In response to my comments on "Let x = x": I see that I've not given enough history of epistemology along the way, here. So now, it's back to the Enlightenment we go.
Here's a brief explanation from The Philosophy Pages:
"Kant's aim was to move beyond the traditional dichotomy between rationalism and empiricism. The rationalists had tried to show that we can understand the world by careful use of reason; this guarantees the indubitability of our knowledge but leaves serious questions about its practical content. The empiricists, on the other hand, had argued that all of our knowledge must be firmly grounded in experience; practical content is thus secured, but it turns out that we can be certain of very little. Both approaches have failed, Kant supposed, because both are premised on the same mistaken assumption.
Progress in philosophy, according to Kant, requires that we frame the epistemological problem in an entirely different way. The crucial question is not how we can bring ourselves to understand the world, but how the world comes to be understood by us. Instead of trying, by reason or experience, to make our concepts match the nature of objects, Kant held, we must allow the structure of our concepts shape our experience of objects."
This can be a difficult thought to get one's brain around, because we are so accustomed to thinking of ourselves as the passive recipients of information from the world. Kant was disturbed because David Hume, empiricist par exellence, had demonstrated that if one uses empirical presuppositions, the law of causality can not be proven. Scientific discoveries based on inductive reasoning were thereby demonstrated to be less than certain knowledge. Kant believed that there must be another way, so he turned the epistemological project inside out (common philosophical parlance calls this his 'Copernican Revolution'). His approach was to try to determine what knowledge is possible based upon the structure of human reason. Our approach herein has been similar, except we have been looking at the structure of language rather than thought, because it is more easily nailed down (so to speak).
Vincent asks: "Or is [Wittgenstein's] use of the word 'show' as in 'it shows itself' itself metaphorical and therefore inadequate in getting his message across?" Yes, I believe this is meant as a metaphor. Witgenstein doesn't mean to suggest that things have volition. He is trying to emphasize the fact that the subject has no control over the appearance of the objects. We construct facts to suit our needs, but the objects simply are there.
And Phillip, ever the skeptical empiricist, insists: "The unobserved world interacts with us all the time without any perception of the interaction. For example an infection. We don't 'know' about the interaction until the pain and or pus shows up. It is possible that an interaction takes place that we will never know about; it doesn't mean that it doesn't happen." What we are concerned with here is the knowledge, though, and not the ultimate reality. You can postulate realities beyond what we actually know has happened, but we don't know about them until we know about them. (There's a good tautology.) You know the infection results from a virus because of the observations of scientists in a biology lab.
And the train, which I hope is coming 'round a bend, is (1) observed by at least four of the five senses, and (2) is a fact insofar as it is coming towards you, so the realization that you are in danger from it does require some action (thinking) on your part, but (3) is also a bundle of sounds, smells, and sights (and if you're too slow, feelings) which simply appears in your world without your having taken any action whatsoever. This difference, between (2) and (3), is basically the difference between what can be said in a sentence and what shows itself as an identity. This last, the identity of the train, which enables us to call it a 'train' now and still a 'train' later when it gets closer, it what proves, through Wittgenstein's deduction, that it exists. If our knowledge of the world is possible, then the objects in the world must really exist, independently of our knowing about them. If our true sentences are really about the world, then the objects named therein must really exist, at some level. So you see, Phillip, we're really on the same side here.
9:02:30 AM 
|
|
