04.17.06
Deductions, transcendental
A comment to Armstrong, Darwin, Eugenie Scott
Let’s forego the jargon and new-agey rhetoric: first issue for any theists or mystics of any type is ontology: are there any good grounds for believing in immaterial and/or transcendent accounts of Mind ? Evolutionists, naturalists, materialists of all types say no; indeed it’s not clear whether Kant himself was holding to immaterialism.
This of course was the point of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction. We are stuck. Our representations include even our interior constructs of ’self’. Perhaps we can infer the ‘integration’ of our experiences just beyond that experiencing.
But Kant uses the term ‘transcendental’ in a meaning distinct from ‘transcendent’.
How could the mind evolve? That’s a better question than asking if it is immaterial.
The issue of your question has gone on since Descartes, never resolved. But I would say that Kant’s strategy is the best version, an upgraded Descartes.
Mr. Toad said,
April 18, 2006 at 12:48 am
OK, good. Yet making a decision about what that interior construct consists of is not impossible or verboten is it? Obviously if one downs a glass of wine quickly one’s perception is affected: so the pure Cartesian soul is hardly tenable (and Kant has a cartesian aspect).
I think the distinction between sensibility and understanding is important, but K. never denies that the understanding deals with sensations, phenomena; it’s that the phenomena are subject to the a priori categories. Nonetheless, those categories are hardly static or even consistent among people–a point K. routinely overlooks. Various “modes” –say possibility, probability– are probably be conceived of/used in widely differing ways, as would logic/math of course–Quine reading a sentence (or gazing at the stars) is hardly reading it the way, say, Esmerlda the cleaning lady is. Which is to say one could take on the categories themselves, and the entire sensation/understanding bifurcation, and the “apperception” concept as well: cognitivism is in fact doing that–even Wittgenstein’s “picture theory of thought” quite different than what Kant suggested. But I will agree eventually consciousness/a prioriness of math/logic relates to evolution and to the biochemical foundation: or reality is far more weird than we suppose .
Mr. Toad said,
April 18, 2006 at 12:51 am
not edited very carefully. apologies. delete it if you want to.