Without sensibility, no object would be given to us without understanding.
No object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty.
Intuitions, without concepts or fly.
So we see that for concept concepts, the conceptual dimension is actually the seeing element in experience.
For there to be an experience in contrast to a sensation to a bear, sensation, to the triggering of events, of the sensory, all that.
But it's not an experience for there to be an experience.
There must be an experience of something and for there to be a something,
it has to be an entity subsumed under a general class of things, whether it's a chair or a person.
So there is a required conceptual framework for experience itself,
and it is experience and understanding that together constitute the foundations of all knowledge.
Without these concepts, no more than a parade of sensations would take place.
And the this parade could never rise to the level of this or that.
Now I want you to understand this is a species of cognitive relativism.
This part of Kahn's argument with appropriate reservations may be taken to be a chapter in the very anthropology of thought,
but not as a species of relativism. And when I say a chapter in the anthropology of thought,
recall how frequently Cox reminds us that the argument in place pertains to us changed to a creature of a certain kind pertains to human beings.
I think I've mentioned in an early election that the fact that he expresses impatience with those who are impatient with this divide,
he's established between phenomena and Numa.
Doesn't this lead to scepticism? Why indeed, can we not comprehend things as in themselves?
They really are unconscious, prepared to say, well, imagine to believe that there is a creature that could but not us,
and that people who are impatient with that division are asking this is a very daily quote, are asking for the impossible.
They're asking for us not to be human beings. So it's not a relativistic epistemology, but it is an anthropology of knowledge.
It presupposes a creature of a certain kind.
And that's the only kind of conjecture discussed with any authority.
And it's the only con to which Kahn's argument can relate directly and with authority.
He probably would be interested in lots of literature that we've squandered in the last 30 years.
On what it's like to be a bat. But I don't think he'd be interested for a long time now.
The manner in which the external world is objectified is according to rules that
are at once universal and necessary within the community of rational human beings.
This is another way of saying this isn't a relativism that leads to scepticism.
The rules that govern the synthesis of the manifold of sensuous composite content.
These rules are universal and necessary. It's conceivable that some different creature might subsume appearances under different rules.
That, of course, is not only something we don't know. It's something we've come to know.
The emphasis here is on what is knowable in principle by the sort of creature that we happen to be.
So knowledge of the country and scheme is a is an amalgam of sensibility and understanding
such that what cannot in principle enter in to experience cannot in principle be known.
And so what we says right at the outset that of course he was right in saying that all of our knowledge arises from experience.
That fossil fuel account has no trouble with at all. And he emphasised.
He says the mistake you made was that in assuming that all of our knowledge arises from experience, our knowledge is grounded in experience.
And while HUME failed to appreciate is the necessary elements of cognition that must be in place for there to be experience
and for experience to merge with understanding in a room governed way in such a way as to be generative of knowledge.
You know. To be known, an object must go beyond an element of experience, and it must be located within a conceptual framework.
So what's required now is an argument that establishes the necessity, that universality of the pure concepts.
How come they're not just haphazard? Required us what country for us to as the transcendental deduction of the categories.
Now, he says, not every kind of knowledge of priority should be called transcendental.
But that only by which we know that and know how certain representations can be employed or are possible purely a
your transcendental in the sense of establishing the necessary enabling conditions for something else to take place.
So how do sensations of the most rudimentary sort enter into the formation of concepts?
And how does the manifold of otherwise disparate appearances become a unified experience in a given consciousness?
Redundantly not only has to get all of this flotsam unified, but it must be unified in a consciousness,
and it has to be unified on a consciousness that actually has a street address so that all this is taking place in you or you.
It's not just out there somewhere.
So there has to be a self-consciousness in which all of this somehow takes place and this has to be achieved without thinking.
Question. Now I do want to say something.
I have this for on on the kind of deduction that Conte has and my transcendental deduction,
the categories I mentioned before, Conte did have an interest.
Conte had an interest in everything. He did have an interest in it.
Certain of political events of the time, jurisdictional disputes,
boundary and border disputes and various German principalities and so forth didn't make a close study of this,
but anyone with an interest in that certainly would have been exposed to what were referred to as deduction placements.
These are filings, formal filings. Today, we we talk about them as of legal briefs to establish the authenticity of a claim.
And that's the sort of deduction he has in mind, is he's talking about an argument that a jury would find compelling.
In other words, it's not a logical deduction of the categories.
It's a transcendental deduction. And the deduction in question is to make out this case, since we can do such and such,
since this happens across all of us, there's no question about it.
Don't you agree that for this to be the case, that must be the case for the conceptual lives we live, for the knowledge claims that we routinely make?
Do you not see that there are certain pure categories of the understanding that must be in place?
They must constitute the template, the framework, the necessary conditions for the knowledge we know we have.
You say? It's that kind of argument.
So he must. No.
So he must provide the the argument.
For the conclusion that we are in a position to make objective judgements regarding entities in the external world and judgement becomes pivotal.
It's the linchpin of the cognitive processes that he's trying to establish.
Judgement itself for time.
So we see that an experience is of a something that's not merely a parade of disconnected sensations.
It must be a means not contained in the sensations themselves by which these experiences are forged and concepts.
The way to begin an understanding of how this takes place is with two supreme principles.
So we now get to the two supreme principles of the first chief.
One pertains to sensibility and one pertains to understanding.
The supreme principle in relation to sensibility is that the manifold of intuition,
quote, should be subject to the formal conditions of space and time.
That's the transcendentalists that the necessary enabling conditions for there to be sensibility is a spatial temporal framework, not in the stimulus.
That's something that we we bring to the situation.
That's the supreme principle regarding sensibility. The supreme principle in relation to understanding is that, quote,
all the manifold of intuition should be subject to conditions of the original synthetic unity of perception.
A typical country and phrase. You're sitting there as if you met them, paralysed by a fire poison dart.
If I say it again, your facial expression will not change one wish.
I will prove this by saying it again. The supreme principle in relation to the understanding.
Somehow you are an Oxford students. Nothing gets by you.
This will be the supreme principle in relation to the understanding is that, quote,
all the manifold of intuition should be subject to conditions of the original synthetic unity of perception.
What's the manifold of intuition? It's all that impinging stuff.
You say spatial, temporally received.
Intuition. On. Sure, this mode of reception and what has to happen to it has to get synthesised.
And it has to get unified. I shall give this to you of if it were the States, you could probably put this on Sesame Street.
I will give it to you by way of Sesame Street. Part of the manifold of intuition is part.
Another part of it is blacks. A third part of it is this bias.
A fourth part of it is West. And the fifth part of it is a pungent aroma.
Absolutely. Absolutely. Synthetic unity of perception.
You will never get a cup of coffee out of this. Oh.
And also now the eyebrows or a vest and the poison has worn off.
So we've got to have the synthetic unity of perception imposed on these sensuous into which the manifold of sensuous intuitions,
which, by the way, do not come carrying the code for unification.
We provide the unification.
The external world provides the matter for otherwise known as we want a technical term of this otherwise known as the mass.
And I would say that we make a cup of coffee constantly on my mind during these lectures.
Now we're the jury in front of competency, argues this case,
and we have to judge whether he's made this case for the transcendental reduction of the categories.
The transcendental, as noted, refers to the necessary conditions for there to be knowledge at all.
He puts it this way as early as a 12.
I call all knowledge transcendental if it is occupied not with objects, but with the way that we can possibly know objects even before we experience.
You say? It's the rule according to which we can have objective knowledge even before our eyes.
How do we want to understand this? We have a little booklet called The Rules of Chess.
So before you ever buy pieces or open up the board or anything, that's every permissible move that can take place.
And a game properly called the game of chess.
All knowledge is transcendental. Such knowledge is transcendental.
When in fact. It's occupied, not with let's watch music glasses, but the very possibility of knowing anything.
Before we experience the conditions that must be in place for us to know things in a certain way.
What way? Our way of knowing things.
So the task of the transcendental deduction, finally, is the question how do we come to have knowledge of objects?
And more precisely.
The task is to establish the warrant or the justification of any knowledge claim we might make that would be validly tied to experience.
Well, let me summarise the approach through a series of steps from sensation to appearances to concepts, and then to one's own concepts.
The process begins with sensation, a response or reaction on the part of sensory organs to stimulate, originating in the external world.
And then by way of the pure intuitions of time and space,
the necessary enabling conditions of sensibility itself, the sensations are transformed into appearances.
It's only when these appearances are subsumed under the pure categories of the understanding
that we can be said to have an experience of what is present in the external world,
as he says it. B 161 The necessary conditions by which there is the very possibility of experience are the pure concepts that we understand.
Well, this gets us back to a question that I think I raised a second.
Well, does a dog say a true creature, a creature without the or in categories could have the same sensations,
and these sensations could give rise to the same appearances as we possess, but not the same experiences.
Such a creature would see a tree, but not experience as such.
And again, you know, we all see dogs, see everything, but they don't see smell.
This becomes clearer and then comes treatment of judgement, which allows us to trace the argument from the subjectivity of mere perception.
Now this is a key distinction that I do hope you will revert to the most functional part of lost frontal cortex social.
And bits of bits of limbic system.
You want to remember this even viscerally. So when you hear it again, you get a funny sensation.
Like, I heard this before, so. And that's the distinction between judgements of perception and judgements of experience.
Judgements of perception versus judgements of experience.
The subjectivity of our perceptions being what it is will give rise to a subjectivity of judgement.
But as experiences arise from the subsection of content under necessary and universal categories,
the judgements of experience are common across recipients.
That's going to be part of the argument that has to be made now integral to this entire process is the faculty of imagination.
It's through the imagination that concepts and intuitions become synthesised.
And become synthesised according to a universal rule, which you can't refers to as a schema.
This is the way the understanding will rise to the level of empirical knowledge and objective general knowledge.
The imagination is what has the power of drawing together certain elements in an otherwise disconnected assortment of sensations,
drawing together just those elements that constitute a knowable something.
But the imagination as such does not yield knowledge.
Rather, it makes knowledge possible.
It is only when the synthesis of the manifold is then brought into froth under the pure categories of the understanding that knowledge as such arises.
Now you might say, well, the imagination, the word itself is suggestive of a kind of subjectivity in my using my imagination
when I do this and wants to be clear that the process of synthesis is not arbitrary.
Indeed, if the resulting synthesis generates the same object for all comparably situated observers,
then you certainly can say that this is the outcome of some merely probable or if the process.
There must be a framework. There must be rules by which the elements of the manifold are pulled and held together.
And this, of course, is what the pure concepts of the understanding of the subject.
So you begin to see how the famous transcendental deduction unfolds.
Cult begins with the with an indubitable feature of the understanding, namely the stability of representations,
the virtually universal manner in which comparably positioned observers judge the objects of experience.
Although it may not be cryptic on this point. Look. Take a look.
Well, take a. No.
I'm larger on your. My Surface Reflections has just changed.
An entirely different configuration of stimuli has just occurred.
As it has again just occurred, every aspect of the external world changes as your head.
Changes as you inspire and breathe out every time you do this,
the position of the external world changes just so you stop this incessant system of continuous alteration,
constant alteration in a world that nonetheless contains things that retain their resilience throughout all these transformations.
How does that. It happens in so far as some aspect of the external world remains of this, and it remains of this by being conceptual.
So that you are no longer limited to judgements of perception, which can be exquisitely detailed.
But you now are in a position to make judgements of experience.
Yes. As the chap on the hill approaches me, his retinal projection gets larger and larger.
A judgement of perception, which, by the way, in classical psycho physics would be called the stimulus error.
Is now corrected by the fact that you happen to know it's a person who size doesn't change as he gets closer to you.
Do you see what I'm talking about? The difference between something that's perceptually governed and something that's conceptual doesn't.
Precepts and concepts are quite different. I mentioned St Augustine's engagement on that front.
I did mention I did a. Should I take a moment because it shows up again.
In fact, Descartes uses exactly the same examples as Augustine does and in a different context.
Augustine uses his to become a saint and Descartes to.
Retain his. Credentials as a philosopher.
Well, how do you become what? You could become a saint? A lot of different ways.
But Saint Augustine was on the way to becoming a saint by effectively battling heresies.
Now, here's a heresy for you. Because it couldn't take place today.
Nobody would think this way today. When people talk about God and tell you what they really mean by God.
They assign attributes that by the very nature of God are beyond the range of possible experience.
God has an infinite. There's a maximum that all you can ask for, etc., etc. has no moving parts, occupies no space.
The whole cosmos is somehow in his imagination. You know the story.
So there isn't any empirical grounding for epistemic claims regarding golf.
So when you talk about God, quite literally, technically,
you're talking about something you couldn't possibly know anything about because there is no perceptual grounding for that knowledge.
Right. They're just sort of names.
I mean, we could we could bring it up national, the group of Oxford leading whites probably saying my college.
Exactly. Well, so St Augustine said well look every normally sight of a person.
Can perceive a geometric object with four equal sides, pairs of sides, standing angles of 90 degrees.
We call that a square. And as everyone can perceive such a thing, so everyone can conceive of such a thing.
Of course, everyone can also conceive of a truly gong, which is a thousand steps figure.
But though you can conceive of it killing a gun,
you can't perceive it because the angular changes are so slight as not to be resolvable by way of our visual acuity.
So you see, you can have quite a clear conception of something that really exists without preceding.
Descartes uses exactly that example, by the way, a few years later.
Descartes died in 1650.
Saint Augustine was hitting homeruns. Earlier.
End of the fourth century. 80. Ah.
Well, what happened? What. What does that have to do with this?
Well, what it has to do with is this. We will all have the same objective.
We will all have the same judgements of experience when it comes to killing gods.
We might have radically different judgements and perceptions when it comes to killing guns.
So intersubjective agreement, not to mention the stable cognition of objects under widely varying conditions, is now explained by way of unhear.
Here, I quote, can't remember what we're trying to explain now.
Intersubjective agreement and stable cognitions of objects under widely variable conditions.
Explain by way of quote a pattern of all the originally pure concepts of the synthesis which the understanding contains after yours,
and these concepts alone entirely to be called a pure understanding, inasmuch as only by them can it render the manifold of intuitions conceivable.
In other words, think an object.
This division is made systematically from a common principle, namely the Faculty of Judgement, which is just the same as the power of thought.
This land is the outline of the transcendental reduction for our representations.
To serve as possibilities for knowledge, they must become conceptual ground.
The categories delineated in the in what come closely metaphysical deduction now seen as necessary
for knowledge to be derived from experience is going to give us a metaphysical deduction,
followed then by a transcendental deduction.
The metaphysical deduction, to some extent tracks Aristotle's famous delineation of the categories constant playing with Aristotle.
That's not so much a complaint, is it? Look, you know, Aristotle had these categories.
Cards categories are going to be different and they're going to be much more carefully arranged.
Is that what Aristotle was doing? It's a mild complaint.
Aristotle was just listing the properties of things that one knows about and subsuming them under general categories.
He was pretty much governed by empirical considerations.
Well, I don't want to say comes close to saying, you know Aristotle that Greek human.
Well, Aristotle's not not that I'm saying that he sees Aristotle as sort of just
putting together a lot of categories because if you get enough of them in place,
it'll pretty much account for all the properties of things that we know about.
A metaphysical deduction is different, that a physical deduction has to do with the number,
the minimum and defined number of categories for all conceivable possible objective knowledge.
The argument as to what you would have to have minimally and devoid of all empirical content.
This is what you have to have before the eyes are open. Now, once that metaphysical deduction is in place,
the transcendental deduction then becomes the argument to the effect that what you have to have is what we have,
and that's what grounds our objective knowledge of the external world.
So the transcendental deduction then becomes the means by which of what?
What would have to be in place is seen to be in place and operating with necessity and universality.
And the pro a commoner up to 97 to 3 oh to come does draw very clearly this distinction between judgement, perception, judgement.
To keep in mind that judgements of perceptions are subjectively valid.
When I judge honey to be sweet, I'm connecting to entities the physical object that is honey and a subjective sensation of sweetness.
There's no guarantee that others will have the same experience or that I will on repeated encounters,
or that my own sensation is not the result of something other them.
Quite simply, they are not the stuff of which science of nature to make a judgement of experience as a node of a quite different.
With these we begin to with what is given by way of sensuous intuition,
but this is then subsumed under concepts that are based on the pure categories of the understanding.
And these are universally operative within the realm of human cognition of life.
The judgements of perception, the judgements of experience hold good not only for us, but for everybody.
And so we now have an objective validity which says content is the same as necessary universality.
Objective validity equates with necessary universality.
It's in this sense that the possibility of nature becomes tied to the possibility of experience itself.
Well, now we can. It's got to be 75 again.
This maximum. Without sensibility, no object will be given to us.
And without understanding, no object would be thought.
Thoughts without content or empty. Intuitions without concepts of light.
So in the absence of the categories of assumptions would, quote,
be without an object merely applied to play of representations less even than a dream.
You say if you couldn't conceptual vice things. Know that the various elements of the objects of thought are synthesised,
but a given object is encountered, as I noted, under radically different conditions at different times.
It retains its identity as a this or that. Surely not as a result of anything delivered by the senses.
In fact, to the extent that we are in the thrall of our sensory processes, it can never be the same object on any successive sample.
All right. So that's the transcendental deduction of the categories.
It has spawned a huge literature, much of it critical.
And there are problems that arise within the arguments itself.
Some of these were duly noted, if I may, saying, with all due respect,
were rather more dishearteningly noted by Kahn's contemporaries than by many of my contemporaries.
But those are not the same contemporaries.
But I'm confident clear on the need for a process by which otherwise various and varying representations are held together.
He describes the process of synthesis as, quote,
the act of putting different representations together and grasping what is manifold in them in one cognition.
Now integral to this process is what we've referred to in an earlier lecture.
Spontaneity. Sensations as such are devoid of structure, synthesis, yield structure.
And spontaneity gives rise to creative and flexible cognitions when on something like an art in our modes of representation.
But then serious questions do arise. And that comes in.
A letter to August 1st repeats a question that has been raised by someone Solomon,
my blog and others of persons who have had many criticisms of the critique.
The question is this How does Carter account for the agreement between the author, your intuitions and the authority concepts?
They come together so perfectly. It looks almost contrived.
How is it that sensuous representations are properly taken up in just the right way by the pure concepts of the understanding?
You know, the question is it's almost like a kind of card trick or the shell game, so.
Is it some Darwinian sort of thing that there might have been species that didn't do it the right way and they all went belly up?
And then, you know, we came on the scene.
We do it right. What what kind of an argument is? Confess to this I hands.
I don't know that you find this compelling has its content.
To this I answer. All of this takes place in relation to an experiential knowledge only possible for us under these conditions.
A subjective consideration to be sure, but one that is objectively valid as well,
because the objects here are not the things in themselves but mere appearances.
Consequently, the form in which they are given depends on ask what?
What he's saying is that he doesn't completely de subjective visit, but he says, look, the pure categories.
This is something that the coloniser is imposing on the sensuous manner.
And and as this is the necessary and universal set of conditions for human understanding, it shouldn't be surprising that we all do it the same way.
Of course we all do the same way. Ideologically speaking, we all conform to the same rules when we play chess.
No surprise, because everything we're doing is governed by a rules structure.
So, so. So again, with can't.
He says all of this takes place in relation to an experiential knowledge that is only possible for us under these conditions.
A subjective consideration to be sure, but one that's objectively valid as well,
because the objects here are not things in themselves, but they are appearances.
Consequently, the form in which they are given depends on us.
On the other hand, they are dependent on the lining of the manifold and consciousness that is on what
is required for the thinking and organising of objects by the understanding.
It's only under these conditions, therefore, that we can have experiences.
So to the extent that the categories that the pure concepts of the understanding are universally
distributed in creatures of a certain kind of a necessary preconditions for the understanding.
But the understanding itself must merge with experience in the right way to constitute knowledge to the extent that this is the case we have.
An anthropological perspective on knowledge, but a universalist anthropological perspective.
It can be subjective in the sense that it is subject to the willy nilly subjective
status of a public recipient because the knowledge claimed does not arise.
It's not grounded in perception. It's grounded in the pure concepts of the understanding as necessarily and universally distributed.
I said that I would be performing a transcendental reduction in the instrument in case you haven't noticed it.
I didn't. Let's.