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Science Forum Index » Philosophy Forum » Criticisms of transcendental arguments
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| turtoni |
 Posted: Sat May 03, 2008 6:40 pm |
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"A transcendental argument is a philosophical argument that starts
from what a person experiences, and then deduces what must be the case
for the person to have that experience.
"Immanuel Kant developed one of philosophy's most famous
transcendental arguments in his chapter 'On the Deduction of the Pure
Concepts of the Understanding' in the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant
attempted to use transcendental arguments to show that our experiences
could not be as they are without the existence of, for example, time
and space."
The sceptics' response
As stated above, one of the main uses of transcendental arguments is
to use one thing we can know, the nature of our experiences, to
counter sceptics' arguments that we cannot know something about the
nature of the world. There are two ways that the sceptic can reject
the claim that transcendental arguments give us knowledge of the
world; the sceptic can object to the premise of the argument - the
claim that we know about the quality of our experiences, or object to
claims that we can draw conclusions about the world from the
characteristics of those experiences. First, a sceptic could respond
to such transcendental arguments by claiming that the arguer cannot be
sure that he is having particular experiences. The claim that a person
cannot be sure about the nature of his or her own experiences may
initially seem bizarre. However, the very act of thinking about or,
even more, describing our experiences in words, involves interpreting
them in ways that go beyond so-called 'pure' experience. Second,
sceptics can object to the use of transcendental arguments to draw
conclusions about the nature of the world by claiming that even if a
person does know the nature of his or her experiences, the person
cannot know that the reasoning from these experiences to conclusions
about the world is accurate.[1] No matter how justifiable
transcendental arguments may be, when people use them, they can still
reach false conclusions."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendental_arguments |
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