The inner and the outer: Kant's 'refutation' reconstructed

Ratio

Volumn 13, Issue 2, 2000, Pages 146-174

  Hanna, Robert ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 37649023556     PISSN: 00340006     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9329.00117     Document Type: Article

References (57)

1. Descartes, 'Meditations on First Philosophy,' in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 3 vols., trans. John Cottingham et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), vol. II, pp. 12-62, at 13
2. Moore, 'Proof of an External World,' in G.E. Moore: Selected Writings (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 147-170, at 166
3. See: Descartes, 'Meditations on First Philosophy,' pp. 50-55
4. J. Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), book IV, chapter xi, pp. 630-639
5. Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1969), pp. 625-627
6. Moore, 'The Refutation of Idealism,' 'A Defense of Common Sense,' and 'Proof of an External World,' all in G.E. Moore: Selected Writings, pp. 23-44, 106-133, 147-170
7. Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981), pp. 1-21
8. and Burge, 'Cartesian Error and the Objectivity of Perception,' in P. Pettit and J. McDowell (eds.), Subject, Thought, and Context (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 117-136
9. As I will indicate directly, Kant correctly isolates the underlying flaw in Descartes's, Locke's, and Reid's arguments. In turn, Moore argues that Kant's argument fails (see 'Proof of an External World,' pp. 147-159)
10. yet remains unconvinced by his own argument: see 'Certainty,' in G.E. Moore: Selected Writings, pp. 171-196, at 194-196
11. Finally, A. Brueckner has made it his business to refute both Putnam and Burge; see his 'Brains in a Vat,' Journal of Philosophy 83 (1986): 148-167
12. Anthropology. Trans. M. Gregor. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974
13. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. N. Kemp Smith. New York: St. Martin's, 1965
14. 'Concerning the Ultimate Ground of the Differentiation of Directions in Space.' In Immanuel Kant: Theoretical Philosophy 1755-1770. Trans. D. Walford and R. Meerbote. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992. pp. 361-372
15. 'Jaesche Logic.' In Immanuel Kant: Lectures on Logic. Trans. J.M. Young. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992. pp. 517-640
16. 'What is Orientation in Thinking?' In Kant: Political Writings. Second edition. Ed. H. Reiss. Trans. H.B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991. pp. 237-249
17. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. Trans. J. Ellington. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1977
18. and also H. Schwyzer, 'Subjectivity in Descartes and Kant,' Philosophical Quarterly 47 (1997): 342-357
19. Stroud, The Significance of Philosophical Skepticism (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984), p. 274
20. Similar charges are also made in his 'Kant and Skepticism,' in M. Burnyeat (ed.), The Skeptical Tradition, (Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 1983), pp. 413-434
21. and 'Kantian Argument, Conceptual Capacities, and Invulnerability,' in P. Parini (ed.), Kant and Contemporary Epistemology, (The Netherlands: Kluwer, 1994), pp. 231-151
22. By 'externalism' I mean the view that at least some of our mental states must be individuated by reference to something existing outside those states, in the worldly environment. See: Burge, 'Individualism and the Mental,' in P.A. French et al. (eds.), Studies in Metaphysics, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 4 (Minneapolis, MN: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1979), pp. 73-122
23. and C. McGinn, Mental Content (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 1-119
24. There is also a wealth of relevant material in the Reflexionen, e.g., at (R: 5653-5654, 5709, 5984, 6311-6316, 6323
25. See Nagel, 'What is it like to be a bat?,' in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 165-180
26. and James, Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (New York: Dover, 1950), vol. I, pp. 224-290
27. See R.J. Sternberg, Cognitive Psychology (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace, 1996), chapters 7-8
28. See J. Campbell, Past, Space, and Self (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), chapters 4 and 7
29. and 'The Structure of Time in Autobiographical Memory,' European Journal of Philosophy 5 (1997): 105-118
30. This is not farfetched. Kant lectured on physical geography throughout his career, and closely connected it with his studies in anthropology. See H. Caygill, A Kant Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 214-215
31. This point yields a result very similar to S. Shoemaker's attack on what he calls the 'perceptual model of self-knowledge' in his seminal paper, 'Self-Reference and Self-Awareness,' Journal of Philosophy 65 (1968): 555-567, at 562-564
32. and also the 'object perception model' of self-knowledge in his 1993 Royce Lectures, 'Self-Knowledge and "Inner Sense",' Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54 (1994): 249-314, at 249-269
33. P.F. Strawson and Paul Guyer have convincingly tied this argument both to the B Deduction and to the Refutation; see the former's The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (London: Methuen, 1966), pp. 72-152
34. Unfortunately, Kant's solution fails because he does he does not notice that both waking experiences and dreams can include either arbitrary or necessary orderings of perceptions. See R. Hanna, 'The Trouble with Truth in Kant's Theory of Meaning,' History of Philosophy Quarterly 10 (1993), pp. 13-17
35. Moore, 'The Refutation of Idealism,' p. 37
36. Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness, trans. F. Williams and R. Kirkpatrick (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Geroux, 1987)
37. See, e.g., J. Vogel, 'The Problem of Self-Knowledge in Kant's "Refutation of Idealism": Two Recent Views,' Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (1993): 875-887
38. See Kripke, Naming and Necessity, second ed. (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982), p. 48. The proviso in parenthesis is needed to avoid the problem of vacuous names
39. See, e.g., S. Kosslyn, Image and Brain (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), esp. ch. 9
40. Admittedly, this is controversial territory. Putnam's famous argument in Reason, Truth, and History, pp. 1-21, against the 'brains-in-a-vat' hypothesis seems to show that any such 'Cartesian possibility' is in fact conceptually impossible
41. Two things can be briefly said. First, Putnam's argument, even if sound, holds only for the entire community of cognizers or speakers, not for an isolated individual. And secondly, it seems to me that the possibility of a person-in-a-virtual-reality-suit is not a 'Cartesian possibility' at all, but rather a 'plain possibility' in Thompson Clarke's sense. See Clarke, 'The Legacy of Skepticism,' Journal of Philosophy 69 (1972): 754-769
42. See G. Evans, The Varieties of Reference (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 153-154
43. See also Q. Cassam, 'Inner Sense, Body Sense, and Kant's Refutation of Idealism,' European Journal of Philosophy 1 (1993): 111-127
44. This necessary ascription of conscious states to the body should not, I think, be construed as a token-token identity thesis, although R. Meerbote takes it this way: see his 'Kant's Refutation of Problematic Material Idealism,' in B. den Ouden (ed.), New Essays on Kant (New York: Peter Lang, 1987), pp. 112-138
45. Instead, I think that Kant anticipates the increasingly popular contemporary view that the human mind is an 'embodied mind.' See: M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), part one, ch. 3, pp. 98-147
46. J.L. Bermudez et al. (eds.), The Body and the Self (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995)
47. and F. Varela, E. Thompson, and E. Rosch, The Embodied Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996)
48. This should be compared with P.F. Strawson's famous argument in Individuals (London: Methuen, 1959), chapter 2, that one can in principle individuate oneself purely in terms of a system of auditory experiences alone, as an isomorphic analogue of spatial representation. If correct, Strawson's argument would suffice to show that psychological individation does not require that I ascribe my mental states directly to my own body in space. But Strawson's sound-system cannot distinguish between incongruent counterparts, hence cannot distinguish between the very different experiences of the same sound heard as 'coming from my right' and as 'coming from my left.'
49. See B. Brewer, 'Self-Location and Agency,' Mind 101 (1992): 17-34. Brewer argues that perceptual self-location is based on a more basic perceptual grasp of determinate possibilities of spatial bodily self-movement. The text I quoted from 'Orientation in Thinking' can be used to support Brewer's conclusion, although in both 'Directions in Space' and in the first Critique Kant places more emphasis on perceiving the motions of other bodies than on the movement of one's own body. Also, some qualifications will be needed to handle tricky cases in which self-movement is reduced or ruled out. See note 40
50. See H.P. Grice, 'The Causal Theory of Perception,' in Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 224-247
51. See B. Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to Judge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998), pp. 391-393
52. See: F. Dretske, Seeing and Knowing (Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1969), chapter II
53. and R. Hanna, 'Direct Reference, Direct Perception, and the Cognitive Theory of Demonstratives,' Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 74 (1993): 96-117
54. See N. Eilan 'Objectivity and the Perspective of Consciousness,' European Journal of Philosophy 5 (1997): 235-250, at 247-248, for a defense of the opposing position. Eilan's view implausibly entails, however, that if I wake up suddenly in total darkness and cannot for the life of me remember where I am, then I am neither perceptually conscious nor empirically self-conscious
55. See G. Santayana, Skepticism and Animal Faith (New York: Dover, 1923), chapter xviii, esp. pp. 171-176
56. Otherwise put, from a Kantian point of view one can refute skeptical idealism and be an externalist, while conceding 'content skepticism.' By contrast, most contemporary externalists are also 'content infallibilists.' But this view does not stand up to critical scrutiny: see A. Brueckner, 'Trying to Get Outside Your Own Skin,' Philosophical Topics 23 (1995): 79-111
57. Strawson, by contrast, argues that although persons are normally and paradigmatically embodied, it is at least conceptually possible for them to be disembodied; see Individuals, pp. 115-116. A Strawsonian critic of my account might grant Kant's point about the necessary connection between psychological individuation and unique spatial location, and also claim that one can in principle be uniquely located in space, yet disembodied. For example, it might seem that someone could have a disembodied purely visual awareness of directions and of various purely visual objects in a purely visual phenomenal space. But that seems to me absurd. It would be to say that I could somehow be uniquely in space without literally occupying any space. If I were an extensionless point, I certainly could not look around