Q&A: "I Hallucinate, Therefore You Exist" – Practical Meaning
"I Hallucinate, Therefore You Exist" – Practical Meaning
Question
Hello Rabbi, happy holiday.
In Truth and Not Certain, in the chapter mentioned above, you wrote several objections to Kant’s approach.
In one of the lines you phrased it this way –
"His claim that we deal with magnitudes, events, and objects as they appear in our cognition is certainly reasonable, but the conclusions he draws from it are not reasonable."
"Even if we accept the distinction between noumena and phenomena, it is still hard to find a good basis for the assumption of induction."
And here the questioner asks –
As someone who read your article, "What Does Moses Our Teacher Have to Do with Kant’s Philosophy" – where exactly is the fine line between accepting the epistemological distinction between noumena and phenomena, and Kant’s hallucination-like view of reality, against which you raised objections in your book? (For example, the objection involving acceleration = force divided by mass — where in the noumenal realm it is different from the phenomenal one.)
That is, if one does accept the distinction between noumena and phenomena – what exactly are Kant’s unreasonable conclusions? And what are the reasonable ones? Where is the boundary?
Thank you very much, and happy holiday!
Answer
I didn’t understand the question. Kant assumes that our cognition dictates the results of scientific experiments (or at least their framework), and I argue that it does not. There is nothing preventing us from seeing an object accelerate at a rate that does not follow Newton’s second law. As for time, people have already written that Kant held that space and time are transcendental categories imposed on us. But then Einstein came along and changed our concepts of time. That shows that they are not imposed on us. As I understand it, only logic is imposed on us (and cannot be departed from). Nothing else connected to physics and the laws of nature is.
Discussion on Answer
Addition –
From what it seems, everything you accept in the distinction between noumena and phenomena applies only to sensory perception, but not beyond that (processes of thinking about the world).
Right?
***The distinction that you accept regarding noumena and phenomena applies only to sensory perception.
You can say anything, but as I wrote, it doesn’t seem correct. Induction does not force what will appear later. If induction tells me that bodies move with an acceleration proportional to the force acting on them, do you think my vision will be unable to perceive bodies accelerating at a different rate? Have you never encountered an inductive generalization that turned out to be false? What about the physics of Aristotle and Newton? Why do you think the conclusions of induction are imposed on us?
I don’t know what else needs to be explained here.
Thank you very much! (I understood the misunderstanding I had in Kant’s words 🙂 )
Happy holiday.
Thank you for the answer.
You wrote –
Kant assumes that our cognition dictates the results of scientific experiments (or at least their framework), and I argue that it does not….."
In the above article http://www.biu.ac.il/JH/Parasha/kitisa/Avraham.doc you wrote –
And from here, if I ask what color the flower is, I am not dealing with the flower itself but with its image in our cognition. There is an implicit assumption here that the person being asked is also observing the flower through eyes (because color is the representation of a message sent from the eyes). The flower in itself has no color at all, only a certain crystalline structure that produces in us the sensations of color. In the same way, every question about the properties of an object presupposes a system of a certain type that observes it. The answer to the question will likewise be given in terms of that same cognitive system. From this emerges a far-reaching conclusion: Kant’s “limitation” is not really a limitation at all. Perception is always the creation of representations of things, and this is our encounter with things as they are in themselves. There is no such thing as seeing or hearing the thing in itself, not because we are limited, but because seeing or hearing a thing means creating a representation of it.
Why can’t one say that according to Kant we accept induction as having the status of a cognitive representation of the world in our minds (the framework of scientific experiments), ***exactly as we accept the color of the flower as a cognitive representation***?
We need an explanation of the difference between a cognitive representation of an object, which you accept as a function of a person’s sensory reception of reality, and rejecting the claim that induction is included in the category of cognitive representation.
Thank you very much.