LS Re: Kant on Recursion


Donald T Palmgren (lonewolf@utkux.utcc.utk.edu)
Fri, 27 Feb 1998 05:03:14 +0100


Hey, Jason and Squad,
        Off-hand:
        "Everything I say is a lie."
        Seems like it must be emperical. It's not a statment of identity
-- something where you only have to know what the words mean to
know whether it's T or F. We must also know what other things you've
said
and they're truth value -- an inductive process -- so that would seem
synthetic. If we observe 500 things you've said and all 500 turn out
false (ignore the paradox for the moment), we say, "Why what he calimed
is
T! Everything this man says seems to be F."

        Less off-hand:
        What your aproching is of course are paradoxes. (The one I
hear is: "This sentence is false." Is that T or F?) And Kant LOVES
paradoxes. The reason the CRITIQUE is a critique is because it's purpose
was to set limits on knowledge! Kant started out in 1770 to write a
responce to Hume, and by 1772 or so he had it, and wrote to a friend
that
it would be published w/in the year. Then he was sitting and thinking,
and he wondered: "Does the universe have a begining?" And he thought,
"Well, if it didn't that would mean an infinate amount of time had to
elapse to reach the present point and the whole point of saying
something
is infinate is to say that it can't elapse / be spent up. So: The
universe
had a begining! Good, I'll go get lunch now." But then he thought: "No,
wait. If time begain some point in the past, then it had to arise out of
/
begin in, something atemporal. But there's no reason why something would
arise out of something atemporal, since that emplies causation and
causation emplies time. Oh, dear. Beter hold lunch; I need to think
about
this." And he does. For 7 more years before CoPR is finished, in which
he
concludes, naturaly, that the universe doesn't exist. Makes perfect
sense
right. Time and space exist only phonoumenaly (for us) but not "in
reality." What really exists is (by formulation 2) the Object of a
Potentialy Creative Intuition... (by stage 4: The Moral Self, that's
what he's aiming towards).
        Kant sought to put limits on knowledge. He goes through 4 or 5
paradoxes ("antinomys" he calls them) of which the begining of time is
the
first, to show that (the Kanitian motto:) we have no knowledge of things
in themselves, only of things how they appear to us (here in the realm
of
s-t and S-O, and I-This...). And that "we have no knowledge" is where
Ficht, Schelling and Hegel come from when they go: "Wait a minate! If
that's true, how could you bloody know that. It don't make no sense."
        So anyway: If you gave K a paradox and asked: is it T or F, he'd
probably just say, "Well, neither, of course. It's a paradox." If he'd
read Chinese, he might call it "Mu."

        Hope that helps,
                                TTFN (ta-ta for now)
                                Donny

        (PS: If I don't get Kant Part 4 in tomarow (Friday) it might be
Monday or tuesday before you see me again, So be good, go forth, and do
grand and glorious things!)

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