.

Do they disagree about whether the beginning exists or not? The eternalist might say, yes, we disagree. I think the beginning currently exists, the presentist thinks that it does not. But notice “currently.” Does the eternalist think that the beginning exists at the middle time? Of course not: they think it exists at its own time. So why do they say “currently”, when we are discussing their observations at the middle time? Basically, the eternalist is saying that from an abstract point of view, their universe contains all the times, and they are describing this point of view by saying “currently.” The presentist, however, is saying that from a concrete point of view, namely the middle time, only the middle time is present. The presentist is not denying that if you look at the times in the abstract, you cannot tell which one is present; “telling which one is present” is precisely to view them concretely.

Our disputants will insist:

Eternalist: According to the true nature of things, the beginning exists, period. Don’t talk about abstract or concrete or whatever.

Presentist: According to the true nature of things, the beginning does not exist, period. Don’t talk about abstract or concrete or whatever.

The first problem with this is obvious, and applies to both positions. Both positions here seem to want to take “exist” as absolute rather than relative, and this cannot be done.

There is a second problem which applies to the presentist position in particular, as described here. Consider another universe, one with only one time and one observer. How is this universe different from the presentist universe with three times? In each of them, the observer claims that there is no past and no future. Our presentist needs to say that “there really was a past” in order to distinguish their position from that of the single time universe. But what can that possibly mean, if the past is literally nothing at all?

In any case, if it means anything at all, “the past that used to exist” in the presentist description has the same relationship to the middle time that “the past that actually exists” in the eternalist description has to the middle time. As I have been saying, the two descriptions have the same elements, and the same set of relationships. They are descriptions of precisely the same reality.

The disagreement, in other words, is not a disagreement about reality, but about which point of view is the “true” one. But points of view are just that, points of view, and the thing can be seen from each. It is just not the case that one is true and the other false.

This of course used a simplified model, and things in the real world are more complicated. For example, what happens if the future is indeterminate? Would not the eternalist position necessarily differ from the presentist one, in that case?

Explaining Causality

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A reader asks about a previous post:

a) Per Hume and his defenders, we can’t really observe causation. All we can see is event A in spacetime, then event B in spacetime. We have no reason to posit that event A and event B are, say, chairs or dogs; we can stick with a sea of observed events, and claim that the world is “nothing more” but a huge set of random 4D events. While I can see that giving such an account restores formal causation, it doesn’t salvage efficient causation, and doesn’t even help final causation. How could you move there from our “normal” view?

b) You mention that the opinion “laws are observed patterns” is not a dominant view; though, even though I’d like to sit with the majority, I can’t go further than a). I can’t build an argument for this, and fail to see how Aristotle put his four causes correctly. I always end up gnawing on an objection, like “causation is only in the mind” or similar. Help?

It is not my view that the world is a huge set of random 4D events. This is perhaps the view of Atheism and the City, but it is a mistaken one. The blogger is not mistaken in thinking that there are problems with presentism, but they cannot be solved by adopting an eternalist view. Rather, these two positions constitute a Kantian dichotomy, and as usual, both positions are false. For now, however, I will leave this to the consideration of the reader. It is not necessary to establish this to respond to the questions above.

Consider the idea that “we can’t really observe causation.” As I noted here, it does not make sense to say that we cannot observe causation unless we already understand what causation is. If the word were meaningless to us, we would have no argument that we don’t observe it; it is only because we do understand the idea of causation that we can even suggest that it might be difficult to observe. And if we do have the idea, we got the idea from somewhere, and that could only have been… from observation, of course, since we don’t have anything else to get ideas from.

Let us untie the knot. I explained causality in general in this way:

“Cause” and “effect” simply signify that the cause is the origin of the effect, and that the effect is from the cause, together with the idea that when we understand the cause, we understand the explanation for the effect. Thus “cause” adds to “origin” a certain relationship with the understanding; this is why Aristotle says that we do not think we understand a thing until we know its cause, or “why” it is. We do not understand a thing until we know its explanation.

Note that there is something “in the mind” about causality. Saying to oneself, “Aha! So that’s why that happened!” is a mental event. And we can also see how it is possible to observe causality: we can observe that one thing is from another, i.e. that a ball breaks a window, and we can also observe that knowing this provides us a somewhat satisfactory answer to the question, “Why is the window broken?”, namely, “Because it was hit by a ball.”

Someone (e.g. Atheism and the City) might object that we also cannot observe one thing coming from another. We just observe the two things, and they are, as Hume says, “loose and separate.” Once again, however, we would have no idea of “from” unless we got it from observing things. In the same early post quoted above, I explained the idea of origin, i.e. that one thing is from another:

Something first is said to be the beginning, principle, or origin of the second, and the second is said to be from the first. This simply signifies the relationship already described in the last post, together with an emphasis on the fact that the first comes before the second by “consequence of being”, in the way described.

“The relationship already described in the last post” is that of before and after. In other words, wherever we have any kind of order at all, we have one thing from another. And we observe order, even when we simply see one thing after another, and thus we also observe things coming from other things.

What about efficient causality? If we adopt the explanation above, asserting the existence of efficient causality is nothing more or less than asserting that things sometimes make other things happen, like balls breaking windows, and that knowing about this is a way for us to understand the effects (e.g. broken windows.)

Similarly, denying the existence of efficient causality means either denying that anything ever makes anything else happen, or denying that knowing about this makes us understand anything, even in a minor way. Atheism and the City seems to want to deny that anything ever makes anything else happen:

Most importantly, my view technically is not that causality doesn’t exist, it’s that causality doesn’t exist in the way we typically think it does. That is, my view of causality is completely different from the general every day notion of causality most people have. The naive assumption one often gets when hearing my view is that I’m saying cause and effect relationships don’t exist at all, such that if you threw a brick at glass window it wouldn’t shatter, or if you jumped in front of a speeding train you wouldn’t get smashed to death by it. That’s not what my view says at all.

On my view of causality, if you threw a brick at a glass window it would shatter, if you jumped in front of a speeding train you’d be smashed to death by it. The difference between my view of causality vs the typical view is that on my view causes do not bring their effects into existence in the sense of true ontological becoming.

I am going to leave aside the discussion of “true ontological becoming,” because it is a distraction from the real issue. Does Atheism and the City deny that things ever make other things happen? It appears so, but consider that “things sometimes make other things happen” is just a more general description of the very same situations as descriptions like, “Balls sometimes break windows.” So if you want to deny that things make other things happen, you should also deny that balls break windows. Now our blogger perhaps wants to say, “I don’t deny that balls break windows in the everyday sense, but they don’t break them in a true ontological sense.” Again, I will simply point in the right direction here. Asserting the existence of efficient causes does not describe a supposedly “truly true” ontology; it is simply a more general description of a situation where balls sometimes break windows.

We can make a useful comparison here between understanding causality, and understanding desire and the good. The knowledge of desire begins with a fairly direct experience, that of feeling the desire, often even as physical sensation. In the same way, we have a direct experience of “understanding something,” namely the feeling of going, “Ah, got it! That’s why this is, this is how it is.” And just as we explain the fact of our desire by saying that the good is responsible for it, we explain the fact of our understanding by saying that the apprehension of causes is responsible. And just as being and good are convertible, so that goodness is not some extra “ontological” thing, so also cause and origin are convertible. But something has to have a certain relationship with us to be good for us; eating food is good for us while eating rocks is not. In a similar way, origins need to have a specific relationship with us in order to provide an understanding of causality, as I said in the post where these questions came up.

Does this mean that “causation is only in the mind”? Not really, any more than the analogous account implies that goodness is only in the mind. An aspect of goodness is in the mind, namely insofar as we distinguish it from being in general, but the thing itself is real, namely the very being of things. And likewise an aspect of causality is in the mind, namely the fact that it explains something to us, but the thing itself is real, namely the relationships of origin in things.

Necessary Connection

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In Chapter 7 of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume says about the idea of “necessary connection”:

We have looked at every possible source for an idea of power or necessary connection, and have found nothing. However hard we look at an isolated physical episode, it seems, we can never discover discover anything but one event following another; we never find any force or power by which the cause operates, or any connection between it and its supposed effect. The same holds for the influence of mind on body: the mind wills, and then the body moves, and we observe both events; but we don’t observe– and can’t even conceive– the tie that binds the volition to the motion, i.e. the energy by which the mind causes the body to move. And the power of the will over its own faculties and ideas– i.e. over the mind, as distinct from the body– is no more comprehensible. Summing up, then: throughout the whole of nature there seems not to be a single instance of connection that is conceivable by us. All events seem to be entirely loose and separate. One event follows another, but we never can observe any tie between them. They seem associated, but never connected. And as we can have no idea of anything that never appeared as an impression to our outward sense or inward feeling, we are forced to conclude that we have no idea of ‘connection’ or ‘power’ at all, and that those words– as used in philosophical reasonings or in common life– have absolutely no meaning.

This is not Hume’s final word on the matter, as we will see below, so this has to be taken with a grain of salt, even as a representation of his opinion. Nonetheless, consider this caricature of what he just said:

We have looked at every possible source for an idea of mduvvqi or pdnfhvdkdddd, and have found nothing. However hard we look at an isolated physical episode, it seems, we can never discover anything but events that can be described by perfectly ordinary words; we never find any mduvvqi involved, nor any pdnfhvkdddd.

We could take this to be making the point that “mduvvqi” and “pdnfhvdkdddd” are not words. Other than that, however, the paragraph itself is meaningless, precisely because those “words” are meaningless. It certainly does not make any deep (or shallow for that matter) metaphysical or physical point, nor any special point about the human mind. But Hume’s text is different, and the difference in question is a warning sign of Kantian confusion. If those words had “absolutely no meaning,” in fact, there would be no difference between Hume’s passage and our caricature. Those words are not meaningless, but meaningful, and Hume is even analyzing their meaning in order to supposedly determine that the words are meaningless.

Hume’s analysis in fact proceeds more or less in the following way. We know what it means to say that something is necessary, and it is not the same as saying that the thing always happens. Every human being we have ever seen was less than 20 feet tall. But is it necessary that human beings be less than 20 feet tall? This is a different question, and while we can easily experience someone’s being less than 20 feet tall, it is very difficult to see how we could possibly experience the necessity of this fact, if it is necessary. Hume concludes: we cannot possibly experience the necessity of it. Therefore we can have no idea of such necessity.

But Hume has just contradicted himself: it was precisely by understanding the concept of necessity that he was able to see the difficulty in the idea of experiencing necessity.

Nonetheless, as I said, this is not his final conclusion. A little later he gives a more nuanced account:

The source of this idea of a necessary connection among events seems to be a number of similar instances of the regular pairing of events of these two kinds; and the idea cannot be prompted by any one of these instances on its own, however comprehensively we examine it. But what can a number of instances contain that is different from any single instance that is supposed to be exactly like them? Only that when the mind experiences many similar instances, it acquires a habit of expectation: the repetition of the pattern affects it in such a way that when it observes an event of one of the two kinds it expects an event of the other kind to follow. So the feeling or impression from which we derive our idea of power or necessary connection is a feeling of connection in the mind– a feeling that accompanies the imagination’s habitual move from observing one event to expecting another of the kind that usually follows it. That’s all there is to it. Study the topic from all angles; you will never find any other origin for that idea.

Before we say more, we should concede that this is far more sensible than the claim that the idea of necessity “has absolutely no meaning.” Hume is now conceding that it does have meaning, but claiming that the meaning is about us, not about the thing. When we see someone knock a glass off a table, we perhaps feel a certainty that it will fall and hit the floor. Experiencing that feeling of certainty, he says, is the source of the idea of “necessity.” This is not an unreasonable hypothesis.

However, Hume is also implicitly making a metaphysical argument here which is somewhat less sensible. Our feelings of certainty and uncertainty are subjective qualities of our minds, he suggests, not objective features of the things. Therefore necessity as an objective feature does not and cannot exist. This is not unrelated to his mistaken claim that we cannot know that the future will be similar to the past, even with probability.

What is the correct account here? In fact we already know, from the beginning of the conversation, that “necessary” and “possible” are meaningful words. We also know that in fact we use them to describe objective features of the world. But which features? Attempting to answer this question is where Hume’s approach is pretty sensible. Hume is not mistaken that all of our knowledge is from experience, and ultimately from the senses. He seems to identify experience with sense experience too simplistically, but he is not mistaken that all experience is at least somewhat similar to sense experience; feeling sure that two and two make four is not utterly unlike seeing something red. We want to say that there is something in common there, “something it is like,” to experience one or the other. But if this is the case, it would be reasonable to extend what we said about the senses to intellectual experiences. “The way red looks” cannot, as such, be an objective feature of a thing, but a thing can be objectively red, in such a way that “being red,” together with the nature of the senses, explains why a thing looks red. In a similar way, certainty and uncertainty, insofar as they are ways we experience the world, cannot be objective features of the world as such. Nonetheless, something can be objectively necessary or uncertain, in such a way that “being necessary” or otherwise, together with the nature of our minds, explains why it seems certain or uncertain to us.

There will be a similarity, however. The true nature of red might be quite strange in comparison to the experience of seeing red, as for example it might consist of surface reflectance properties. In a similar way, the true nature of necessity, once it is explained, might be quite strange to us compared to the experience of being certain or uncertain. But that it can be explained is quite certain itself, since the opposite claim would fall into Hume’s original absurdity. There are no hidden essences.

Motivated Reasoning and the Kantian Dichotomy

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At the beginning of the last post, I distinguished between error caused by confusing the mode of knowledge and the mode of being, and error caused by non-truth related motives. But by the end of the post, it occurred to me that there might be more of a relationship between the two than one might think. Not that we can reduce all error to one or the other, of course. It seems pretty clear that the errors involved in the Kantian dichotomy are somewhat “natural,” so to speak, and often the result of honest confusion. This seems different from motivated reasoning. Similarly, there are certainly other causes of error. If someone makes an arithmetical error in their reasoning, which is a common occurrence, this is not necessarily caused by either confusion about the mode of knowing or by some other motive. It is just a mistake, perhaps caused by a failure of the imagination.

Nonetheless, consider the examples chosen in the last post. Scott Sumner is the anti-realist, while James Larson is the realist. And if we are looking only at that disagreement, and not taking into account confusion about the mode of knowing, Larson is right, and Sumner is wrong. But if we consider their opinions on other matters, Sumner is basically sane and normal, while Larson is basically crazy. Consider for example Larson’s attitude to science:

In considering what might be called the “collective thinking” of the entire Western world (and beyond), there is no position one can take which elicits more universal disdain than that of being“anti-science.” It immediately calls forth stereotyped images of backwardness, anti-progress, rigidity, and just plain stupidity.

There are of course other epithets that are accompanied by much more vehement condemnations: terms as such anti-semite, racist, etc. But we are not here concerned with such individual prejudices and passions, but rather with the scientific Weltanschauung (World-view) which now dominates our thinking, and the rejection of which is almost unthinkable to modern man.

Integral to this world-view is the belief that there is a world of “Science” containing all knowledge of the depths of the physical world, that the human mind has the potential to fully encompass this knowledge, and that it is only in the use” of this knowledge that man sins.

It is my contention, on the other hand, that the scientific weltanschauung is integrally constituted by a dominant hubris, which has profoundly altered human consciousness, and constitutes a war against both God and man.

Stereotyped or not, the labels Larson complains about can be applied to his position with a high degree of accuracy. He goes on to criticize not only the conclusions of science but also the very idea of engaging in a study of the world in a scientific manner:

It is a kind of dogma of modern life that man has the inalienable right, and even responsibility, to the pursuit of unending growth in all the spheres of his secular activity: economic, political (New World Order), scientific knowledge, technological development, etc. Such “unending quest for knowledge and growth” would almost seem to constitute modern man’s definition of his most fundamental dignity. This is fully in accord with the dominant forms of modern philosophy which define him in terms of evolutionary becoming rather than created being.

Such is not the Biblical view, which rather sees such pursuits as reeking disaster to both individual and society, and to man’s relationship to Truth and God. The Biblical perspective begins with Original Sin which, according to St. Thomas, was constituted as an intellectual pride by which Adam and Eve sought an intellectual excellence of knowledge independently of God. In the situation of Original Sin, this is described in terms of “knowledge of good and evil.” It is obvious in the light of further Old Testament scriptures, however, that this disorder also extends to the “seeking after an excellence” which would presume to penetrate to the depth of the nature of created things. Thus, we have the following scriptures:

“Nothing may be taken away, nor added, neither is it possible to find out the glorious works of God: When a man hath done, then shall he begin: And when he leaveth off, he shall be at a loss.” (Ecclus 28:5-6).

“And I understood that man can find no reason of all those works of God that are done under the sun: and the more he shall labor to seek, so much the less shall he find: yea, though the wise man shall say, that he knoweth it, he shall not be able to find it.” (Eccl 8:17).

“For the works of the Highest only are wonderful, and his works are glorious, secret, and hidden.” (Ecclus 11:4).

“For great is the power of God alone, and he is honoured by the humble. Seek not the things that are too high for thee, and search not into things above thy ability: but the things that God hath commanded thee, think on them always, and in many of his works be not curious. For it is not necessary for thee to see with thy eyes those things that are hid. In unnecessary matters be not over curious, and in many of his works thou shalt not be inquisitive. For many things are shewn to thee above the understanding of men. And the suspicion of them hath deceived man, and hath detained their minds in vanity.” (Ecclus 3:21-26).

These scripture passages proscribe any effort by man which attempts to penetrate (or even be inquisitive and curious about) the hidden depths of God’s “works.” It is evident that in these scriptures the word “works” refers to the physical world itself – to all those “works of God that are done under the sun.” There is no allegorical interpretation possible here. We are simply faced with a choice between considering these teachings as divinely revealed truth, or merely the product of primitive and ignorant Old Testament human minds.

It is not merely that Larson rejects the conclusions of science, which he admittedly does. He also condemns the very idea of “let’s go find out how the world works” as a wicked and corrupting curiosity. I say, without further ado, that this is insane.

But of course it is not insane in the sense that Larson should be committed to a mental institution, even though I would expect that he has some rather extreme personality characteristics. Rather, it is extremely obvious that Larson is engaging in highly motivated reasoning. On the other hand, most of Scott Sumner’s opinions are relatively ordinary, and while some of his opinions are no doubt supported by other human motives besides truth, we do not find him holding anything in such a highly motivated way.

Thus we have this situation: the one who upholds common sense (with regard to realism) holds crazy motivated opinions about all sorts of other matters, while the one who rejects common sense (with regard to realism) holds sane non-motivated opinions about all sorts of other matters. Perhaps this is accidental? If we consider other cases, will we find that this is an exceptional case, and that most of the time the opposite happens?

Anti-realism in particular, precisely because it is so strongly opposed to common sense, is rare in absolute terms, and thus we can expect to find that most people are realist regardless of their other opinions. But I do not think that we will find that the opposite is the case overall. On the contrary, I think we will find that people who embrace the Kantian side of such a dichotomy will frequently tend to be people who have more accurate opinions about detailed matters, and that people who embrace the anti-Kantian side of such a dichotomy will frequently tend to be people who have less accurate opinions about detailed matters, despite the fact that the anti-Kantian side is right about the common sense issue at hand.

Consider the dichotomy in general. If we analyze it purely in terms of concern for truth, the anti-Kantian is interested in upholding the truth of common sense, while the Kantian is interested in upholding the truth about the relationship between the mind and the world. From the beginning, the anti-Kantian wishes to maintain a general well-known truth, while the Kantian wants to maintain a relatively complex detailed truth about the relationship between knowledge and the world. The Kantian thus has more of an interest in details than the anti-Kantian, while the anti-Kantian is more concerned about the general truth.

What happens when we bring in other motivations? People begin to trade away truth. To the degree that they are interested in other things, they will have less time and energy to think about what is true. And since knowledge advances from general to particular, it would not be surprising if people who are less interested in truth pay less attention to details, and bother themselves mainly about general issues. On the other hand, if people are highly interested in truth and not much interested in other things, they will dedicate a lot of time and attention to working out things in detail. Of course, there are also other reasons why someone might want to work things out in detail. For example, as I discussed a few years ago, Francis Bacon says in effect: the philosophers do not care about truth. Rather their system is “useful” for certain goals:

We make no attempt to disturb the system of philosophy that now prevails, or any other which may or will exist, either more correct or more complete. For we deny not that the received system of philosophy, and others of a similar nature, encourage discussion, embellish harangues, are employed, and are of service in the duties of the professor, and the affairs of civil life. Nay, we openly express and declare that the philosophy we offer will not be very useful in such respects. It is not obvious, nor to be understood in a cursory view, nor does it flatter the mind in its preconceived notions, nor will it descend to the level of the generality of mankind unless by its advantages and effects.

Meanwhile, Bacon does not himself claim to be interested in truth. But he desires “advantages and effects,” namely accomplishments in the physical world, such as changing lead into gold. But if you want to make complex changes in the physical world, you need to know the world in detail. The philosophers, therefore, have no need of detailed knowledge because they are not interested in truth but disputation and status, while Bacon does have a need of detailed knowledge, even though he is likewise uninterested in truth, because he is interested in changing the world.

In reality, there will exist both philosophers and scientists who mainly have these non-truth related concerns, and others who are mainly concerned about the truth. But we can expect an overall effect of caring more about truth to be caring more about details as well, simply because such people will devote more time and energy to working things out in detail.

On this account, Scott Sumner’s anti-realism is an honest mistake, made simply because people tend to find the Kantian error persuasive when they try to think about how knowledge works in detail. Meanwhile, James Larson’s absurd opinions about science are not caused by any sort of honesty, but by his ulterior motives. I noted in the last post that in any such Kantian dichotomy, the position upholding common sense is truer. And this is so, but the implication of the present considerations is that in practice we will often find the person upholding common sense also maintaining positions which are much wronger in their details, because they will frequently care less about the truth overall.

I intended to give a number of examples, since this point is hardly proven by the single instance of Scott Sumner and James Larson. But since I am running short on time, at least for now I will simply point the reader in the right direction. Consider the Catholic discussion of modernism. Pius X said that the modernists “attempt to ascribe to a love of truth that which is in reality the result of pride and obstinacy,” but as we saw there, the modernists cared about the truth of certain details that the Church preferred to ignore or even to deny. The modernists were not mistaken to ascribe this to a love of truth. As I noted in the same post, Pius X suggests that a mistaken epistemology is responsible for the opinions of the modernists:

6. We begin, then, with the philosopher. Modernists place the foundation of religious philosophy in that doctrine which is usually called Agnosticism. According to this teaching human reason is confined entirely within the field of phenomena, that is to say, to things that are perceptible to the senses, and in the manner in which they are perceptible; it has no right and no power to transgress these limits. Hence it is incapable of lifting itself up to God, and of recognising His existence, even by means of visible things. From this it is inferred that God can never be the direct object of science, and that, as regards history, He must not be considered as an historical subject. Given these premises, all will readily perceive what becomes of Natural Theology, of the motives of credibility, of external revelation. The Modernists simply make away with them altogether; they include them in Intellectualism, which they call a ridiculous and long ago defunct system. Nor does the fact that the Church has formally condemned these portentous errors exercise the slightest restraint upon them.

As I noted there, epistemology is not the foundation for anyone’s opinions, and was not the foundation for the opinions of the modernists. But on the other hand, Pius X may be seeing something true here. The “agnosticism” he describes here is basically the claim that we can know only appearances, and not the thing in itself. And I would find it unsurprising if Pius X is right that there was a general tendency among the modernists to accept a Kantian epistemology. But the reason for this would be analogous to the reasons that Scott Sumner is an anti-realist: that is, it is basically an honest mistake about knowledge, while in contrast, the condemnation of questioning the authenticity of the Vulgate text of 1 John 5:7 was not honest at all.

Generalized Kantian Dichotomy

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At the end of the last post I suggested that the confusion between the mode of knowledge and the mode of being might be a primary, or rather the primary, cause of philosophical error, with the exception of motivated error.

If we consider the “Kantian” and “anti-Kantian” errors in the last post, we can give a somewhat general account of how this happens. The two errors might appear to be mutually exclusive and exhaustive, but in fact they constitute a false dichotomy. Consider the structure of the disagreement:

A. Common sense takes note of something: in this case, that it is possible to know things. Knowledge is real.

B. The Kantian points out that the mode of knowing and the mode of being are not the same, and concludes that common sense is wrong. Knowledge is apparent, but not real.

C. The anti-Kantian, determined to uphold common sense, applies modus tollens. We know that knowledge is real: so the mode of knowing and the mode of being must be the same.

Each party to the dispute says something true (that knowledge is real, that the mode of being and the mode of knowing are not the same), and something false (that knowledge is not real, that the mode of being and the mode of knowing are the same.)

A vast number of philosophical disputes can be analyzed in a very similar manner. Thus we have the general structure:

A. Common sense points out that some item X is real.

B. The Kantian points out that the mode of knowing and the mode of being are not the same, and concludes that common sense is wrong. X is apparent, but not real.

C. The anti-Kantian, determined to uphold common sense, applies modus tollens. We know that X is real: so the mode of knowing and the mode of being must be the same.

Once again, in this general structure, each party to the dispute would say something true (that X is real, that the mode of knowing and being are not the same), and something false (the denial of one of these two.) As an example, we can apply this structure to our discussion of reductionism and anti-reductionism. The reductionist, in this case, is the Kantian (in our present structure), and the anti-reductionist the anti-Kantian. The very same person might well argue both sides about different things: thus Sean Carroll might be anti-reductionist about fundamental particles and reductionist about humans, while Alexander Pruss is anti-reductionist about humans and reductionist about artifacts. But whether we are discussing fundamental particles, humans, or artifacts, both sides are wrong. Both say something true, but also something false.

Several cautionary notes are needed in this regard.

First, both sides will frequently realize that they are saying something strongly counter-intuitive, and attempt to remedy this by saying something along the lines of “I don’t mean to say the thing that is false.” But that is not the point. I do not say that you intend to say the thing that is false. I say that you give an account which logically implies the thing that is false, and that the only way you can avoid this implication is by rejecting the false dichotomy completely, namely by accepting both the reality of X, and the distinction of the modes of knowing and being. Thus for example Sean Carroll’s does not distinguish his poetic naturalism from eliminativism in terms of what it says to be true, but only in terms of what it says to be useful. But eliminativism says that it is false that there are ships: therefore Carroll’s poetic naturalism also says that it is false that there are ships, whether he intends to say this or not, and whether or not he finds it useful to say that there are.

Second, this outline uses the terminology of “Kantian” and “anti-Kantian,” but in fact the two tend to blur into one another, because the mistakes are very similar: both imply that the unknown and the known, as such, are the same. Thus for example in my post on reductionism I said that there was a Kantian error in the anti-reductionist position: but in the present schema, the error is anti-Kantian. In part, this happened because I did not make these distinctions clearly enough myself in the earlier post. But is it also because the errors themselves uphold very similar contradictions. Thus the anti-reductionist thinks somewhat along these lines:

We know that a human being is one thing. We know it as a unity, and therefore it has a mode of being as a unity. But whenever anyone tries to explain the idea of a human being, they end up saying many things about it. So our explanation of a human being cannot be the true explanation. Since the mode of knowing and the mode of being must be the same, a true explanation of a human being would have to be absolutely one. We have no explanation like that, so it must be that a human being has an essence which is currently hidden from us.

Note that this reasons in an anti-Kantian manner (the mode of being and the mode of knowing must be the same), but the conclusion is effectively Kantian: possible or not, we actually have no knowledge of human beings as they are.

As I said in the post on reductionism, the parties to the dispute will in general say that an account like mine is anti-realist: realism, according to both sides, requires that one accept one side of the dichotomy and reject the other. But I respond that the very dispute between realism and anti-realism can be itself an example of the false dichotomy, as the dispute is often understood. Thus:

A. Common sense notes that the things we normally think and talk about are real, and that the things we normally say about them are true.

B. The Kantian (the anti-realist) points out that the mode of knowing and the mode of being are not the same, and concludes that common sense is wrong. The things we normally talk about appear to be real, but they are not.

C. The anti-Kantian (the realist) applies modus tollens. We know these things are real: so the mode of knowledge and the mode of being must be the same after all.

As usual, both say something true, and both say something false. Consider Scott Sumner, who tends to take an anti-realist position, as for example here:

Even worse, I propose doing so for “postmodern” reasons. I will start by denying the reality of inflation, and then argue for some substitute concepts that are far more useful. First a bit of philosophy. There is a lively debate about whether there is a meaningful distinction between our perception of reality, and actual reality. I had a long debate with a philosopher about whether Newton’s laws of motion were a part of reality, or merely a human construct. I took the latter view, arguing that if humans had never existed then Newton’s laws would have never existed. He argued they are objectively true. I responded that Einstein showed that were false. He responded that they were objectively true in the limiting case. I argued that even that might be changed by future developments in our understanding of reality at the quantum level. He argued that they’d still be objectively approximately true, etc, etc.

On the one hand, a lot of what Scott says here is right. On the other hand, he mistakenly believes that it follows that common sense is mistaken in matters in which it is not, in fact, mistaken. The reasoning is basically the reasoning of the Kantian: one notices that we have a specific mode of knowing which is not the mode of being of things, and concludes that knowledge is impossible, or in Scott’s terminology, “objective truth” does not exist, at least as distinct from personal opinion. He has a more extensive discussion of this here:

I don’t see it as relativism at all. I don’t see it as the world of fuzzy post-modern philosophers attacking the virtuous hard sciences. It’s important not to get confused by semantics, and focus on what’s really at stake. In my view, Rorty’s views are most easily seen by considering his denial of the distinction between objective truth and subjective belief. In order to see why he did this, consider Rorty’s claim that, “That which has no practical implications, has no theoretical implications.” Suppose Rorty’s right, and it’s all just belief that we hold with more or less confidence. What then? In contrast, suppose the distinction between subjective belief and objective fact is true. What then? What are the practical implications of each philosophical view? I believe the most useful way of thinking about this is to view all beliefs as subjective, albeit held with more or less confidence.

Let’s suppose it were true that we could divide up statements about the world into two categories, subjective beliefs and objective facts. Now let’s write down all our statements about the world onto slips of paper. Every single one of them, there must be trillions (even if we ignore the field of math, where an infinite number of statements could be constructed.) Now let’s divide these statements up into two big piles, one set is subjective beliefs, and the other pile contains statements that are objective facts. We build a vast Borgesian library, and put all the subjective beliefs (i.e. Trump is an idiot) into one wing, and all the objective facts (Paris is the capital of France) into the other wing.

Now here’s the question for pragmatists like Rorty and me. Is this a useful distinction to make? If it is useful, how is it useful? Here’s the only useful thing I can imagine resulting from this distinction. If we have a category of objective facts, then we can save time by not questioning these facts as new information arises. They are “off limits”. Since they are objective facts, they can never be refuted. If they could be refuted, then they’d be subjective beliefs, not objective facts.

But I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to consider any beliefs to be completely off limits—not at all open to refutation. That reminds me too much of fundamentalist religion. On the other hand, I do want to distinguish between different kinds of beliefs, in a way that I think is more pragmatic than the subjective/objective distinction. Rather I’d like to assign probability values to each belief, which represent my confidence as to whether or not the belief is true. Then I’d like to devote more of my time to entertaining critiques of highly questionable hypotheses, than I do to less plausible hypotheses.

Again, this makes a great deal of sense. The problem is that Scott thinks that either there is no distinction between the subjective and objective, or we need to be able to make that distinction subjectively. Since the latter seems an evident contradiction, he concludes that there is no distinction between subjective and objective. Later in the post, he puts this in terms of “map and territory”:

The other point of confusion I see is people conflating “the map and the territory”. Then they want to view “objective facts” as aspects of the territory, the underlying reality, not (just) beliefs about the territory. I don’t think that’s very useful, as it seems to me that statements about the world are always models of the world, not the world itself. Again, if it were not true, then theories could never be revised over time. After all, Einstein didn’t revise reality in 1905; he revised our understanding of reality–our model of reality.

“Statements about the world are always models of the world, not the world itself.” Indeed. That is because they are statements, not the things the statements are about. This is correctly to notice that the mode of knowledge is not the mode of being. But it does not follow that there are no objective facts, nor that objective facts are not distinct from opinions. Consider the statement that “dogs are animals.” We can call that statement a “model of the world.” But is not about a model of the world: it is about dogs, which are not our model or even parts of our model, but things moving around outside in the real world. Obviously, we cannot concretely distinguish between “things we think are true” and “things that are actually true,” because it will always be us talking about things that are actually true, but we can make and understand that distinction in the abstract. Scott is right, however, to reject the idea that some ideas are subjective “because they are about the map,” with other statements being objective “because they are about the territory.” In the map / territory terminology, all statements are maps, and all of them are about the territory (including statements about maps, which refer to maps as things that exist, and thus as part of the territory.)

We can see here how Scott Sumner is falling into the Kantian error. But what about the realist position? It does not follow from any of the above that the realist must make any corresponding error. And indeed, in all such dichotomies, there will be a side which is more right than the other: namely, the side that says that common sense is right. And so it is possible, and correct, to say that common sense is right without also accepting the corresponding falsehood (namely that the mode of knowing and the mode of being are the same.) But if we do accept the realist position together with the corresponding falsehood, this can manifest itself in various ways. For example, one might say that one should indeed put some things in the category of “off limits” for discussion: since they are objective facts, they can never be revised. Thus for example James Larson, as in an earlier discussion, tends to identify the rejection of his positions with the rejection of realism. In effect, “My beliefs are objectively true. So people who disagree with my beliefs reject objective truth. And I cannot admit that my beliefs might be false, because that would mean an objective truth could be false at the same time, which is a contradiction.” The problem will not always be manifested in the same way, however, because as we said in the last post, each end of the false dichotomy implies a similar contradiction and cannot be reasoned about coherently.

Kantian and Anti-Kantian Confusion

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I introduced what I called the “Kantian error” in an earlier post, and have since used it in explaining several issues such the understanding of unity and the nature of form. However, considering my original point, we can see that there are actually two relevant errors.

First, there is the Kantian error itself, which amounts to the claim that nothing real can be truly known.

Second, there is an anti-Kantian error, namely the error opposed to the element of truth in Kant’s position. I pointed out that Kant is correct that we cannot know things “as they are in themselves” if this is meant to identify the mode of knowing and the mode of being as such. The opposite error, therefore, would be to say that we can know things by having a mode of knowing which is completely identical to the mode of being which things have. Edward Feser, for example, effectively falls into this error in his remarks on sensible colors discussed in an earlier post on truth in the senses, and more recently at his blog he reaffirms the same position:

Part of the reason the mechanical conception of matter entails the possibility of zombies is that it takes matter to be devoid of anything like color, sound, taste, odor, heat, cold and the like, as common sense conceives of these qualities.  On the mechanical conception, if you redefine redness (for example) as a tendency to absorb certain wavelengths of light and reflect others, then you can say that redness is a real feature of the physical world.  But if by “redness” you mean what common sense understands by it – the way red looks in conscious experience – then, according to the mechanical conception, nothing like that really exists in matter.  And something similar holds of other sensory qualities.  The implication is that matter is devoid of any of the features that make it the case that there is “something it is like” to have a conscious experience, and thus is devoid of consciousness itself.

The implication here is that the way red looks is the way a red thing is. Since the emphasis is in the original, it is reasonable to take this to be identifying the mode of the senses with the mode of being. In reality, as we said in the earlier discussion, there is no “redefinition” because the senses do not define anything in the first place.

Both mistakes, namely both the Kantian and anti-Kantian errors, imply contradictions. The claim that there is something that we cannot know in any way contradicts itself, since it implies that we know of something of which we know nothing. Thus, it implies that an unknown thing is known. Similarly, the claim that the mode of knowing as such is the same as the mode of being, to put it in Kant’s words, “is as much as to imagine that experience is also real without experience.” In other words, suppose that “the way red looks” is the very way a red apple is apart from the senses: then the apple looks a certain way, even when no one is looking, and thus precisely when it does not look any way at all.

Thus both errors imply similar contradictions: an unknown thing as such is known, or a known thing as such is unknown. The errors are generated in much the way Kant himself seems to have fallen into the error. Either knowledge is possible or it is not, we say. If it is not, then you have the Kantian error, and if it is, it appears that our way of knowing must the same as the way things are, and thus you have the anti-Kantian error.

As I pointed out in discussing consistency, an inconsistent claim, understood as such, does not propose to us any particular way to understand the world. The situation described is unintelligible, and in no way tells us what we should expect to find if it turns out to be the case. Given this fact, together with the similarity of the implied contradictions, we should not be surprised if people rarely double down completely on one error or the other, but rather waver vaguely between the two as they see the unpalatable implications of one side or the other.

Thus, the problem arises from the false dichotomy between “knowledge is not possible” and “knowledge is possible but must work in this particular way, namely by an identity of the mode of knowing and the mode of being.” I said in the linked post that this is “one of the most basic causes of human error,” but it might be possible to go further and suggest that it is the principal cause of philosophical error apart from error caused by trading truth for other things. At any rate, the reader is advised to keep this in mind as a distinct possibility. We may see additional relevant evidence as time goes on.