Philosophy: Kant on Space Part 2

Scott Edgar (Saint Mary's) returns to Kant's argument from Geometry, this time examining two famous objections to it: the famous "neglected alternative" objection and a powerful objection from 20th century physics. After considering possible responses on Kant's behalf, Scott ends with a bang, introducing Kant's famous claim that we know things only as they appear to us, not as they are in themselves.

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[TheAlphasapien]

If our knowledge of what space(geometry) 'actually' is like comes from experiment, doesn't that indicate that our previous knowledge of space wasn't empirically based?

Children don't do advanced physics to arrive at a concept of space! Also special and general relativity are well known to upset previous intuitions of space and time. If our intuition of space, and our empirical knowledge of space differ, doesn't this clearly confirm Kant's argument? This also gets to the neglected alternative argument. It implies that there is a sort of actual space out there, that behaves sort of like our intuitions, but also not (in empirically measurable ways). The fact that knowing how space actually is, requires empirical study doesn't necessarily imply that our first draft concept of space wasn't an intuition.

This is perfectly in line with evolutionary theories of how the mind evolved, an approximation of space-like activity is modeled in the brain aiding survival. Each organism develops and uses this synthetic a priori intuition of space. Only when an inteligent enough species comes along to actually experiment with space in strange cases (that didn't apply to the past survival of the species) would the differences between "space" the concept and "space" the reality be known.

[rhYT]

I'm no Kant expert, but have put some effort into it. Kant's most fundamental claim was that the human mind (and even that of other animals) can't be a blank slate because by the various circuitous pathways that stimulus enters the brain there quite obviously has to be some kind of templates that organize the stimulus into forms. 3D space has to be one of the templates, probably very fundamental low level template, because we get no stimuli from "space". Kant did not opine that 3D space was not real, he only claimed that our representation of it is not real in the sense that it is not sensed.

Accepting that the mind has some kind of templates that organize the stimulus we can at least be cautious with regards how trustworthy those templates are. However, at the same time, we can't ignore the templated picture of the world since it is all we have - we are stuck with it.

Kant also said that the 3D template necessarily leads to the concept of time when we sense objects moving. Time, he noted, is a synthetic concept and not directly sensed. Next, the concept of cause and effect must necessarily rise from 3D+Tme and sensation of movement, thus refuting Hume's assertion that the concept of cause&effect is a habit of thought due to memory. Kant is saying that from only a 3D apriori template the concepts of Time and cause&effect must arise if memory allows for recognition of movement. It is not a habit of thought but a necessity.

Maths, in particular geometry, with their aprioriness, likely reveal to consciousness some basic structures of one or a few apriori apparatus that we have. The love affair between science and math shows that empirical science does not wholly trust itself without the math confirming the observations, meaning that we validate observations using the only really validating tool we have, namely the aprioris.

Kant did say that any stimulus of the senses, that can't be fit into a 3D+Time picture of the world will simply be ignored, likely fairly early in the brain processing apparatus. So he wondered what, if anything, we might be missing. And furthermore, if checking observations against aprioris is the best validation we can come up with, then we'd better hope those aprioris are correct, and yet, with what will we validate them?

Ultimately Kant did caste some skepticism on the possiblity of science to know everything, while at the same time recognizing that science as it is done is the best we can do.

To all that I will add: Consider if intelligent creatures on some other planet have a different set of aprioris? Such could make them more or less clever than humans.

[samisiddiqi]

A lot of these objections come from a bunch of hecklers in all honesty.

Kant was talking about what goes on in the mind through intuition.

[pxp]

I think that the main contribution of Kant is to argue in a very convincing way, that what we might call "objective reality" (or digonsicht), is a co-production of what is out there in the world, and what we project on to it. Space and time are projected from our minds onto whatever is out there, and together reality is created. This might not be actual reality, but it is all we have, and as we all have the same fundamentals in our minds - space and time, we can call this co-production reality.

This is represented very strongly in postmodernist thinking about how history and facts are a product of our mind reflected in narratives and subjectivity. This is a cause of a general sense of confusion in which we are gradually losing common ground in regards to what is fact and what reality is in general.

[milliern]

You follow up such a good video with such a bad video. The formal intuition in its Euclidean structure was the foundation for Lobachevsky and Bolyai's work, in a synthetic a priori sense. Everyone forgets that 1) GTR can be represented in 3-D Euclidean geometry using gradients, and 2) that the non-Euclidean stuff was applied to Einstein's conception of space, and existed prior. None of this geometry was strictly contingent upon experience; it was built up from Euclidean geometry via a variation on the axiom set. That is not inconsistent with the synthetic a priori distinction. This is all done independent of sensuous experience, i.e., not empirically. Above all, regardless of the mathematical description of space in physics, the world of perception is organized and formatted in Euclidean space, otherwise it wouldn't have taken so long to build more sophisticated geometries.


Second, Kant doesn't ignore the possibility that space is also a property of thing-in-themselves. He lays out exactly why we can't have knowledge of things in themselves, which simply makes the possibility trivial. Regarding what you say, in accordance with others, namely that Kant somehow holds that necessity of knowledge is what determines whether space is or is not a property of objects, is not correct; that's not the heart of it, at all. Were space a property of things-in-themselves, that would lie on the other side of the senses, and senses mark the bounds of knowledge. Any attempt to wrangle with that necessarily requires that you treat the refutation of transcendental realism, not this other junk you are talking about.


My advice is not to confuse geometric descriptions of the empirical world with the notion and structure of formal intuition.

[andyz]

The objection of the first is flawed due to a misunderstanding of relativity: geometry is a description of space, and finding the correct geometry to describe space does not change the nature of geometry itself. Einstein and Lorenz said that the geometry that we use to describe space is wrong (due to the incorrect assumption that position, time and momentum are constant regardless of reference frame), however that means the geometrical description that we used to describe the universe is wrong, not the nature of geometry itself.

[dionysianapollomarx]

It is not that space does not represent a thing-in-itself. It is that space is indeed a thing-in-itself, but our representation of space is not a thing-in-itself, but a thing as we perceive it to be. Such are the limits of human perception and human knowledge and reflection, which limit our representations. Kant did make the mistake of stating clearly that space is a form of our intuitions, instead of stating that our representation of space is merely a verisimilitude of what space really is. We can grasp the concept of space by reflection. However, we cannot fully realize it through our own limited cognition, which also limits our tools of reflection. Kant's notion that synthetic a priori knowledge is ampliative is perhaps the best insight to serve as the most effective antidote to this limitation.

[aulus]

what an illuminating explanation of such convoluted ideas...

[fabiolademartini]

OMG! I wish you were my Modern Philosophy teacher! You make it sound really easy (and I am a Spanish speaker). You are officially my hero.

[hetuchakra]

One doesn't need to invoke empiricial knowlegde of the world/physics to show the first premise as given here is problematic. Mathematicians Gauss or better still Riemann had already established that there can be many more geometries than the familiar Euclidean one in the 1800s. Riemann then developed the mathematical concepts that Einstein would go on to use fifty years later in his General Theory of relativity

[castrojosua]

All this makes sense once you add the Ether into the equation.

[jovinl]

Greeting from Hong Kong.Just want to say thanks to Scott. Your series of Kant is really brilliant, so comprehensive that I have not seen so far, really helped me a lot to understand the idea in very short time. I wish you can do more videos.

[henrydavidpurple]

My head hurts now but I kinda like it.

[chandlerinman]

I love Immanuel Kant! Could you do a video on the transcendental ideality of time? 

[borgholable]

i want to add that kant might be right if he just acknowledged that space can be different in our mind but still exists, and what supports that argument even more is actually quantum mechanics, the fact that when we get down to the smallest of scales things start to make no sense to us, in contrary how relativity which operates on our human perception scale can make alot more sense to us, so maybe kants argument is fully right, but its also not fully wrong either, its just missing pieces that i think if kant was still alive today to witness all those new scientific theories how can he fill those holes with a new argument about knowledge

[moesypittounikos]

Kants things in themselves are the same as Locke's primary qualities. But, as Kant argues, if time is ideal then so is plurality. So you can't have things in themselves, or seperation, because space and time is ideal. So there is only one thing in itself. This is Schopenhauers insight.

[GourmetBurrito]

Dang son. But suppose his argument is airtight. Our image of the objects in front may not be perfect, but isn't it at least just as likely that the image we get is somewhat correct despite the distortions?

[Francisqolito]

This is interesting. well am not versed in the theory of relativity and am not sure how you arrived at "we need to do a bunch of physics to discover geometry" but it seems to me Kant was going for an axiomatic truth and he succesfully proved geometry is synthetic as well as a priori hence it is insured from any further speculation in his grand system(transcendental aesthetic). That is to say unless the system was leading to some contraction with itself within its own a priori constructed bounds it remained valid. Since "reason only perceives that which it draws from itself". Whether the construction of these synthetic a priori concepts happens a posteriori is irrelevant to this system since time and space are the forms of intuition which means where we discover these concenpts or not they are still there as possible conceptions and are still synthetic apriori.

Am not sure why he failed to allow room for space to be a property of things in themselves (noumena) since he had already claimed ignorance to the nature of his noumena. Maybe because he wanted to make a clearer appropriation of 'THE space'(specific) as a form of intuition which he considered neccesary in completion of the circuit of his critique leaving out anything unessential and accidental(maybe a bit hastily). This seems to me quite trivial though.

[Bobxchen]

I agree with Kant. This is my argument: Using my head I can think of empty space without any object. I can never think of any object without Space. So our mind can create the space before there is even any object, therefore I believe that space is really something that our mind is using as a form of intuition NOT a property of things in itself.

[ahmedmahmud]

I think most scientist Dont understand kant and dont understand the theory of relativity. Since it seems that they are describing both incorrectly. Last time I checked, I did not perceive the world in non-Eucladian geometry and even non-Eucladian geometry is described in terms of Eucladian geometry. That's the only way to make it intelligible to humans. So the first objection misses the mark.😂