This result seems to have nothing to do with Kant. The logical explanation for this has to do with the fact that rats have evolved in three dimensional Euclidean space. Any result that Kant had in this regard is a lucky coincidence.
To be fair to Kant, it does have something to do with Kant. Kant’s thesis of innate mental categories was pretty radical in its time, and certainly wasn’t obvious. Now we know there are quite a few innate mental categories, due to our evolutionary history. But we didn’t know Kant was right about a few particular cases until after the science had been done, and Kant was wrong about almost everything else. :)
Kant was not even wrong about this and everything else. He did nothing but to crystalize his own confusion and pass it on to later generations. He failed to notice, for example, that it is not necessary that space have three dimensions, that those dimensions be unbounded, nor that the geometry be Euclidean. And in asking whether the concept is prior to experience, he failed to notice that the question is ambiguous until you specify whose experience you are talking about. Am I criticizing Kant for not knowing about evolution? Not exactly. I am criticizing him for trying to answer questions he was completely unequipped to answer. Questions which he knew he was unequipped to answer. But he just couldn’t resist trying.
Like almost all philosophy, from the time of the Greeks until today, Kant’s thinking was counterproductive—it did more harm than good. And the reason for the failure is easy enough to see for anyone who looks closely. Philosophers try to accomplish tasks that they and their tools are completely inadequate to accomplish. They are like blind artists who seek to execute ice sculpture armed with sledgehammers.
If philosophers limited themselves to generating and clarifying questions, they might do some good. If they also venture into listing some conceivable answers to those questions, they perhaps do little harm. But they are never content with that. They attempt to answer their own questions. Using a methodology which is completely incapable of answering questions. Even worse, sometimes they succeed in convincing each other that they have succeeded. And when they do, they congratulate each other and strike a question from their lists. And at that point they do real harm.
You (and really, the whole of Lesswrong) should Popper’s paper “The Nature of Philosophical Problems and Their Roots in Science”. Here’s a pdf.
The section about Kant (towards the end) does an excellent job of explaining how he arrived at his (far too strong) system. In essence, Kant was faced with a paradox: On the one hand, Hume had proven that it’s impossible for us to attain certain knowledge about the natural world, and its spatiotemporal and causal structure. But on the other, Newton had apparently done just that! So Kant tries to resolve this by showing that concepts such as space, time and causation are preconditions for the possibility of being conscious at all. So ultimately Newton’s system is merely ‘unpacking’ what’s already implicit in the fact that we have minds, hence we can have certain knowledge of it after all.
Of course it’s confused and wrong. But in its time it was brilliant and original.
You (and really, the whole of Lesswrong) should Popper’s paper “The Nature of Philosophical Problems and Their Roots in Science”.
An excellent recommendation. Thank you.
Of course [Kant’s “Critique” is] confused and wrong. But in its time it was brilliant and original.
I won’t disagree that it was brilliant and original. My question was whether it was helpful. Or, if you prefer, whether it was fruitful.
I’m a big fan of David Hume. And I understand that Hume’s writing on “the problem of induction” was fruitful to the extent that it stimulated Kant’s work. My problem is that my distaste for Kant leads me to doubt that Hume’s work here was fruitful. Or at least I have to doubt that it has yet borne fruit yet (though Laplace, Jaynes, and Solomonoff have certainly tried heroically to grow something digestible from that barren ground.)
Where’s the evidence they do harm? Do we have something that shows that these attempts overall tend to stop further thought rather than start it? Personally I’d have thought that others coming across philosopher’s conclusions are often sparked to either disagree or to attempt to prove it, and both of these can help knowledge grow. Alternatively, philosophers can suggest ways of thinking about things which can then be used productively.
Where’s the evidence they do harm? Do we have something that shows that these attempts overall tend to stop further thought rather than start it?
I’m going to follow my own advice to philosophers and refrain from attempting to definitively answer your excellent questions. Instead I will limit myself to adding to your list of possible answers. I will simply mention the standard hagiographies surrounding Galileo and Copernicus and the negative roles assigned to Aristotle and other Greek philosophers and geometers in those stories.
But even though I sidestepped your questions, it seems appropriate in context for me to add some questions of my own. Do you know of any cases in which someone came across a philosopher’s conclusion, was sparked to disagree, and as a result generated something useful? Do you know of any cases in which philosophers suggested ways of thinking about things which then got used productively?
Even in cases where philosophers generated fruitful ideas, it seems to me that those ideas were usually inspired by work by people outside philosophy. Popper by Mach, for example. Or Martin-Lof by Curry and Gentzen. Cognitive philosophers by folks like Turing, Hebb, and Minsky.
Do you know of any cases in which philosophers suggested ways of thinking about things which then got used productively?
Sure. Roger Bacon. Sir Francis Bacon.
Both of whom, I note, greatly respected Aristotle while deriding the “Aristotelian” philosophers of their days, which suggests the problem in the Galileo and Copernicus cases was less defects of Aristotle and more defects of Scholasticism (during Roger’s day) and Second Scholasticism (during Francis’s day).
Good point about Aristotle: that was an area where a particular view was definitely seen as authoritative and that was a problem. Not sure if whether a lack of philsophy would have prevented another definitive solution being present, mind: the problem there was largely about a backwards-looking approach to truth, that saw the past as a Golden Age.
I don’t have answers to these myself: I don’t pretend to any more certainty than you. It partially depends on what you consider philosophy. I think Malthus is a good example of what I’d consider a (wrong) philosophical idea which assisted a great scientific advance. I thought that late nineteenth/early twentieth century physicists were often influenced by people like Kant, but I may be wrong, it’s been awhile since I’ve read anything in these areas.
Come to that, I sometimes think that people are lumped into ‘science’ by their success or their association with more solid empirical science. To take your example of Copernicus, I don’t think he really did much in the way of scientific experimentation etc: the main appeal of his theory was its mathematical/aesthetic elegance. It was Galileo who got into testing things.
Bee in bonnet time: I hate Kant’s “categories”, sitting in their neat 4 * 3 table. Why only four, why those four, why does each four have three, are each of the threes supposed to ‘map onto’ each other?
Being very vaguely analogous to some equally arbitrary, obsolete things that Aristotle did thousands of years previously doesn’t seem to me very good reason for modern philosophers to take Kant’s categories seriously.
Our “innate mental categories” and Kant’s are by no means the same. He believed that the categories are innate because they refer to a meaning beyond ourselves (in other words, that we process Euclidean geometry because space is Euclidean, and we contain the seeds of something that Knows this without evidence). We, upon discovering an innate mental category, can file it among “things to exploit or fix”.
That rats have a grid prior to experience is unsurprising. They derive more evolutionary benefit from such a heuristic than from having to lug aroudn an expanded brain capable of inventing geometry.
I thought Kant’s position was the concept of space is necessarily prior to experience, not just that currently-existing life-forms have it prior to experience. So it would seem that it would not validate Kant to find one example of a life-form that happens to have space hard-coded before it has experiences.
This result seems to have nothing to do with Kant. The logical explanation for this has to do with the fact that rats have evolved in three dimensional Euclidean space. Any result that Kant had in this regard is a lucky coincidence.
To be fair to Kant, it does have something to do with Kant. Kant’s thesis of innate mental categories was pretty radical in its time, and certainly wasn’t obvious. Now we know there are quite a few innate mental categories, due to our evolutionary history. But we didn’t know Kant was right about a few particular cases until after the science had been done, and Kant was wrong about almost everything else. :)
Kant was not even wrong about this and everything else. He did nothing but to crystalize his own confusion and pass it on to later generations. He failed to notice, for example, that it is not necessary that space have three dimensions, that those dimensions be unbounded, nor that the geometry be Euclidean. And in asking whether the concept is prior to experience, he failed to notice that the question is ambiguous until you specify whose experience you are talking about. Am I criticizing Kant for not knowing about evolution? Not exactly. I am criticizing him for trying to answer questions he was completely unequipped to answer. Questions which he knew he was unequipped to answer. But he just couldn’t resist trying.
Like almost all philosophy, from the time of the Greeks until today, Kant’s thinking was counterproductive—it did more harm than good. And the reason for the failure is easy enough to see for anyone who looks closely. Philosophers try to accomplish tasks that they and their tools are completely inadequate to accomplish. They are like blind artists who seek to execute ice sculpture armed with sledgehammers.
If philosophers limited themselves to generating and clarifying questions, they might do some good. If they also venture into listing some conceivable answers to those questions, they perhaps do little harm. But they are never content with that. They attempt to answer their own questions. Using a methodology which is completely incapable of answering questions. Even worse, sometimes they succeed in convincing each other that they have succeeded. And when they do, they congratulate each other and strike a question from their lists. And at that point they do real harm.
You (and really, the whole of Lesswrong) should Popper’s paper “The Nature of Philosophical Problems and Their Roots in Science”. Here’s a pdf.
The section about Kant (towards the end) does an excellent job of explaining how he arrived at his (far too strong) system. In essence, Kant was faced with a paradox: On the one hand, Hume had proven that it’s impossible for us to attain certain knowledge about the natural world, and its spatiotemporal and causal structure. But on the other, Newton had apparently done just that! So Kant tries to resolve this by showing that concepts such as space, time and causation are preconditions for the possibility of being conscious at all. So ultimately Newton’s system is merely ‘unpacking’ what’s already implicit in the fact that we have minds, hence we can have certain knowledge of it after all.
Of course it’s confused and wrong. But in its time it was brilliant and original.
An excellent recommendation. Thank you.
I won’t disagree that it was brilliant and original. My question was whether it was helpful. Or, if you prefer, whether it was fruitful.
I’m a big fan of David Hume. And I understand that Hume’s writing on “the problem of induction” was fruitful to the extent that it stimulated Kant’s work. My problem is that my distaste for Kant leads me to doubt that Hume’s work here was fruitful. Or at least I have to doubt that it has yet borne fruit yet (though Laplace, Jaynes, and Solomonoff have certainly tried heroically to grow something digestible from that barren ground.)
Where’s the evidence they do harm? Do we have something that shows that these attempts overall tend to stop further thought rather than start it? Personally I’d have thought that others coming across philosopher’s conclusions are often sparked to either disagree or to attempt to prove it, and both of these can help knowledge grow. Alternatively, philosophers can suggest ways of thinking about things which can then be used productively.
I’m going to follow my own advice to philosophers and refrain from attempting to definitively answer your excellent questions. Instead I will limit myself to adding to your list of possible answers. I will simply mention the standard hagiographies surrounding Galileo and Copernicus and the negative roles assigned to Aristotle and other Greek philosophers and geometers in those stories.
But even though I sidestepped your questions, it seems appropriate in context for me to add some questions of my own. Do you know of any cases in which someone came across a philosopher’s conclusion, was sparked to disagree, and as a result generated something useful? Do you know of any cases in which philosophers suggested ways of thinking about things which then got used productively?
Even in cases where philosophers generated fruitful ideas, it seems to me that those ideas were usually inspired by work by people outside philosophy. Popper by Mach, for example. Or Martin-Lof by Curry and Gentzen. Cognitive philosophers by folks like Turing, Hebb, and Minsky.
Sure. Roger Bacon. Sir Francis Bacon.
Both of whom, I note, greatly respected Aristotle while deriding the “Aristotelian” philosophers of their days, which suggests the problem in the Galileo and Copernicus cases was less defects of Aristotle and more defects of Scholasticism (during Roger’s day) and Second Scholasticism (during Francis’s day).
Good point about Aristotle: that was an area where a particular view was definitely seen as authoritative and that was a problem. Not sure if whether a lack of philsophy would have prevented another definitive solution being present, mind: the problem there was largely about a backwards-looking approach to truth, that saw the past as a Golden Age.
I don’t have answers to these myself: I don’t pretend to any more certainty than you. It partially depends on what you consider philosophy. I think Malthus is a good example of what I’d consider a (wrong) philosophical idea which assisted a great scientific advance. I thought that late nineteenth/early twentieth century physicists were often influenced by people like Kant, but I may be wrong, it’s been awhile since I’ve read anything in these areas.
Come to that, I sometimes think that people are lumped into ‘science’ by their success or their association with more solid empirical science. To take your example of Copernicus, I don’t think he really did much in the way of scientific experimentation etc: the main appeal of his theory was its mathematical/aesthetic elegance. It was Galileo who got into testing things.
Bee in bonnet time: I hate Kant’s “categories”, sitting in their neat 4 * 3 table. Why only four, why those four, why does each four have three, are each of the threes supposed to ‘map onto’ each other?
Being very vaguely analogous to some equally arbitrary, obsolete things that Aristotle did thousands of years previously doesn’t seem to me very good reason for modern philosophers to take Kant’s categories seriously.
If you’re looking for a Kant defender, you won’t find him in me. :)
Our “innate mental categories” and Kant’s are by no means the same. He believed that the categories are innate because they refer to a meaning beyond ourselves (in other words, that we process Euclidean geometry because space is Euclidean, and we contain the seeds of something that Knows this without evidence). We, upon discovering an innate mental category, can file it among “things to exploit or fix”.
That rats have a grid prior to experience is unsurprising. They derive more evolutionary benefit from such a heuristic than from having to lug aroudn an expanded brain capable of inventing geometry.
I thought Kant’s position was the concept of space is necessarily prior to experience, not just that currently-existing life-forms have it prior to experience. So it would seem that it would not validate Kant to find one example of a life-form that happens to have space hard-coded before it has experiences.
Technically, almost Euclidean space.