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Transcendental Arguments and Kant's Refutation of Idealism. Adrian, Bardon University of Massachusetts Amherst

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Transcendental Arguments and Kant's Refutation of Idealism. Adrian, Bardon University of Massachusetts Amherst University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014 1-1-1999 Transcendental arguments and Kant's Refutation of Idealism. Adrian, Bardon University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_1 Recommended Citation Bardon, Adrian,, "Transcendental arguments and Kant's Refutation of Idealism." (1999). Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014. 2323. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_1/2323 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014 by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. UMASS/ AMHERST 312Dbb 2 ( 4 DT21 7 TRANSCENDENTAL ARGUMENTS AND KANT’S REFUTATION OF IDEALISM A Dissertation Presented by ADRIAN BARDON Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY May 1999 Department of Philosophy © by Adrian Bardon 1999 All Rights Reserved TRANSCENDENTAL ARGUMENTS AND KANT’S REFUTATION OF IDEALISM A Dissertation Presented by ADRIAN BARDON Harlan Sturm, Member felln Robison, Department Head department of Philosophy The analytical power should not be confounded with simple ingenuity; for while the analyst is necessarily ingenious, the ingenious man is often remarkably incapable of analysis. ...Between ingenuity and the analytic ability there exists a difference far greater, indeed, than that between the fancy and the imagination, but of a character very strictly analogous. It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic. Edgar Allan Poe "The Murders in the Rue Morgue'’ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my parents for their support and encouragement. I would like to thank Bruce for Aune his valuable assistance with the preparation of this essay. In the course of my writing I also had several lengthy conversations with Jonathan Vogel and read an unpublished manuscript of his on the subject of the Refutation; these were very important to my understanding of Kant and Kant's approach to skepticism. ABSTRACT TRANSCENDENTAL ARGUMENTS AND KANT'S REFUTATION OF IDEALISM MAY 1999 ADRIAN BARDON, B.A., REED COLLEGE M.A., UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON Ph D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Bruce Aune An anti-skeptical transcendental argument can be loosely defined as an argument that purports to show that some experience or knowledge of an external world is a necessary condition of our possession of some knowledge, concept, or cognitive ability that we know we have. In this dissertation I examine transcendental arguments by focusing on one such argument given by Immanuel Kant in his Critique ofPure Reason , along with some attempts to interpret that argument by contemporary commentators. I proceed by dividing anti-skeptical transcendental arguments into three types: epistemological, verificationist, and psychological. I examine arguments of the first two types (themselves often described as ‘Kantian’) and show why they cannot succeed against the skeptic. I then argue that Kant's Refutation of Idealism is of a different type: it is psychological in that it concerns the necessary conditions of our forming beliefs of certain kinds. Many contemporary Kant scholars have claimed that his anti-skeptical strategy relies on phenomenalism or verificationism; I argue. vi however, that Kant in the Refutation employs a clever and hitherto unappreciated strategy which involves an empiricist principle concerning the origin of simple ideas, and which does not require either phenomenalism or verificationism. I conclude with an analysis and assessment of Kant's argument. TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ^ ABSTRACT Chapter INTRODUCTION: SKEPTICISM AND TRANSCENDENTAL ARGUMENTS 1 L EPISTEMOLOGICAL SKEPTICISM AND KANT’S REPLIES 4 1. Cartesian and Humean Skepticism 4 2. The General Principle of Kant’s Analogies of Experience 8 3. The First Analogy jq 4. Kant’s First Edition Idealism 15 5. The Second Edition Refutation of Idealism 19 II. THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION 29 1 . Guyer's Reading 09 2. Brueckner’s Criticism 33 3. The Real Problem With the Epistemological Interpretation 37 III. VERIFICATIONS AND WITTGENSTINIAN VERSIONS 40 1 . Logical Positivism 40 2. Putnam, Burge, and Theories of Reference and Content-Ascription 46 3. The Private Language Argument 51 4. Strawson's Objectivity Argument and His Reading of Kant's Refutation 62 5. Bennett's Revision of Strawson’s Argument 74 IV. PSYCHOLOGICAL CONDITIONS OF EXPERIENCE 80 1. The Problem of the Refutation 80 2. Mental Contents and Objective Experience 82 3. Brueckner’s Criticism and Lipson’s Reply 91 4. The First Edition Argument From Idealism 101 5. The First Edition Argument From Empiricism 103 6 . What Reasons Do We Have to Accept NOECP? 107 viii 7. Whether Kant’s Argument Shows That the Existence of External Objects Follows From the Truth of NOECP 1 14 8. The Refutation of Idealism Revisited j p 9. Flow Is the Refutation of Idealism Different From the First Edition 'Argument From Empiricism’? I34 10. Making Sense of Non-Idealistic Immediacy i 40 1 1 . Grunbaum's Specious Present ~> j 4 12. Broad's Specious Present 147 13. Vogel’s Answer 153 14. Concluding Remarks l^p BIBLIOGRAPHY ,.0 IX INTRODUCTION SKEPTICISM AND TRANSCENDENTAL ARGUMENTS An anti-skeptical transcendental argument can be loosely defined as an argument that purports to show that some experience or knowledge of an external world is a necessary condition of our possession of some knowledge, concept, or cognitive ability that we know we have. In this essay I shall examine transcendental arguments by focusing on one such argument given by Immanuel Kant in his Critique ofPure Reason , along with some attempts to interpret that argument by some modem commentators. In my first chapter I introduce Kant's approach to epistemological skepticism in his Critique. I explain the two main founts of skepticism and sketch Kant’s response to them. I argue in this chapter that Kant has two answers to skepticism. One such answer involves a widely criticized sort of idealism, in which he appears to answer skepticism by embracing phenomenalism. However, Kant also presents in the Critique an anti-skeptical argument called the ‘Refutation of Idealism' which, while very difficult to interpret, appears to be based on a different sort of reasoning. I conclude Chapter One by sketching this it argument as is presented and noting the difficulties in interpreting it. In Chapters Two through Four I examine three approaches to interpreting Kant’s argument and the correlative three basic approaches to the anti-skeptical transcendental argument. In Chapter Two I examine what I call the “epistemological” approach to transcendental arguments and to Kant’s argument in particular. This approach focuses on the necessary conditions of making justified judgments of certain kinds. Paul Guyer has argued that Kant’s Refutation of Idealism is an argument that claims that experience of external-world objects is a necessary condition of making justified judgments about the temporal order of one’s subjective experiences. I argue, however, that this interpretation, in addition to being unsubstantiated by the text, cannot yield a successful anti-skeptical argument. In Chapter Three I examine the dominant view of transcendental arguments. On this view, anti-skeptical transcendental arguments like Kant’s Refutation of Idealism concern the necessary conditions of making meaningful or ‘legitimate’ judgments of certain kinds. I call this approach the “verificationist” or “Wittgenstinian" approach. This approach is influenced by logical positivism and by Wittgenstein's views on language. I begin by discussing logical positivism and examining a hypothetical anti-skeptical transcendental argument based on its doctrine of verificationism. I argue that verificationism cannot be the basis for a successful argument of that kind because the skepticism in question can always be relocated to the level of the meaningfulness of one's utterances. I then move to a slightly different class of argument given by Putnam and Burge in which they claim that experience of an external world is a necessary condition of the ability to refer to external-world objects. For reasons similar to my rejection of verficiationism as the basis for a transcendental argument against the skeptic, I claim, again, that this kind of argument cannot succeed. I then address a related sort of anti- skeptical argument based on Wittgenstein's views on private languages. In the last two sections of Chapter Three I examine P.F. Strawson’s and Jonathan Bennett's interpretations of Kant’s anti-skeptical strategy. These interpretations explicitly claim that Kant in the Refutation of Idealism attempts to show that the experience of an 2 external world is a necessary condition of making "meaningful” or “legitimate” judgments about one's subjective order of experiences. This has become the received view about the strategy behind anti-skeptical transcendental arguments generally, and represents the kind of argument that has been subject to devastating criticism by commentators such as Barry Stroud and Anthony Brueckner. I demonstrate in these sections why such arguments cannot succeed against
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