History of Philosophy in the 17th & 18th Centuries

Kant 4

Conceptual Frameworks

A key term in philosophy as it is done today is 'concept'. A school of philosophical thought in the 20th Century, and one that is still with us to an extent, is 'conceptual analysis' The distinctive task of philosophy according to this school is to conduct the analysis of concepts.

But what is a concept?

Let me just present one line of thought on this question. (You will not be surprised that I can't do better than that, not surprised that I can't just say: I will now explain what 'concept' means. You are used to the difficulty of saying exactly what any given word means. Still, it is also surprising that philosophers often appear to conduct their thinking in terms of 'concepts' without showing much awareness of the bluntness of their analytical tool.)

Here is the one line of argument at any rate.

Start with a word, say 'brother'.

We know what 'brother' means. Just because of its meaning we can say 'brothers are male'.

This is true simply in virtue of the meaning of the terms used in the sentence. It is what we call an 'analytic' truth.

But then notice that there are different words for 'brother' in different languages. In French, the word is 'frère'.

If 'frère' and 'brother' mean the same we say that these two words express the same concept.

We might say: the concept of a brother involves the notion of maleness. This is now a conceptual claim.

It is very like the claim about words, but it aspires to be more general. It's still about meanings.

The same meaning is expressed by 'brother' in English and 'frère' in French. The claim 'the concept of a brother involves the notion of maleness' is true , if it is true, in virtue of the meanings expressed by 'brother' which is the same as the meaning expressed by : 'frère'.

According to this line of thought, 'conceptual truths' are much the same as analytic truths. For example, they can be established by thinking in the armchair - by doing the thinking and writing that is called 'conceptual analysis'.

Of course our grip on the 'concept' concept would be more secure if we knew what 'meanings' were. We easily say that the meaning of 'brother is the same as the meaning of 'frère'. But what is the 'meaning' of a word exactly? There are of course a raft of theories, which we can't divert for now. My point is that if we try and understand 'concept' as the meaning shared by words that mean the same we are not clarifying very much...

So that's one line of argument trying to get at what a concept is, and what conceptual analysis is. But we also speak of 'conceptual frameworks'. Now for a line of argument which tries to explain what one of these is.

In short the suggestion is this:

The idea is that we perceive our surroundings, and in fact do all our thinking, in terms of the 'concepts' we have before we look or think.

To take one example: we have the concept of a material object before we look at the world, and this makes us interpret what we see as a world with material objects in it.

Notions of 'conceptual framework' or 'conceptual scheme' have been put forward by several writers in recent intellectual history. Some people say that if we had a different conceptual scheme, we might think of the world as full of processes, not full of material objects: flames, not tables and chairs (Alfred North Whitehead might be thought of in this connection). Thomas Kuhn has theorised about what he calls 'paradigms' in scientific thought. Michel Foucault historical analysis is conducted in terms of the 'épistème'. These notions differ amongst themselves of course, but they are all very different from the system of a priori concepts which Kant thought of as constituting the framework of experience. There couldn't be more than one framework of the kind Kant considered he was exploring. That framework was simply, as he thought of it, a condition of experience. You had to have it if you, as a rational being, were to have experience at all.

With this caveat having been entered, you can think then of Kant arguing that we approach experience with a 'conceptual framework' in place, and that it is this which gives our experience its 'structure'.

Once again let us bring into the open the temptation to which we are prone today in our attempt to find as sympathetic a reading of Kant as possible - the temptation to think of the understanding as processing input data. Isn't this a way of understanding Kant? Data pours into the brain via the senses but it is only when that data has been subject to complex processing that one can become conscious of anything. And the 'experience', when it comes, owes something to what comes in, and something to what the processor does with it.

This is much too psychological an interpretation of Kant's project as he saw it himself, but I sometimes wonder if that should deter us. It was very fashionable once - and the weakness lingers on - to gloss seminal thinkers like Hume and Locke as 'cloaking' their philosophy in psychological garb, and of being themselves taken in by this misrepresentation. Maybe we should be prepared to do the reverse and admire Kant for articulating visionary psychology under the guise of doing philosophy.

More modestly, if we are not prepared to think of Kant as talking essentially about data and data processing, maybe we could consider the usefulness of taking this not as a literal account of what Kant was trying to do but as an analogy.

Noumena and phenomena

I have explained what might be meant by a 'framework of concepts', and the centrality of this idea to Kant's theories.

He maintains that rational beings have an interlocking set of concepts through which they have whatever experience they do have.

For example, the concept of causality. We interpret our experience by making the assumption that every event has a cause. That principle of interpretation is something we bring to experience.

But then we might try to raise the question: what is reality like in itself? We may grant for the sake of argument that all our experience is structured by the conceptual scheme we bring to it, but want to go on to ask: but what is reality like when it is not being structured by our conceptual framework?

The first thing to note:

We may try to raise this question, but it follows from the Kant's claims about the framework that we can't sensibly raise it.

We are trying to suggest:

'Let us think what reality is like when not subject to the structuring our thinking about it imposes.'

This is a peculiar kind of silliness.

The Kantian claim is that we can only think in terms of our conceptual framework, that thinking without that framework is impossible. It follows that the moment we try and pursue the thought 'What is the world like in itself' - it can't be done. We will be using the conceptual framework we are trying to think of the world without...

There is some parallel with the point about perception that people began to take seriously at the beginning of the last century. The act of perception involved causal chains that actually disturbed the thing you were looking at.

You can think of this in the following way. Perception involves light rays impacting on an object and being deflected or reflected by it. If the object is small enough the impact of the light will push it around. You can then never see the object as it is independently of perception...

So it seems that Kant's account of things leaves it open in a way for us to think there is a world independent of our conceptual framework, but at the same time rules out the possibility of our having any thoughts about it.

To think you have to apply concepts, so you can have no thoughts which don't apply concepts.

Kant's name for the world about which you can frame no thoughts at all is the noumenal world.

The world of which we can have experience is the world of 'phenomena', the world of experience, the phenomenal world.

On the other hand,for the record, there are passages in Kant in which he seems unquestionably to be understanding himself as proving things about the the world as it is in itself.

He says he has proved how our concepts must be in order for us to have experience, but also claims that he has has shown how the world must be in order for experience to be possible.

It's probably silly to explore the point in terms of the data-processing analogy. Are there any constraints on what processable data must be like? The answer to this seems to be Yes. They must have the appropriate format. Any thoughts? Discussion site.

The self

If one thinks about oneself, one must be applying the concepts, because for Kant thinking, or experience of any kind, is impossible without applying concepts. It follows that oneself must be subject to causality, since causality is one of these concepts.

This means that whatever actions engaged in by the self must be determined. All the events that happen in the world are determined for Kant. Actions engaged in by the self are no exception. This is because we cannot think of an action - just as we cannot think of anything at all - without applying the concept of causality.

This is true of the self we can think about. It is in thinking about the self that we have to apply causality.

The idea of the self as it really is being determined was repugnant to Kant. Indeed you can see Kant as launching a resistance movement against the thrust of the 18th Century, which was seen as sponsoring the extension of science throughout culture. The ice of determinism, the philosophy of science, was seen by the revolutionaries towards the end of the 18th Century as closing in on every side, and Kant was in the forefront, concerned above all to defend the human being and the freedom of the human being from the encroaching freeze.

You can see how his philosophy allows the self a sort of escape route. The way he has set it up, the fact that the self is determined follows from our application of the concept of causality. We cannot help apply this concept, and when we do it becomes true that the self is determined.

But cannot we suggest the following: the self prior to the application of concepts to it is not determined. That is, cannot we suggest that the self independently of being thought about will not be subject to causality?

The difficulty is of course that we cannot, by those principles, have this thought at all. We cannot, by Kant's principles, think about the self as it is independently of thought. And so, by those principles we cannot after all entertain the thought that the self as it is in itself is 'free'.

By Kant's own principles we cannot think without applying concepts, and so cannot have the thought of something as it would be without those concepts applying to it.

The situation is the same as with the world as it is in itself: we can't think what 'it' might be like.

We can't have any thoughts about the self as it is in itself.

An influential tradition of later writers taking their inspiration from Kant took to their hearts the idea of the real self hidden deep inside a person, as it were, but cut the umbilical cord which had to begin with given this conception its essential nourishment. That is, they completely abandoned the Kantian principle that there was something powerfully undescribable, something radically unthinkable, about this self. Once given a kind of articulation by Kant, the noumenal self was seized on by this tradition and talked about a very great deal. In Schopenhauer it became the Will. In Hegel it is not just the human being that has an inner hidden self, but whole cultures or 'peoples', whose destiny lies in the gradual expression of their inner selves. In Marx, the inner self was the thing which was denied fulfillment by the various social frameworks which characterised human life in history, and whose fulfilment would mark History's end.

I would say it was this idea, the idea of the noumenal self, wrenched out of context and spun into decidedly unKantian elaborations, which carried his influence more than any other into the 19th Century and beyond.

FINIS

Review questions

Which of the following articulate the notion of a 'conceptual framework'?

Which best expresses Kant's view of the categories through which human beings form their experience?

Which best expresses Kant's view?

Which best expresses Kant's view

Which of these figures was influenced by Kant?

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