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src/content/posts/kant-view-of-mind-and-consciousness/index.md

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+---
+title: Kant's View of the Mind and Consciousness of Self
+published: 2024-07-24
+description: 'Kant's View of the Mind and Consciousness of Self'
+image: './cover.png'
+tags: ["Theory"]
+category: 'Theory'
+draft: false 
+---
+
+> Brook, Andrew and Julian Wuerth,
+> "[Kant's View of the Mind and Consciousness of Self](https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2023/entries/kant-mind)",
+> The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.)
+
+A Sketch of Kant's View of the Mind
+-----------------------------------
+
+In general structure, Kant's model of the mind was the dominant model in the empirical psychology that flowed from his
+work and then again, after a hiatus during which behaviourism reigned supreme (roughly 1910 to 1965), toward the end of
+the 20th century, especially in cognitive science. Central elements of the models of the mind of thinkers otherwise as
+different as Sigmund Freud and Jerry Fodor are broadly Kantian, for example.
+
+Three ideas define the basic shape ('cognitive architecture') of Kant's model and one its dominant method. They have all
+become part of the foundation of cognitive science.
+
+1. The mind is a complex set of abilities (functions). (As Meerbote 1989 and many others have observed, Kant held a
+   functionalist view of the mind almost 200 years before functionalism was officially articulated in the 1960s by
+   Hilary Putnam and others.)
+2. The functions crucial for mental, knowledge-generating activity are spatio-temporal processing of, and application of
+   concepts to, sensory inputs. Cognition requires concepts as well as percepts.
+3. These functions are forms of what Kant called synthesis. Synthesis (and the unity in consciousness required for
+   synthesis) are central to cognition.
+
+These three ideas are fundamental to most thinking about cognition now. Kant's most important method, the transcendental
+method, is also at the heart of contemporary cognitive science.
+
+- To study the mind, infer the conditions necessary for experience. Arguments having this structure are called
+  _transcendental arguments_.
+
+:::tip
+Translated into contemporary terms, the core of this method is inference to the best explanation, the method of
+postulating unobservable mental mechanisms in order to explain observed behaviour.
+:::
+
+To be sure, Kant thought that he could get more out of his transcendental arguments than just 'best explanations'. He
+thought that he could get _a priori_ (experience independent) knowledge out of them. Kant had a tripartite doctrine of
+the _a priori_. He held that some features of the mind and its knowledge had _a priori_ origins, i.e., must be in the
+mind prior to experience (because using them is necessary to have experience). That mind and knowledge have these
+features are _a priori_ truths, i.e., necessary and universal. And we can come to know these truths, or that they are
+_a priori_ at any rate, only by using _a priori_ methods, i.e., we cannot learn these things from experience (B3) (Brook
+1993). Kant thought that transcendental arguments were _a priori_ or yielded the _a priori_ in all three ways.
+Nonetheless, at the heart of this method is inference to the best explanation. When introspection fell out of favour
+about 100 years ago, the alternative approach adopted was exactly this approach. Its nonempirical roots in Kant
+notwithstanding, it is now the major method used by experimental cognitive scientists.
+
+:::important
+Other topics equally central to Kant's approach to the mind have hardly been discussed by cognitive science. These
+include a kind of synthesis that for Kant was essential to minds like ours and what struck him as the most striking
+features of consciousness of self. Far from his model having been superseded by cognitive science, some things central
+to the model have not even been assimilated by it.
+:::
+
+Kant's Critical Project and How the Mind Fits Into It
+-----------------------------------------------------
+
+The major works so far as Kant's views on the mind are concerned are the monumental _Critique of Pure Reason (CPR)_ and
+his little, late _Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View_, first published in 1798 only six years before his death.
+Kant's view of the mind arose from his
+[general philosophical project](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-development/) in CPR the following way. Kant
+aimed among other things to,
+
+- Justify our conviction that physics, like mathematics, is a body of necessary and universal truth.
+- Insulate religion, including belief in immortality, and free will from the corrosive effects of this very same
+  science.
+
+Kant accepted without reservation that “God, freedom and immortality” (1781/7, Bxxx) exist but feared that, if science
+were relevant to their existence at all, it would provide reasons to doubt that they exist. As he saw it and very
+fortunately, science cannot touch these questions. “I have found it necessary to deny _knowledge_, ... in order to make
+room for faith.” (Bxxx, his italics).
+
+Laying the foundation for pursuit of the first aim, which as he saw it was no less than the aim of showing why physics
+is a science, was what led Kant to his views about how the mind works. He approached the grounding of physics by asking:
+What are the necessary conditions of experience? Put simply, he held that for our experience, and therefore our minds,
+to be as they are, the way that our experience is tied together must reflect the way that, according to physics, says
+objects in the world must be tied together. Seeing this connection also tells us a lot about what our minds must be
+like.
+
+In pursuit of the second aim, Kant criticized some arguments of his predecessors that entailed if sound that we can know
+more about the mind's consciousness of itself than Kant could allow. Mounting these criticisms led him to some
+extraordinarily penetrating ideas about our consciousness of ourselves.
+
+In CPR, Kant discussed the mind only in connection with his main projects, never in its own right, so his treatment is
+remarkably scattered and sketchy. As he put it, “Enquiry … [into] the pure understanding itself, its possibility and the
+cognitive faculties upon which it rests ... is of great importance for my chief purpose, ... [but] does not form an
+essential part of it” (Axvii). Indeed, Kant offers no sustained, focussed discussion of the mind anywhere in his work
+except the popular _Anthropology_.
+
+In addition, the two chapters of CPR in which most of Kant's remarks on the mind occur, the chapter on the
+Transcendental Deduction (TD) and the chapter on what he called Paralogisms (faulty arguments about the mind mounted by
+his predecessors) were the two chapters that gave him the greatest difficulty. (They contain some of the most
+impenetrable prose ever written.) Kant completely rewrote the main body of both chapters for the second edition
+(though not the introductions, interestingly).
+
+In the two editions of CPR, there are seven main discussions of the mind. The first is in the Transcendental Aesthetic,
+the second is in what is usually called the Metaphysical Deduction. Then there are two discussions of it in the
+first-edition TD, in parts 1 to 3 of Section 2 and in the whole of Section 3 and two more in the second-edition TD. The
+seventh and last is found in the first edition version of Kant's attack on the Paralogisms, in the course of which he
+says things of the utmost interest about consciousness of and reference to self. (What little was retained of these
+remarks in the second edition was moved to the completely rewritten TD.) For understanding Kant on the mind and
+self-knowledge, the first edition of CPR is far more valuable than the second edition. Kant's discussion proceeds
+through the following stages.
+
+### Transcendental Aesthetic
+
+Kant calls the first stage the Transcendental Aesthetic. It is about what space and time must be like, and how we must
+handle them, if our experience is to have the spatial and temporal properties that it has. This question about the
+necessary conditions of experience is for Kant a 'transcendental' question and the strategy of proceeding by trying to
+find answers to such questions is, as we said, the strategy of transcendental argument.
+
+Here Kant advances one of his most notorious views: that whatever it is that impinges on us from the mind-independent
+world does not come located in a spatial nor even a temporal matrix (A37=B54fn.). Rather, it is the mind that organizes
+this 'manifold of raw intuition', as he called it, spatially and temporally. The mind has two pure forms of intuition,
+space and time, built into it to allow it to do so. ('Pure' means 'not derived from experience'.)
+
+### Metaphysical Deduction
+
+The Aesthetic is about the conditions of experience, Kant's official project. The chapter leading up to the
+Transcendental Deduction, The Clue to the Discovery of All Pure Concepts of the Understanding has a very different
+starting point.
+
+Starting from Aristotelian logic (the syllogisms and the formal concepts that Aristotle called _categories_), Kant
+proceeds by analysis to draw out the implications of these concepts and syllogisms for the conceptual structure (the
+“function of thought in judgment”) within which all thought and experience must take place. The result is what Kant
+called the Categories. That is to say, Kant tries to deduce the conceptual structure of experience from the components
+of Aristotelian logic.
+
+**Thus, in Kant's thought about the mind early in CPR, there is not one central movement but two, one in the
+Transcendental Aesthetic and the other in the Metaphysical Deduction. The first is a move up from experience (of
+objects) to the necessary conditions of such experience. The second is a move down from the Aristotelian functions of
+judgment to the concepts that we have to use in judging, namely, the Categories. One is inference up from experience,
+the other deduction down from conceptual structures of the most abstract kind.**
+
+### Transcendental Deduction, 1st Edition
+
+Then we get to the second chapter of the Transcendental Logic, the brilliant and baffling Transcendental Deduction (TD).
+Recall the two movements just discussed, the one from experience to its conditions and the one from Aristotelian
+functions of judgment to the concepts that we must use in all judging (the Categories). This duality led Kant to his
+famous question of right (_quid juris_): with what right do we apply the Categories, which are not acquired from
+experience, to the contents of experience?. Kant's problem here is not as arcane as it might seem. It reflects an
+important question: How is it that the world as we experience it conforms to our logic? In briefest form, Kant thought
+that the trick to showing how it is possible for the Categories to apply to experience is to show that it is _necessary_
+that they apply.
+
+TD has two sides, though Kant never treats them separately. He once called them the objective and the subjective
+deductions. The objective deduction is about the conceptual and other cognitive conditions of having representations of
+objects. It is Kant's answer to the quid juris question. Exactly how the objective deduction goes is highly
+controversial, a controversy that we will sidestep here. The subjective deduction is about what the mind, the
+“subjective sources” of understanding, must as a consequence be like. The subjective deduction is what mainly interests
+us.

src/content/posts/reading-notes-de-administrando-imperio/index.md

@@ -5,7 +5,7 @@ description: 'A peek into how an emperor manages his nation'
 image: './cover.png'
 tags: ["Management"]
 category: 'Management'
-draft: false 
+draft: true 
 ---
 
 Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (905 - 959) was the fourth Byzantine emperor of the Macedonian dynasty,