Hello and welcome to the 10th session of Kant's Circle of Revenge with Reza Negri Stani. I'll pass the microphone to him now. Thanks to you. Okay, so, the continuation of our engagement with categories and forms of judgment. Now, this session we are going to talk about the so-called threefold synthesis, and whose task or whose job is what you might call providing the condition of possibility of perceptual
judgment. both in its objective and subjective poles. Now before even starting to, precisely because, you know, first of all, between the first edition and the second edition, the way that Kant elaborates on these threefold sentences and their roles is rather different. Second, because the role of threefold sentences is quite important in critique of pure reason, and three, because it is usually considered
to be one of the more convoluted subjects in Kant's work. First, I'm going to give a very, very brief, albeit condensed version of what threefold syntheses are. And then I rewind, I go back to the beginning and then I will take the step-by-step movement and we elaborate how Kant in fact reaches this topic and what its implications are.
So remember that, you know, in... Sorry, let me... Let me actually get it from my computer. So, remember that a kind of fundamental distinction we had so far, it was between seeing of and you know, seeing at. Between what you might say, you know...
kind of sensorial engagements or sensorial encounters with items in the environment or items in the world and perceptual encounters. Another way that we could talk about them was the idea of seeing obs where, you know, on the side of image model singular representation of a particular item in the world and seeing as where what we called perceptual taking a good way of to establish the difference
between these two two example would be as we have been discussing for example seeing of a book, of a red book, and seeing a book as red, thick, so on and so forth. So there is a red book in front of us. What we see of it is it's just within our... is those parts of it and those color sides of it which are in our field of experience. Hence, seeing God requires a presence of an item inside our visual field.
So it requires a presence of an item. What seeing as, and for that matter is of course perspectival, something that we engage with it and it's present for sensory, that it affects in real time our sensory organs is of course is going to be, should be considered to be present. But for seeing as the presence of objects is not important. It's a presence of object in response to other components that don't require the presence
of an object. Now this is, I'm getting ahead of myself, that actually opens the whole topic of eschemism, which is going to be the next chapter. So the difference, so when I see a red book, when I see of a red book, I see those parts of it which are in my visual field or I hear of for example a rustling noise certain properties which can be picked up by my auditory system Seeing as, however, which is a species of perceptual taking, is non-perspectival.
I take, you can change the word take with the word grasp, understand, conceive. They are not synonymous to be more precise, but they all belong to the family of, you know, of judgings, of veridical judgings. I take this item to be a book, to be a red thick book to be more precise.
So this was one of the more fundamental divisions that we have been talking about. Another fundamental division or distinction that we were talking about was the difference between ED and ING forms. and experiencing in imaged or imaging intuited and intuiting object and act so threefold synthesis the whole discussion about threefold synthesis tries to
articulate very briefly how the gap between ed and ing between seeing one of and seeing two as can be overcome can be filled So, let me get this. Notes. Okay.
So we can think of seeing one, which is seeing of, and seeing two, which is seeing as, perceptual taking, in terms of making a Lego model. you know a kind of intuitive example of how to grasp these and how the synthesis the threefold synthesis can be understood as a kind of a form of model building image model building that allow you to ultimately move from seeing one
to seeing to from in treated to in treating from experience to experiencing so for example think of it and this is this is from the manuscript think of it for example a toy robot that we are going to make a Lego model of a toy robot using Lego blocks of different shapes and colors. So we know that seeing of are perspectival. So from a shifting perspectival point of view which is seeing one of the blocks with their various shapes and colors correspond to
diverse yet rudimentary images of our Lego models, the point of view is intuitives, which are obtained as our rudimentary subject confronts the Lego blocks in such and such prex perspectival imagings. This Lego block, that Lego block facing me edgewise facing me this way that way so on and so forth their role in our model construction is particular and contingent in so far as their prospect I will the shapes and colors of the blocks are what you might say to be the raw sense given matter of the intuitive
items qua images now the pictorial motif of our Lego model building which is you know arriving at a at the picture or the image of a toy robot so you are making these levels put them together and you want to make a robot a toy robot of them So the toy robot, the whole pictorial motif, corresponds to the conceptual representation of these intuited items in acts of judgment, namely the intuitings.
The function of this pictorial motif is to determine the colors and shapes of the blocks in such a way that it becomes possible to put them together so as to construct a specific Lego model in question. This toy robot. In other words, the pictorial motif encapsulates the function of the concept of a robot, this robot that determines images, namely the right Lego blocks, as different aspects of only that object.
That's important, of only that object. It is only because the colors and shapes of these blocks hang together in the right way, respectively in space and time, synchronically and diachronically, that we are able to synthesize the pictorial motif of our Lego model building. And respectively, it is only because of the blocks, namely the image models, can be put together in the right way in accordance with a rule, i.e. the concept of a robot, that We are able to conceive them or take them as associable and multiple aspects of one,
such and such toy robot. So in seeing one, seeing of, we are dealing with local variations and rudimentary, namely point of view-ish invariant aspects of particular items. Whereas in seeing to, seeing as, we have the function of productive imagination, by means of which categories or pure concepts of understanding, namely general or universal invariances, are applied to the intuited items, just like blueprints or instructions necessary for construction of a toy object out of these
such and such Lego blocks. But in seeing two, we are also capable of bringing and constructing images under a specific concept. Example, this such and such toy robot. This kind of laser gun wielding, gray toy robot. The combination of these abilities turns seeing two into a complex act of imagination and understanding. In more contemporary terms, seeing two involves object individuation and object simulation,
general and specific forms of classification and re-identification of local invariants across different contexts. Units of experience are perceptual takings, or the class of INGs as, you know, intuiting as, experiencing as, taking as, conceiving as, not the class of of Local variations, manifolds of items, shapes, colors, etc. supplied by the latter sensory and perspectival class are not by themselves sufficient for object construction,
since object, geganeshtand individuation, classification and recognition involve the construction of type of invariances which form a network of associations and implications. So hence we can put such and such toy blocks or Lego blocks together. that requires a rule as a principle of unity, concepts as principles of unity, a universal rule. Such invariances cannot be obtained without a complex interplay between the sensory intuition given in imagination and the pure concepts of understanding, qua the faculty of judgment,
or in Kantian parlance, the unification of the manifold. Categories or pure concepts are by themselves logical functions in themselves. It is only when they are brought into conformity with the sensory intuition, through eschemism and synthetic a priori principles, that they can become roots for generating perceptual takings. taking that is rules for constructing something as an object of representations again to move a little bit ahead and then you can later on as I elaborate you can tie back
all this stuff into you know my elaboration Eschemata can be said to be rules of construction pertaining to the process of providing a concept with a singular representation qua image for example triangularity and a and a triangle on the other hand the synthetic a priori principles can be understood as general rules of unity in the integration of or synthesis of appearances Now, the Lego model building process, which is necessary for the transition from seeing
one to seeing two, as a whole corresponds to Kant's so-called threefold synthesis, namely synthesis of apprehension in the intuition, synthesis of reproduction in the imagination, and synthesis of recognition in the concept. Now, the synthesis of apprehension delineates the first constructive role of imagination in pooling together a synchronic manifold of sensations by antecedently taking up the sense impressions into its activity, which is apprehension. It introduces order into the confusion of simultaneous impressions
by giving them temporal and spatial locations, and thus differentiating them. In doing so, the synthesis of apprehension brings about the condition of the intelligibility of impressions as distinct, namely spatiotemporally structured, impressions qua appearances available for further construction and structuring. The second synthesis, the synthesis of reproduction in imagination, signifies the second constructive role of imagination in combining and reproducing the sensory manifold diachronically,
carrying over its earlier elements in order to construct a stable image qua singular representation of an item in the world. It establishes temporal associations between appearances that the synthesis of apprehension has located in a space and time, in a certain way, rudimentary structured out of the undifferentiated homogeneity of simultaneous sense impressions. So these two syntheses are called the figurative part of the building process of our toy robot, associated with imagination,
as a constructive simulating capacity or faculty whose function is to represent an object even without its presence in intuition. This is from Kant page 256. And which is unavailable to pure sensibility. They are accordingly what can be called figurative synthesis. The third synthesis, the synthesis of recognition in the concept, strictly designates the role of a perceptive consciousness in perception, that which must be added to pure imagination in order to make its function intellectual. Since, according to Kant, in itself, the synthesis of imagination,
although exercised a priori, is nevertheless always sensible, for it combines the manifold only as it appears in intuition. Now, the synthesis of recognition requires both the act of recognizing a past representation as related to the present one, and the act of recognizing past and present representations as belonging to one object via the function of a concept, a principle of unity. The third synthesis then involves different forms of full-blooded judgments or a priori acts of cognition or candidness.
So this was a very, very, as I mentioned, brief and condensed explanation of what threefold synthesis is are and what basically what their function is now I'm going to elaborate and unpack this for you so before that by the way hello hunter ask any question but with the understanding that I'm going to elaborate on a lot of this stuff as we are moving forward. Again, best example, visual example, I mean,
I think Salah has really had this fantastic method that approach Kant's idea of threefold synthesis as an exercise in logical phenomenology, not Husserlian phenomenology, but logical phenomenology. So it's actually good to exemplify as how to make a LEGO model, to put these right blocks, to identify the blocks, so on and so forth. Silence.
All right. What I find most interesting about this, and I think it's probably because I haven't yet read the B deduction, but the huge role, I noticed this reading the seller's piece on imagination and experience, is that the role that judgment plays in intuition, insofar as judgment... In tweaking, yes. Right. That's what gives the recipes, gives the appropriate rules for the construction of the image models. Yes, yes. You see, you need to have...
So, you know, Imagine that you are going to again make a toy robot. This toy robot, usually when you get old Lego boxes, those expensive ones which has children we couldn't afford, unless we hopefully played with them in one way or another, usually come with an instruction. There is this massive starship, Death Star toy robot, I mean toy model. And then how are you going to make it? Usually there is a blueprint of this, made in the Lego vocabularies.
That's your principle of unification. That's the conceptual part of it. That's the rule. It doesn't tell you that you can choose, for example, the red, for example, legs of a robot instead of the black one. No, it doesn't tell you anything. It actually gives you a kind of a very schematic view of how to make this using nevertheless some minimal local variations of such and such Lego blocks that regardless as long as they conform to some minimal standards of synthesis and unification, then it means that
you can hang or attach this block to another block and hence construct it. It doesn't matter whether it is red or green, whether it is like the leg of a robot, or it's a leg of, for example, Darth Vader, or it's a leg of a nurse. As long as it actually fits to the other part, you can do it. And that's what concepts are really. That concept is that instruction. kind of blueprint instruction. What I find really interesting about this is this actually gets close
to the emphasis of needing some sort of naturalistic account here rather closely because we're not just talking about experience like in this circumstance we're talking about the construction of an actual material object. We've got rules of correct putting pieces together like some pieces don't fit together but we have those actually this is really fantastic yes precisely because imagine that most of you you know toyed with lego blocks sometimes you get the recipe for making such a model then you see that some model some toy blocks are missing or they're or they have for example lego has updated
them with new blocks, but they haven't updated their instruction. That corresponds to when the concept no longer conforms to the level of observation. And hence, you either need to revise your instruction, your concepts, to account for those things, or those evidences need to be brought under a new concept, a new set of instruction. Yes, absolutely. all of this you can you can think about all of these scenarios in this kind of construction and as you say you can't have an object there's no such thing as an object out there without this instruction so what would you say the
difference is between like these rules of the way that these local variations can be put together, those rules and then the rules which put them together in such and such a way. Well you see, that's the whole point. So you have conceptual rules, you have rules of imagination and then you also have rules of eschematism supplying the concepts with the right images, with the right blocks, Lego blocks. These are all rules but they are not all at the same level.
Right, right. Like in some circumstance, or in some sense, the conceptual rules are imposed as an additional layer on top of the rules of the schematism of a schematism yes yes absolutely yes yeah there's need to consistently revise the concepts for the uh objects which are given or the uh data which is given or i should say the need to revise the model or concept map for the pieces of the Lego blocks that we have. Yes, yes.
An ongoing... You revise your concepts, but also you form new concepts because sometimes your concepts can no longer hold those blocks together, hang together. You see, concepts are classic, picatory, structuring unities or principles, as I mentioned. So what does really a structure mean? A structure is a function of mind. For now, I think I don't want to get into really the nitty-gritty of the word structure as systematically understood in philosophy, but I think you can somehow hijack Seller's definition of philosophy and use it as actually a definition of a structure. How things, in the broadest possible sense, hang together in the broadest possible sense.
So how these Lego blocks hang together in the broadest possible sense is really the structure. Sometimes, so concepts do a structure. They allow you to understand how you can hang them together. But sometimes they don't hang together precisely because they are not right blocks. Then you either revise your concepts or actually arrive or have to arrive at a new concept. through that you make them hang together in the right way. The concept of a toy robot whose hand wielding a laser gun and a concept of a
toy robot whose hand is like holding a cup of coffee. You know, these are two different concepts and in order for you to put the blocks together, you need to make sure that you are following the construction. A concept of a coffee holding robots of course doesn't include the laser gun wielding robot piece right I mean this is really interesting to me is the is the correct application of or maybe I should use the example of when the concept doesn't apply to the pieces
pieces that you have and you need to revise the concept, is that the question of quid facti? I guess it's not, is it the question of quid facti? Yes, yes, yes, it's absolutely the question of quid facti, yes, it's a question of quid facti, yes, you're right, the origin, the origin of that, an origin that is outside of a concept. Yes, it's absolutely quid facti, yes. There is a lot of complication though it seems at this level of quid facti because, I mean, in some ways you have certain sense matters supplied, but the question of schemas
and image models is a fact of or is a result of judgment. So it seems like, I don't know quite what to say, but it seems like the fact that there are different schemas which could be applied. Yes. no you're right do you see no you are right you see the best way to understand you see so we know about the instruction the blueprint of making such and such Lego model but what about the blocks what would be the best canteen level for
by identifying these blocks. The blocks are not pure sensory bundles, bundle of sensory questions. Those are actually what you might call to be at the level of figurative synthesis. At the level of integration, localization of items in space and time, but also the temporal ordering ordering of blocks. Okay now again jumping a little bit ahead. So we have the synthesis, the first synthesis of the intuition in apprehension and we have the second one, recognition in imagination. So what would be a good example of this
and what would be the difference between the two? First let me give an example outside of our Lego model and then extend it to our Lego model example so imagine you are it is part of the chance own example and usually you know that's how commentators differentiate between the two so the apprehension one which is the first one is that you want to draw a line so you do a step by a step in continuing with you right you you put your pen in on the first place and then you draw it and then it's as if you are adding pieces by pieces to this line for
it to grow. Now obviously every time that you move your pen to make an addition of this line, you always have in mind or your eye and this idea that you're adding a piece to a previous piece, that all of these pieces are part of the same whole, the same line. So it's the spatiotemporal localization of all parts as belonging to the same whole. All additions, pieces or segments of this line belong to a line as a whole.
That's the first synthesis. Now, what is the difference of the first synthesis with the second synthesis, the synthesis of recognition and imagination? As it name says, it's the function of recognition that is key here. So when you are drawing a line, every time imagine that as you are making these infinitesimal segments you are working with a new object with a new piece or sensory field the rest are no longer present inside your sensory field by necessity
nevertheless you have retained them to the function of memory so this is the temporal aspect that every piece of line as you move your pen you draw it is attached to what you previously what you previously drew recognition of what is retained those segments of lines that are retained what are no longer present, you add parts to them. That's the temporal aspect.
So these two are figurative syntheses. In the case of our Lego model, the first one is that, so you have, even if you don't have a concept, even if you don't have a blueprint of making the toy robot, you do nevertheless, now that's I think the example Kantianism gets a little bit tricky here. Precisely because can you really say that I can have the synthesis of intuition and
apprehension without even the most minimal degree of concept or conception? Because the concept is the one that gives you the invariance of the whole, of the principle of unification, just like the concept of line. If you don't have a concept of the line, then how can you say really these parts hang together and are part of the same hole, part of the same line, just as your toy blocks hang together and part of a hole which is a toy robot. So you see, even in the synthesis of apprehension, the first synthesis, you still have the specter
of concept. You need to know at least a very vague idea of what you are going to construct in order to say that as I put the blocks together, they are all parts of the same whole. That would be the first synthesis. The second synthesis, so you have attached many blocks together, now you add another block. It no longer matters to you about what blocks you have put together. Nevertheless, it's just the idea that is retained for you.
What you have already done, the kind of organization that you have gone through, that you have retained, and hence the temporal function of memory, the recognitive function of memory, and then you know that what you add is being added to what you previously made, for example, the leg of a robot. And it's not the head of the robot, in fact. So you see, That's the second function, the second form of synthesis. Is this one and two from the second edition? Because it sounds like you're talking about two as recognition, which is the third and the first deduction. No, the first one is apprehension.
The second one is imagination. the third one is the concept yeah what it made me think of and I mean this is kind of silly but I mean it's interesting just to unpack is there's this forget what the fuck I read it from but it was from the Soviet dialectician Ilyankov just talking in sort of like a sci-fi vein of like if you're like decomposing the atoms in the universe if you like decompose it so far like the entire universe i don't know just fucking explodes or some bullshit but like i mean if you're like you know putting you know lego blocks together and then you find you know you split a lego block in a certain way or you find a new way of like
splitting a lego blocks like that and that entails a judgment which necessarily would like would um so to speak, transform the image models which we find appropriate because we would find that... Yes, absolutely. I mean, that's exactly the job of the science, the job of philosophy and science. They revise our concepts and hence it fundamentally revise what we understand as being or universe in the most unrestricted way. Yes. Okay, let's have a break at this point for meltdown, and then we'll get back to the elaboration
I don't think I'll be satisfied with my understanding of this for quite some time. It's interesting to see just how high the stakes are for Kant in section B-121 or A-89. He says, thus the reader must be convinced of the unavoidable necessity of such a transcendental deduction before he has taken a single step in the field of pure reason, for he would otherwise proceed blindly, and after much wandering around, would still have to return to the ignorance from which he had begun. But he must also clearly understand from the outset its inevitable difficulty, so that he will not
complain of the obscurity where the subject matter itself is deeply veiled, or become annoyed too soon over the removal of hindrances. Since we must either surrender completely all claims to insights of pure reason in its favorite field, namely that beyond the boundaries of all possible experience, or else perfect this critical investigation? Yes. No, I mean, that shows that really Kant's, Salah was, I think, right to read Kant precisely in this vein that can't represent a kind of rationalist materialist or more appropriately
dubbed a normativist with a naturalistic term. Precisely because if you're a pure normativist you would say that it's just a pure reason. So you need to have both, and if you are a naturalist you just would say that you are just simply empiricist in the human vein. So you need to have both in understanding that how is that we arrive at such and such faculties, but then how such and such faculties are also applied to the object, the subjective people and how they are a priori relevant to such a domain, you know, can gain traction
of the objective domain. No, I think that that shows the length of Kant's both, you know, kind of transcendental term but also his ultimate reconciliatory philosophy that you can think of Kant's philosophy as not being anti-empiracist or anti-logicist but simply being a reconciliatory movement between the two to kind of integrate them together. It's a kind of, you know, to twist Vienna Circle and later Seller's term, there is such
a thing as Irenic empiricism, you know, reconciliatory empiricism. So I think you can call Kant Irenic Rationalist. All right, shall we move forward then, if no one has questions? Looks like no. Okay. So we know that from Kant that deduction of pure concepts of
understanding has two poles. According to Kant one side refers to the object of pure understanding and is supposed to show and make comprehensible the objective validity of its concepts a priori. The other side deals with the pure understanding itself concerning its possibility and the powers of cognition on which it itself rests. Thus it considers it in a subjective relation. So the first one is which deals with showing that categories
necessarily apply to all possible objects of experience is what you call objective deduction. The second poll of it, when it attempts to show how categories can apply to objects of experience, is what can be called subjective deduction. Now insofar as we know that categories are pure concepts of understanding, then subjective deduction attempts to explain the role of understanding in experience. In Kant's own
It attempts to explore the way in which the understanding brings a transcendental content into its representations by means of the synthetic unity of the manifold in intuition in general. A79-B105. Now starting with aid deduction, it seems that Kant doesn't give a major role to understanding.
Even though Kant has already said the experience only arises through the cooperation of the sensibility and understanding. He now seems to be giving a rather different version of this account. He says there are three original sources, capacities or faculties of the soul which contain the conditions of the possibility of all experience and cannot themselves be derived from any faculty of the mind namely sense imagination and a perception and these are grounded one
the synopsis of the manifold a priori through sense, the synthesis of this manifold through the imagination and finally the unity of the synthesis through original perception. This is A deduction. This is what you might call to be the prototypical model of threefold synthesis provided in B deduction.
So in the later version, we no longer have sense, imagination, perception. We rather have the manifold of pure intuition, its synthesis by means of imagination, and concepts that give this pure synthesis unity, which of course Kant has already identified as dependent upon understanding. So, to start to elaborate, you know, this kind of discrepancy between the first
account in the second account you should know that the first account is usually coming under attack by many people including even sellers I have I have even heard this from ray from Peter Wolff and Dale and many other people who generally think that the first version the first account of this story is is conservative and it's only in the second the later second account that you know Kent embarks on something significant I tend to take side with some of the commentators who believe that no the first account is actually quite important
and in the second account it seems that Kent already has yes elaborated this but But also, in order to avoid confusion, he has dropped some of the more ambitious and more interesting part of his project in this chapter. So remember that in the A deduction, the first version, the first one is he associates the word synopsis of the manifold of a manifold a priori through sense then he
associates the word synthesis and unity with respectively with the second and the third analogous to the second and third synthesis in the later account in the second account I think this is one really important things precisely because When Kant talks about synthesis, he doesn't simply mean integration. Again, many commentators believe that synthesis simply, and I have already said that, but now that we are moving to our new phase, we should drop this whole word at understanding simply as integration. I have seen that many commentators simply think that synthesis is an integration.
Yes, it is an integration but it is not simply an integration. Synthesis requires concepts. It requires some sort of connection with conceptuality, with categories. The very fact that Kant dissociates the kind of term he uses for the first, which he calls the synopsis of the manifold a priori through sense versus the second and the third which he calls the synthesis and the unity of the synthesis shows that Kant is quite aware of this problem.
Another, so that's really important, you know you can't just bunch together all of these as three sentences or the whole idea of threefold synthesis is more is what you might call to be a more streamlined vulgar Kantian version that he had to say in order to you know avoid confusions instigated by philosophy dummies but I think he's in the under on the right track in the in the in the first version to dissociate these there are not all synthesis in the sense that there are simply integration okay if they are simply integration and the the way that integrations are differentiated by faculties then how
these faculties are how these faculties can be understood or grasped in relation to the sense and understanding. Kant wants to show that insofar as the relation of these faculties operating at these different levels of hierarchy differ from one another in terms of their you know affinity with sense and understanding we should not use the word synthesis for all of them the first one which corresponds to the first synthesis is a
This is a synopsis. Simply what you might call to be an integration into a compressed version of simultaneous impressions, this confused flux of simultaneous impressions, and give it some sort of compressed spatiotemporal identification, tag mark. This is what he calls synopsis. Then, you get the second one, which is a synthesis, and the third one, which he calls the unity of synthesis, insofar as it's associated with concepts or principles of unity. Another objection that is usually levied against Kant's first enumeration of the threefold
synthesis is that it appears to be quite mystical and metaphysical. It appears that Kant simply tries to give this very kind of cookie cutter, in terms of today's cognitive science, divisions of labor for each layer of the mind or cognition. So first you get the synthesis of the apprehension one, then imagination one, and then the concept. So you get the input, the output of the first one becomes the input of the second one, the
the output of the second one becomes the input of the third one. It's kind of like this sequential form of computation that moves bottom up. But Kant actually later on, both in the first account and the second account, he makes it quite clear that these three stages are inseparable. that they are in complex interplay with one another. It's not as if they are sequentially ordered, or that the output of one becomes the input of another one.
No, this is already we know, you know, through what we have discussed, that for example imagination is actually quite complex. its output input can both come from understanding as it can come from intuition, sensible intuition. So this is the second point that you need to have in mind. So as I mentioned, it's quite common to dismiss Kant's first enumeration as rather vulgar and metaphysical and antiquated theory of what you might call mental faculties.
However, you know, once you look at this issue more attentively, I would say, given Kant's own expositions, it becomes clear that Kant does not take these three stages as what you might call to be three separate sources of cognition or mental faculties or mindedness
or perceptual judgment. He does not take them to be sequential. He does not take them to be in some sort of input-output relation with regard to one another. Rather, he takes them to be more of something that Rosenberg and Salars have called phenomenological analysis of various aspects and conditions of perception. that need not correspond in any straightforward way to the classification and explanatory
accounts of a psychological or psychophysical theory of perceptual experience. So it's not as if Kant says that, well, you know, there is this part of your mind that is called imagination. No, he tries to lay out what he might call to be a functionalist blueprint of the mind. There are such and such faculties at work, and these faculties are in such and such complex interplay with one another. Now it doesn't say that where these faculties are situated, nor does it say that these faculties
correspond to such and such, for example, real cognitive faculties instantiated, for example, by humans. He can't really, what he tries to give is really to provide a functional schema, a functional diagram of cognition, of a priori cognition. And so far as a functional diagram, it does not need to be restricted to Homo sapiens. It can be extended to something else, including a machine, hence the relevance of Kant for artificial intelligence.
What's interesting here is, I mean, this kind of gets into what you were talking about last week, maybe the week before, I don't remember, regarding the fact that ontologically That's bottom up and sequential, but epistemologically not necessarily in so far as the understanding has the capacity to exercise judgment with respect to what schema we use to build image models. It just shows that there's a complex interaction at play, even though in a certain ontological
sense there's the certain order to it. Yes, but that ontology also is in retrospect. It is only through the exercise of such and such capacities, through the maturation of reasons, power of knowing, that we come to understand that we are realized in such and such way, but there are also necessary features in such a realization that can be extended to other kinds of species, them not having necessarily our own local and contingent constitution. I have a question in regards to that. So what we have is a set of empirical phenomena that we observe that are constituted by our own contingent constituents.
These are not empirical phenomena, Artem. When we talk about different species and so on... Yes, different species. What we are talking... You see, Kant simply tries to anchor the idea of threefold synthesis not as tethered to an empirical, specific empirical domain, but simply tries to give a functional abstraction of it. A functional abstraction is independent of the empirical substrate that supports it. It can be constrained by it, but the necessity of it, in the Kantian idea of necessity, condition
of possibility, is independent of such an empirical constitution. I was just wondering, and now that you've elaborated on that, I think this might sound dumb, but I'm still going to ask it. But what we get is a kind of, I understand it would be dumb to address the Sinusurlian Chinese room position. But at the same time, what we have is, yes, a functionalistic kind of count of mind, which implies kind of by the virtue of being functionalistic, multiple realisability of intelligence.
Yet I was just wondering, is there possibly a kind of a gap between its realisability metaphysically in as much as we have come into being versus realizing them on the principle of dawning, dawning, kind of dawning those metaphysically structured principles of thinking onto things which are already structured in such a way as our metaphysical structure has given them the right to. OK. Can I try to reformulate your question?
And if my reformulation wrong, don't shy away. Just say it's bullshit. from what I understand from your question is that you are saying that's okay it's something that you know we have acknowledged or recognized certain kinds of normative functioning rather until the logical normative functioning the so-called functional diagram of mindedness required for us to structure the world and ourselves in it this is the normative functioning independent of
any physical substrate but also the fact that we have arrived at such a recognition is the very byproduct of our history of evolution in the sense that we have been physically realized in a particular sense contingently and locally that we have arrived at this particular recognition of our of some independent normative functioning yeah and in the sense that how can we reconcile them I would say that this is really the project of artificial general
intelligence it is a process at which the escepticism and the philosophy of mind come hand in hand you can't have one without the other yes I think you know first of all in order to in fact to approach this problem coherently we should recognize what Plato called the formal independence of thinking from being and this formal independence of thinking from being necessary for us to arrive at the intelligibility of being or the universe of nature so on so forth requires the recognition of certain kinds of necessary rules.
So those we put aside as absolutely necessary. Yes, their instantiation might be contingent, but what you might call to be their function is absolutely necessary. Because if you don't have something like logic or logos, then how can you really talk about being, talk about evolution, so on and so forth, without falling prey to pure unintelligible. So we put those aside regardless of their instantiation. Now, the skeptical part. The skeptical part, as you say, is quite dangerous because when it comes to nuances, when it comes to subtleties of what exactly the configuration of this functional diagram might be,
What are in fact necessary characteristics, which at the end of the day might end up to be quite local and contingent, part of our particular evolutionary history, that requires skepticism. Investigation of that requires skepticism. A skepticism that needs to be conjoined with the necessity of rationalism in order for it to not become impotent. And this is the whole idea that I really, I mean, I haven't seen a Hegelian ever talks about this. But I'm not a Hegelian really, nor I'm a Kentian. I think nevertheless, Hegel says, you know, Geist mind is a phenomenology of mind.
Geist is a self-consummating skepticism. in the sense that if you have something called phenomenology of mind, where you can arrive at, for example, a list of logically necessary functions, then you should also have a fundamental form of skepticism about this phenomenology of how you arrive at such a list. Without this, then you can, as you might object, you can easily fall prey to your own local and contingent history of evolution. What you thought is necessary is actually not necessary, is actually purely objectively
contingent. It's only from your particular local perspective that it appears to be necessary. Yes, I think these are conjoined projects. And I would say that the skepticism part is right now what you might call to be carried on under the banner of neuroscience, of artificial intelligence. You know, algorithms who come with better forms of unification of sensory data, deep learning. different kind, fundamentally not just better, fundamentally different kind as humans. So I think these two needs to come together if this question should be answered coherently.
Because without the skepticism you are simply reaffirming your contingent and local constitution of subjectivity, which is ultimately what you might call to be a species of dogmatism. Without the necessity of reason and only with skepticism, then you have something like Scott Baker, something like David Roden. You know, people who precisely because they don't put any constraint on the link between intelligence and the intelligible, they arrive at the conception of intelligence that is purely
unconstrained, a super intelligence. In David Roden's disconnected intelligence, in Scott Baker simply a singularity, a god. These are all, you know, all of these options need to be dispensed with as empty thoughts, Kantian empty thoughts, illusions. Illusions begotten either by exercising dogmatic rationalism or exercising greedy skepticism. A speculative enthusiasm is what Kent calls it, yes.
A speculative enthusiasm. Yes. Give me two minutes, I will be back. What are your thoughts, Theo? Tardom? I don't know. This seems like kind of strange.
I keep rereading Turing's mind article on artificial intelligence and thinking. and well like the general turing machine thing uh and uh simply sometimes puzzles me it mostly reza i mean he formulated perfectly but he was trying to put into like put emphasis on saying that certain elements might not be necessary certain elements might simply be contingent in thinking but I what I was what I'm kind of scared of is positing some things as not recognizing some things as necessary so you know what what do you get when you posit an artificial
intelligence with which actually lacks which kind of conveys all the general functionalist principles that you've outlined but actually lacks something and you're simply not there, not deep enough into this stuff to actually understand what part is missing. I think that's a possibility. I'm not sure whether Reza would agree with this. Yeah, I mean, that's interesting because what that brings up is the question of like threefold synthesis is some sort of like functionalist account. And while it's a functionalist account that allows for the revising of concepts,
I mean, what would the functionalist account of a mind which is able to revise concepts itself being revised or subject to some sort of critical reformulation? Sorry, Christian, I did not get your question. What Artem was talking about was the idea of like, okay, there's certain necessary functional components to some idea of mind. But what if, you know, you construct some AI, you construct
some sort of intelligence, and I mean, while, you know, it might have certain capacities, might not have others, because certain necessary conditions for some deeper realization of mind weren't there. And then what I went to was was saying that threefold synthesis is a certain functionalist account of mine, specifically one that is open to the revision of concepts, etc., etc. But what if there's certain gaps in this functionalist account of the threefold synthesis that would, that even if it already has certain capacity for the revision of concepts,
but if that functionalist account itself has some necessary conditions for a deeper realization of mind that are not, it's lacking those necessary conditions for a deeper realization of mind. I don't think that it lacks any kind of necessary, precisely because it's ultimately, as I mentioned, the threefold synthesis, that's a revolutionary part of it. What is it exactly? As I mentioned, it's just simply a bridge between sensibility and understanding. Any kind of intelligence that you take as intelligible, in the sense that you should
be forced to explain why is that you call this an intelligence, should have a relation between sensibility and understanding, between sensibility and concepts, as principles of unity of intuitions, of sensory intuitions. So it's not that Kant is as stingy about the features, these are not features, these are what you might call to be conditions of possibility of mind. Hence they're part of transcendental psychology rather than saying that they're part of what you you might call to be empirical psychology of cognitive science of homo sapiens no they're
part of the condition of the possibility because then how can you really explain what you mean by intelligence what you mean by intelligible any form first of all uh i mean you know that i know that Artem knows the concept of semantic naivete, you know, Brandon's semantic naivete, that's part of also race between suspicions and trust, dialectic between suspicions and trust. So we can talk about something also called cognitive or mind naivete, in the sense that many people think that you can actually talk about other forms of intelligences
without any constraint no the first kind of constraint is that any form of intelligent behavior that you are going to talk about is ultimately going to be modeled on both the condition the necessary conditions of possibility of having mind but also your experience both in terms of evolutionary and historical experience of what you take the mind might be. Now there is no such a thing as an intelligent behavior or a
conception of intelligence that is not modeled on the mind because without that then it's ultimately as Theo was what said it Kant is called is enthusiasm empty thoughts. In English you call it over excitement. there is no base to it we should we can't even talk about these kinds of stuff we are not allowed to talk about this kind of stuff now I made a distinction between the condition of the possibility of mind and your subjective experience of mindedness the con the necessary condition of possibility cannot change there are there are the minimal invariances that are required
for you to in fact remain within the bind between intelligence and the intelligent but what can change and can be revised is your subjective experience of what the mind is and can be that can be changed in fact artificial general intelligence so as neuroscience can show that this can be fundamentally changed Question, anything before I move forward?
By the way, I don't have a sidebar today for some reason. Is there a sidebar? If you press the button in the top left corner. Yeah, up in the top left corner there's a... Yes, yes, yes. Let me... the art of and I were having a conversation about yes contingent instantiations yeah yeah you see the whole idea is that you know if philosophy of mind in the deep tradition before you see when I
at least when I do talk about philosophy of mind I do not mean cognitive science. I simply talk about what you might call a family of fundamental relations in philosophy. Intelligence and the intelligible, theory and object, mind and world. So within this definition of philosophy of mind, of course you need to have a skepticism. Well there is this chapter in the forthcoming manuscript that tries to show the power of this skepticism and actually you know right when you think that something is necessary is actually going to be proved
or questioned as contingent. The perception of time is a good example. Time consciousness. Time consciousness, however, we can't talk about Kant really here, precisely because Kant believes in transcendental idea of experience and morality, meaning that time consciousness is only pragmatically relevant with regard to the subject of experience. Yes, that is true, but nevertheless even this admission to the transcendental ideality of experience
and morality, that time is simply not real but transcendentally ideal, there is more to it and can actually lead to some complications because even though you admit to this fact Allah can't you can still fall prey to a smuggle the transcendental ideality of temporality to those sectors of sciences which, you know, engage with the concept of reality. Hence, you attribute to sectors of reality a
feature that is purely subjective transcendentally ideal temporality this has happened a number of times and I think is still happening in physics so yes these things can happen and that's why you need to have the skepticism because what is exactly a skepticism a skepticism is the power of investigation investigating, but investigation without trust in some, it's exactly the dialectic between suspicion and trust. If you have only suspicion without trust in some sort of condition of necessity for going about doing reasoning, all you get
is greedier skepticism, which is purely unintelligibility. And if you have only only trust in the conditional possibility, then you are led into the dogmatic position. So these two things need to come hand in hand, but with the understanding that the tasks of these two are quite different. Minimal rationalism engages with the conditions of possibility, what Kant calls conditional possibility, what you might call in today's vocabulary minimal invariances of what it means to be a minded creature, a minding subject. Whereas a skepticism comes with this idea that how much of what you might call to
be necessary is actually contingent and to what extent the contingent characteristics of our experience adversely affect or influence what we take to be necessary conditions of possibility. Theo is getting enthusiastic now, we are caged by reason. Yes, But sometimes, but this cage, being caged is a positive constraint. If you are, the whole illusion of living outside of a cage is a danger that you should say,
no, thank you, I don't want it. I prefer to live in the cage. Guillotine versus gas chambers. What are you guys talking about now? No, I was talking like suspicion and trust, the issue of that. Yes, either you get Robespierre guillotine or Hitler's gas chambers. Pick your choice. If you trust the supreme being of reason then you can trust that the people who are coming under the justice are coming under it justly.
You see the very fact that Kant even vaguely puts forward something called a functional diagram of being a mindless subject the threefold synthesis without ever reducing to the contingent characteristics of an instantiated cognitive subject shows the extent of how Kant is actually from today's perspective committed to the inhumanist thesis that this functional diagram can be
instantiated by any particular substrate contingent particular and contingently constituted subject as long as it has the right kind of constraints. Hence it already abolishes the very idea of human homo sapiens, homo sapiens rather than human, because human is not really homo sapiens, homo sapiens as the supreme representative of reason. Kant is the first inhumanist. Actually Plato is but let's not talk about this. I'm still itching over this whole intuition and...
Okay, we are going to go on. Okay, let's move on with the thing. Hopefully you get a little bit clarified and more confused. It's going in both ways, definitely. Yeah, well, that's the whole idea of philosophy. Unfortunately, an uncurable itch. So as I mentioned, you know, the first enumeration of the threefold sentences is usually taken to be a representation of a naive psychological theory of mental faculties. But I discussed
that it actually is not. There are in fact components of the first enumeration that are important nevertheless are being dropped in the in the second edition. Also I mentioned that these kind of a three level that Kant lists in a deduction are best to be understood in terms of phenomenological analysis of various aspects and conditions of perception. Or using Hume's notion as philosophically useful distinctions of reason
that give us, you know, a coherent account of psychophysical theory of perceptual experience. Think of this, I mean going back between human and Kent. So I look at, glance upon very momentarily, and this red big book. I transiently think to myself that this red, big book is so exciting.
The demonstrative this, in this I thought, marks the thought as a perceptual judgment. This is about something that is here and now, sincerely present in my visual field, an object that I take it to be a big red book since that's the concepts that I apply. So in this case, you may say that my perceptual experience is veridical, which is to say, what I see is in fact a big red book.
Namely, I see it as a big red book. that's exactly what I take it to be and I judge of it as being an exciting read so while it's correct to say that I see a big red book and that I see it as a a big red book it's also correct to say that i don't see all of that book i see it as a big red
book and so as also having a red back cover and many black and white inside pages some diagrams some knots so on and so forth but what I see of it see one of it doesn't include its inside pages nor do I see its back cover the diagrams inside it so on and so forth. Then how is that? These unseen parts of this Big Red Book get into my
perceptual experience. What I initially said at the beginning of this session, difference between seeing one and seeing two, seeing of and seeing as. Now, according Rosenberg and Sellars is that one possible answer, of course, is that they don't get into my perceptual experience at all. As Rosenberg says, all that I, strictly speaking, see are surfaces, which can properly be characterized in terms of color and shape and perhaps curvature, bulginess, but which have no thickness and so no back and no inside.
On this sort of sensedatum account, this object and its properties are related to my perceptual experience only by corresponding to unactualized perceptual possibilities that I might infer from it. Correlatively, the only sense in which it would be correct to say that I see what I do as having such and such properties is the sense in which it would also be correct to say, for example, that I see what I do as being, for example, inflammable or non-magnetic. For these properties can also be associated with families
of unactualized perceptual possibilities. Now, the thing is that, as we have already talked about, Kant reject these kinds of Humean constraints and descriptions of our perceptual experience, precisely because our experience are not derived from sense data. When, precisely because what I see are not bundles of sense impressions, are objects.
What we see are objects, for example, this book or books in general. When I see a book, I see it as a complete substantial object. it as as here and so as having parts other than what i see of it those parts are then present as actualities in my perceptual experience even though they are not strictly speaking seen when i saying strictly speaking i mean see of I don't have see of of these black and white pages inside this big red book but nevertheless I see them as part of this book because that's what concept of book holds.
It's a non-perspectival thing. so if what I see of the book correspond to what is present in intuition in the sense of being present as elements in sensation then what I need in order to be able to see the book as a book and so as having parts other than what I see of it is a way of making those further parts although not in that sense present in intuition nevertheless present in perception as actualities.
Kant calls the job of this thingy that is responsible for this seeing those unseen part, unseen of part, unseen one part, the faculty responsible for that, the imagination. It's the job of imagination to bring forth actualities. So are you saying that image of is, or image models is seen of? Rudimentary image models are seen of. Okay.
Yes. Rudimentary, that's the qualification, yes. So there are image models that aren't seen of? Yes, but there are more what you might call to be conceptual image models. What you might call to be, what we do call in our ordinary sense imagination. I imagine I am walking on a grass field, I'm flying, so on and so forth.
Okay, so what this sort of draws my attention is the fact that the relationship of concepts and the understanding here can produce a series of differences in degrees of conceptuality within the image models. That is, you know, I can see of a very parochial, perspectival apple where I'm not even necessarily seeing the white within the apple. Yes. But then I can have like a more developed image model. Well, you see, no, no, no, okay, hold on your horses one second.
Actually, that white that you are talking about, you absolutely don't even see it as so you see, okay let's put it that way. So you have C of, C1, right? Where you see the red facing side of the apple, right? and you feel its coolness. Then you have C2 of the apple. When you see it as a volume that is read through and through
and it's also cool and it's also fleshy all the way through. Then you get C3 of the apple. C3 of the apple is what you might call to be a critical judgment. That the apple is not the red through and through. It's actually white inside. So I mean insofar as this critical judgment plays a role also being one of the rules of the understanding in image construction, you would have a conceptual image model of this
that comes from this critical judgment. Well, conceptual image model actually starts from C2 to C3. That's what I would think. Yes, it's not just C3. It's also C2. C2 is also conceptual. And I mean, wouldn't it be fair to say that it's like rather ambiguous? You might have like scene 4, 5, etc. like depending on like the... Not really, no, no, no. You see again, this comes back to this whole idea of threefold synthesis. These are what you might call to be necessary astations. Yes, you might have the variations of them, but every variation ultimately belongs
to one of these three stages. One, the intuitive image model. Two, the intuiting image model. Three, the critically conceived or judged image model. Okay, that actually makes a remarkable amount of sense. I don't know if I... It has a hierarchy, and each of them intuited, intuiting image model, intuiting image model, and conceived image model, which is a critical one. And the fact that we're talking about image models at each level really demonstrates the complex interaction...
Of imagination with understanding, yes. Yes. Yes, absolutely, yes. Theo, any question here? No deep questions right now, but I'm just sort of wondering about the confidence that someone could have on the application of judgments. It seems like it's an unnecessary part to even talk about confidence at this point, just because this is what is necessary. No, confidence, yes, it's a necessity. Necessity doesn't mean certainty. Necessity doesn't essentially mean certainty.
These two concepts need to be dissociated. Necessity means that you need to have the necessity for veridical judgment. Now, your veridical judgment might be actually false and true, but in so far as it can be false but also it can be true that's why it's called vertical judgment the first place right right because if you don't have it then then you are in trouble the whole idea of very decalty means that it is susceptible to falsification it's simply from the perspective of faculties or the conditions of possibilities necessary. The products of
it, the conclusions you reach through it are far from certain. So, as I said that Kant calls this the job of imagination. According to Kant, imagination is the capacity to represent an object even without its presence in intuition.
So accordingly those parts of the book over and above what I see of it are present in my perceptual experience as imagined. Now it's important to be clear that being present as imagined does not imply being presented as imagined. Since I am aware of my experience as such, I am aware of it simply as a unitary experience of seeing a book.
So back to the Hume-Cant distinction, this is I'm quoting from Rosenberg here, the philosophically useful distinctions of reason, Hume's terms, that we are in the process of drawing, that is, are not distinctions that can be, so to speak, introspectively read off from our perceptual experiences merely by suitably directing our attention to them. This is part of what Kant had in mind when he called the imagination a blind, true, indispensable function of the soul without which we would have no cognition
at all, but of which we are seldom even conscious. So imagination then turns out to be a necessary aspect of perception as such. In Kant's term, no psychologist has yet thought that the imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself. This is so partly because this faculty was limited to reproduction and partly because it was believed that the senses do not merely afford us impressions, but also put them together and produced images of objects, for which, without doubt, something more than the receptivity of impressions is required,
namely, a function for the synthesis of them. And this is exactly what Kant calls the synthesis of apprehension in intuition. So, and this is, as I mentioned, the first synthesis in what you might call to be the figurative synthesis. The other two are synthesis of reproduction in imagination, you know, the temporal ordering, drawing a line, retaining what you have already drawn in memory and then
continue from that point onward and ultimately synthesis in concept. Using concept as the principle of Unity. The instruction of how to build a toy robot. So I mean a lot of my questions are here I think because I mean it's said that the imagination constructs image models or schemas from the rules of the understanding and I mean presumably also you know the construction of the toy model would also according to a concept of the understanding. Now
Given the fact that there is... It seems like the difference between the image models of the second and the third is between conceptual and critical conceptual, correct? Between concept-laden and uncritical and explicitly conceptual and critical judgment, yes. Okay, so I mean, I guess like, my question would be, like, what's the nature of these different rules?
the rules of, say, like proper concept, composition and fitting together of certain elements and using, fitting, according to those proper rules of construction, constructing a particular object out of these components. in the relationship you know he can't can't obviously can't answer this and cannot answer this question you are essentially entering to advanced what you might call transcendental philosophy it's above cancer level in the sense that you need to one be able to fundamentally
provide a complex version of figurative synthesis, a naturalistic account of them, but also you should be capable of giving a complex, inferentialist account of intellectual synthesis, synthesis in the concept. Without these, I don't think that you can answer this question. And I think that very, very few philosophers have even engaged with this question. Salars, Brandom on the side of the, of course, intellectual synthesis, Salars a little bit
with also you know figurative synthesis you know a good number of stuff in predictive processing a paradigm deals with precisely figurative synthesis but they are far from perfect and that's about it really it is um a figurative um synthesis The first and the second one. The first and the second. Those would be like the proper construction, but not necessarily according to a particular object, correct? Like the fact that Lego pieces. No, you might say that there aren't the proper particularity, the proper particularity, but
without the specific principle of unification namely concept yeah I think that that is what I was trying to do. There are the natural what you might call to be naturalistic or the natural naturalizable part of this threefold synthesis whereas the third one the intellectual synthesis is the logical one. So I mean what is the logical one go on the difference between these could you like maybe make a distinction between these types of rules as figurative rules and intellectual rules yes yeah absolutely yes I haven't seen anyone does it but I yeah genuinely
think that you can do it figurative rules actually that would be very good way to dispel some of the confusion figurative rules versus intellectual rules yes but of course that requires a little bit of elaboration but that's fine yeah but but yeah that's absolutely I think is correct well what would be What would make the lower two figurative rules? Sorry? What would make the scene of and scene as the apperceptive and imagination? what would make the rules in both of those figurative
yet necessitate drawing the distinction between them? I'm still having a hard time to understand this question. Sorry, let me just rephrase myself. Given the fact that apperception and imagination are the two components of the figurative synthesis, what makes them figurative in each respective case? And what would be... Well, they are figurative precisely in so far as their material resource, the source of their integration, are the EDs.
It is, you know, intuited, experienced, imagined, you know, that's the reason. So the aim of the transcendental deduction is... um Consist the expert what why can I? apply concepts to objects a priority yes, but the There's something sort of strange about the idea of finding the The right to apply concepts to
empirical objects Right? There's a... as if he somehow still isn't... I mean, this is why he's... We haven't got to that point. That's eschematism. Yeah. Eschematism is basically... and eschematism, you see, the thing is that... I think, as I mentioned, I think this whole part about perceptual judgment and threefold synthesis is really revolutionary, you know, in the grand scale of things. Eschematism is really great in the sense of idea. But when Kant, as opposed to when he elaborates threefold synthesis, when Kant tries to elaborate eschemata and eschematism,
he usually references to things that are unintelligible, like, you know, the function, the mysterious function of the soul, so on and so forth. Kant I really don't think that Kant adequately answers this. But nevertheless, he puts us in the right direction in the sense that he defines the role for eschemism and I think your question can be answered in terms of eschemism. Now, of course, the very exact function of eschemism can be susceptible to debate and refinement, but nevertheless, I think that's where your question, the answer to your question,
you know, lies. And we will get to this. We will get to the eschemism. I think, really, without eschemism, this whole idea of reconciling reason with empirical that will fall into this array. Basically, you can think of transcendental turn as a rudimentary philosophy of coordination. Coordination between epistemology and ontology, coordination between logic and sense, between judgments and between rationalism and imperialism,
so on and so forth. In order for you to have coordination, you can't have unilateral coordination, because the whole idea of coordination needs to be bilateral, both from sense to understanding and understanding to sense. So far all we have got were kind of like key moments in how understanding can be applied to sense and some implicit understanding that sense is always important. But we don't know exactly how they hang together. Threefold sentences tries to lay out the groundwork for this.
But only in schematism that you can see that there are certain kinds of constraints, again as a condition of possibility, that intuition should relate to the concept, so as concept end up to be blind and empty thoughts. Essentially all Kant wants to do, as I mentioned to you, is reconciling between rationalism and empiricism. So, um, later on in the schema, um, because I'm still kind of following through this whole
figure. Don't ask me any question about the schema, Christian. This is going to be a lengthy discussion next session. I won't go too far, but I mean, it seems like, I mean, you said that the figurative figurative are EDs, which I mean, it makes a certain amount of sense, you know, especially if you think of the figurative syntheses, the rules, the figurative rules being sort of like naturalistically explicated rules of afforded compositionality or something like that. Yes, but then as I mentioned to you, using Kant's own examples, it can be shown that
even if when you think that you don't have any role for conception or judgments in these figurative synthesis, it can be shown that you in fact do, like the concept of a line. How can you get the first synthesis if you don't have the concept of a line as a whole? How can you synthesize these infinitesimal line segments that you draw, locate in space and time? How can you structure them or hold them together if not with regard to some proto-conceptual
if not conceptual idea of line as a whole? Yeah, this is actually what I was about to ask. why I was sort of like a little bit skeptical of it being only ED because then this sort of brings in like the fact of you know acts of cognition. It's not that there as I mentioned to you, you see the more I have read about you know these levels it seems to me it's not that one is only ED and one is only ING. One is intuited and one is in treating experience and experiencing no you can think about these levels in
terms of the priority of their emphasis the emphasis of the figurative synthesis is on eds in twitteds rather than in two teams whereas the emphasis on the third one is only in tweeting rather than in tweeted this does not mean that the figurative synthesis can simply go on and be instantiated without any conceptual component. Right. Without any judging. And likewise like in order to make a critical conceptual model you're going to need... It can be instantiated without intuitions, yes absolutely. Okay, so I mean I guess like
what I mean sort of like if we can wrap this up as much as we can what would be like that the difference of the conceptual rules at the at the different levels like what what what makes um like figurative rules different from like intellectual semantic rules well you have already answered this semantic rules versus what you might call to be rudimentary rules that pertain to the configuration of certain components of intuitive components
semantic versus syntax and then within semantic you get again different levels within syntax also you get different levels so you have both syntactic complexity and semantic complexity and then you see that this leads to ever more complex idea of how these things relate to one another you have minimal syntax you have a syntax as simply say that for example this is next to that a red item next to a big item or red item when the presence
of red big item then the presence of for example SLR is an example when a presence of you know light like lightning then the presence of for example deafening noise a hearing of index of what you might call to be a thunder so you have these kinds of configurations these are syntactic
configuration but you are also different kind of syntactic configurations syntax within the logical structure of language logical syntax so you have different levels of syntax and also you have different levels of semantics These things, as I mentioned, you know, obviously, you know, if Kant had already answered these questions and refined them, then, well, really, the use for cognitive science would be none. But we know that Kant, neither philosophically nor empirically, has sufficiently answered these questions. Both from a logical linguistic perspective and both from an empirical
perspective, we can see that there is such thing as both syntactic complexity at different levels and semantic conceptual complexity at different levels. And then of course this requires us to refine this Kantian model evermore things have never been so very clearly and lucidly confusing yes welcome to philosophy my friend okay guys happy new year I hope you have a a rather okay year ahead of you let's not talk about the best or great all right that's just a