File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2000/bhaskar.0010, message 18


Date: Mon, 02 Oct 2000 22:47:19 +0100
From: Nick Hostettler <nh8soas-AT-lineone.net>
Subject: Re: BHA: Bhaskar, Kant and the epistemic fallacy


Dear Ruth,

I'm not at all versed in things Kantian, so the Kant I'm painting here 
could well be a figure of my imagination. Even if it is, the distinction 
I'm making might be useful for clarifying what I think Roy's DCR should be 
doing.

In your post you distinguish between reality, perception and knowledge. You 
sugggest that Roy and Kant are pretty much in agreement that the world is 
there (intransitively) so that perception and knowledge are of something 
which can be distinguished from the person doing the perceiving or knowing. 
However, the picture then becomes more complicated because Kant does not 
regard perceiving as a moment of simple reception. Perception involves the 
subject in a kind of activity (so that the content of our perceptions is 
transitive). This is where the categories come in, with Kant arguing that 
the categories are internal to perception. In particular, 
spatio-temporality, he argues, is not an empirical or sensually accessible 
feature of the world. To think of 'seeing' the world in those terms would 
make no sense, but thinking of experiencing in this way does. Indeed, 
spatio-temporality is necessary if our experiences of the world are to make 
sense. So it would seen that the categories are invoked in order to make 
sense of the fact that the world available through the senses makes sense!

However, this rather suggests that Kant is using an expansive notion of 
perception that includes aspects that properly fall under the social 
development, or education, of the senses. I would argue that in respect of 
human beings it makes no sense to speak of raw or otherwise pre-social, 
perception whether it is of an empiricist 'sense data' kind or a Kantian 
synthetic kind. On the other hand, it makes every sense to speak of our 
senses having been cultivated, integrated and developed in various ways. 
However, I get the impression that despite invoking mind as an active 
moment in producing synthetic perceptions, Kant retains a naturalistic 
account of perception. He regards the synthetic products of perception as 
embodying the categories as a result of the operation of the mind, but that 
this can be accounted for without any reference to socialisation (I could 
well be wrong though).

My sense is that Kant's account of perception is developed in the absence 
of a real dialectics of subjectivity: he does not recognise the 
fundamentally social character of the subject, nor does he give an account 
of the emergence of mind within social being. His categories are 'natural' 
in as much as they are not thought of as the effects of relationally 
structured social practices: they are unmediated effects of a pre- or 
non-social mind (absenting moments of transitivity in the formation of the 
categories of thought). The result is that Kant's categories are real 
features of an asocial and illicitly univeralised mind. This means that the 
categories cannot be 'real' in the sense that they do not refer to aspects 
of reality in the way that the language of the empirical does. Blue is a 
real feature of the world, while depth, structure, absence and process are 
not. Could it be said that Kant's (implicit) theory of reference was 
determined by the noumenal/phenomenal distinction, with reference only 
applicable at the level of the phenomenal and non-referential concepts 
applicable at the noumenal?

 From an epistemological perspective, Roy's discussion of categories is 
similarly cognitive: it relates to the way we think about the world. Right 
at the start of RTS Roy makes the distinction between the real, which 
encompasses the actual, which encompasses the empirical. He also relates 
the empirical directly to experience. (It does not rule out the idea that 
perception, as distinct from cognition, can be thought of in terms of 
acquired but tacit skills.) His work on the categories, like Kant's, is 
about the way in which the world makes sense to us, but, unlike Kant, Roy's 
DCR is more likely to treats us as determinate social beings (though see my 
posts in response to some of what Phil has to say for some significant 
caveats on this score). A consistent DCR emphasises the emergence of mind 
within the social and the processes of socialisation through which we 
aquire conceptions of the world and the categories these conceptions 
embody. DCR historicises and socialises the categories of perception.

Like neo-Kantianism, Roy's epistemic relativism allows for the fact that 
categorial structures of thought differ between ways of thinking  (or 
perceiving). But, from his distinctively ontological realist perspective he 
rejects the implications that the neo-Kantian position has for ontological 
relativism. Rather, through developing the sciences our concepts come to 
embody increasingly 'real' categories. That is to say, Roy holds that 
categories, if properly realist, do indeed refer to real qualities of the 
world which are quite independent of social being. His categorial realism 
entails the central claim that the categorial system of DCR is an abstract 
account of the intransitive qualities of all Being. The system of DCR works 
up some of the logical implications of the mutual internality of these real 
qualities. This allows him to define irrealism generally as any departure 
from his system. Though here too his tendencies towards the assumption that 
this process can be completed (fully absenting the absence of neccesary 
categories of thought), giving us 'endism' in philosophy if not in history, 
is deeply problematic.


At 13:46 02/10/00 -0400, you wrote:
>Hi Phil, Nick, Jan and all,
>
>Thanks a lot for your comments on the epistemic fallacy, empiricism and
>Kant.  This exchange has really helped me work out my thoughts about this.
>
>Phil, you wrote:
> >I agreed with what you said about the assertion of a non-mental reality not
> >being sufficient to dispose of Kant's account of perception.  But then you
>said >the question is really "just how synthetic of an operation perception
>in the >end is".  I'm not sure what you mean by this so I held my silence.
> >Clarification please.
>
>What I meant was this: if Kant believes (as I think he clearly does) that
>perception is at some level perception *OF* something, some reality that is
>not itself the product of reason, then the difference between RB and Kant
>regarding perception is not a general ontological one ("Is there a material
>world?"), but rather something more like "What are we doing when we perceive
>the world?"  For Kant, what we are doing when we are perceiving (let alone
>engaging in, say, causal reasoning) is highly synthetic.  In the
>"application," or bringing to bear, of the pure forms of intuition, we are,
>in the very moment of perception, construing (for ourselves) the parameters,
>or necessary features, of said perceptual event.  Specifically, in
>perceiving, we do the work of presenting things to ourselves in spacial and
>temporal terms.  Kant thinks that there is no other way for humans to
>perceive than this way, but that it is nonetheless the end-result of a
>synthetic operation.
>
>Contrast this with the process of perception as it is described within
>empiricism.  For empiricists, perception is far less synthetic of an
>operation. It is basically the registration, or reception, of information
>that is, we might say, ready to be registered.  No assembly required.
>
>So Kant comes along and says, "It's not just knowledge that has to be
>produced; sense perceptions are produced too."  The empiricist, depending on
>how seriously s/he takes Bacon (!), may or may not think that knowledge has
>to be actively produced, but in any case s/he does not think this of
>perception.  Sense-data are not produced, for the empiricist; they are
>given.  [For you and other Adorno fans out there, if you aren't already
>familiar with it, Horkheimer has a great treatment of this issue in the
>wonderful article "Traditional and Critical Theory," collected in his
>*Critical Theory*.]
>
>What I was saying is that I see this as the major point of difference
>between RB and Kant on the very specific matter of perception.  Or at least,
>if there is a difference, I'm not sure what it would be other than this.
>
>Does that help?
>
>You continue:
> >On your inquiry about the epistemic fallacy, Ruth, I didn't understand who
> >is supposed to be claiming that "The only thing that exists is knowledge
> >(defined as empiricism)".
>
>That was just my crude way of stating what I understood to be the
>ontological crux of the epistemic fallacy.
>
> > I agree with what you say about Kant's transcendental idealism
> >being most clearly where he commits the epistemic fallacy.
>
>Yes, although I admit that it is interesting and exciting, too, to be shown
>how much he still has in common with empiricists.
>
> >On Kant, I can see what Nick
> >means about Roy's categorial realism being an attempt to overcome the
> >dualism of Kant's phenomenal and noumenal...
>
>I didn't quite understand this.  Can one of you guys explain it a little
>more?  What exactly is "categorial realism?"
>
> >Have you considered the diagram on p145 of RTS?  Here it seems
> >to me that Roy's category of the real could be eliding the distinction
> >between the transitive and the intransitive dimensions, and might not
> >actually establish the primacy of the intransitive material world, but might
> >compress it into the transitive procedures of scientific discovery.
>
>I've just had a look.  It's not a diagram I've thought a lot about.  Let me
>get back to you!
>
> >And just to complicate matters we have Roy's recent plenary statement at the
> >Lancaster CR conference about categorial realism which seemed to imply that
> >if God was a category then God was real.  But how do we then distinguish
> >fiction from reality?
>
>I will have to leave the assessment of Bhaskar's current work to greater
>minds than my own!
>
> >Ruth, from the above I would therefore agree with you that it is Kant's
> >transcendental idealism, and not so much his empirical realism, which is the
> >paradigmatic instance of the epistemic fallacy in his work.
>
>I'm glad to hear it; at least I am a little bit more confident now that it
>is not just that I'm confused.
>
> >Have you checked the Kant references in Roy's later works to see if
> >Roy has a convincing critique of transcendental idealism?
>
>Yes.  At least, I started on it -- there's not a lot, but there *is* one
>dense section in Plato, Etc., in particular, that comes to mind.  I got
>distracted going back to Kant.  Thanks for this obvious reminder.
>
>Warmly,
>Ruth
>
>
>
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