/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.11356493]

Can someone help a brainlet understand the second analogy of experience in the first critique?

Why does our being able to order our perceptions in time according to the order of phenomena in the object as opposed to our own perceptions of it mean that this ordering carries the weight of necessity?

Why can't it just be that we're habituated to cognize some events in time as occurring before others in regular patterns by habit, and we use this as a heuristic to so order them, without attributing any necessity to this ordering?

Help please, thank you!

[Anonymous No.11356538]

>>11356493
because if it's all contingent on habituation the possibility of an objective science falls apart. The fact that these structures are necessary for experience leads to a universalist philosophical position akin to the one that the scientific revolution was championing. Remember, he is trying to save epistemology from Hume's devastating attack on causality, and Hume's point was basically the one you are making (i.e. causality is built upon customs not empiricism)

[Anonymous No.11356563]

>>11356538
I get that's his motivation, but I don't understand how the arguments given in the text support it. (He doesn't mention the possibility of objective science in the proof for the second analogy).

[Anonymous No.11356618]

>>11356563
He can't state an objective science because that would be circular; he's trying to do it from behind the scenes (quite literally metaphysically(a priori)). Plenty of people don't find the second analogy sufficient (https://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Meta/MetaStei.htm)) so I won't pretend like this is Kant at his most ironclad. In fact, I'd go so far as to argue that time is the least satisfactorily engaged with concepts philosophy has still to deal with. Even later philosophers like Hiedegger struggled greatly with it (according to him it was Time that was what killed Being and Time). With all the weird stuff we are finding out about now like time dilation and relativity it might not be the biggest mystery why (e.g. Kant was working with the wrong concept, not the wrong category).

[Anonymous No.11356840]

By necessity Kant generally means that the understanding alone is capable of IMPARTING necessity to representations - which is experienced, by us, as "seeing" necessity "in" the representations, but we have to remain mindful that it can only come from the understanding a priori. This is directly related to Hume's critique of causality vs. association. Kant is saying that it makes no sense that "necessity," as such, could be a product of association without an a priori concept of necessity (read: a built-in tendency of the mind to see the world in terms of necessary relations and continuities, and attempt to subordinate fluctuating phenomena to this conception to create a coherent law-like model of the world).

Kant DOES acknowledge habit and difference of judgment in different individual minds, BUT the fundamental built-in rule of *attempting necessary judgments under the a priori conditions of a concept of necessity* is common to all minds.

Essentially it all boils down to a simple logical point: How can you notice something "in" a succession of experiences/phenomena unless you already know what to notice? How could the phenomena themselves "bear" the concept of their necessary inter-relation "in" themselves? I can't remember where Kant says this, but mentions that this would require a conception of the whole of nature and of all its inter-relations - something that we don't have. Even if there are laws "behind" the world, it makes no sense that by interacting with *particular* phenomena determined by those laws, a blank slate mind would somehow come to know them - let alone with the rapidity and ease of assimilation and application that humans obviously possess.

The other guy already said this in much more elegant terms but maybe this world salad will still help.

[Anonymous No.11356871]

>>11356840
I understand all this (I think), but it's more a commentary on his general approach and not on the second analogy in particular.

Here is what I've gotten so far out of what Kant is saying:

>Our perceptions appear to us ordered in time.

Granted. This seems just to be an observation about how things have to appear to us, and not argued for. the aesthetic tries to establish that this ordering is non-empirical, which we can grant here too.

>In order for experience of a thing in the world, or a real event, to be possible, and not just the experience of our own perceptions of things, we need to order not just out own perceptions in time, but order the phenomena 'in the object.'

OK, cool.

>To do this, we have to impart some order based on the order of our own perceptions, to an order in the object: we can take our perceptions to correspond to some objective order in how the object really is in time, or not.

Now here is the part I get stuck on:

>When we do this, we cognize that order as NECESSARILY proceeding from the previous to the successive.

I don't understand how this last step works. Where does the necessity come from?