De-constructing Kant's concepts
May 15th 2007 16:55
Still on physics, here it is a little post trying to get our reason back from "meta" stuff, before you all start to think i'm crazy...
This post is also due to some comments from Adrian on the last one.
So i thought of analysing a little bit of the concept of "Concepts" that i've read (and sometimes use) from Kant's work. If you do not know it, please take a tour on this post here, or this one here, to get into the subject better.
The thing is: i need to decontruct "concepts" to validate (or not...) the usage of them.
Concepts, acording to Kant, are those things that help you categorize and imagine things, but are not the thing in itself. I mean, when you see a dog, you know it is a dog, but can you really describe it in a way that the dog would be completely defined?
I mean, one can start: dogs have tails, fur, make specific kinds of sounds, have specific kinds od behaviour, etc.
But cats and lions have also tails and fur, make specific kinds of sounds, etc. You can't say exactly which kind of sounds dogs make, even because they're quite different from dog to dog....
But when you see a dog, you know that it's one. Why? For Kant, because of the concept of dog that exists in your mind. It would be like a frame, a pattern in your mind, that checks if the "fact" you have fits or not in it.
So, how did these "concepts" of things got into your mind? By the usage of examples. (disconsidering the a priori ones, which i'll talk about later) Of "facts" that you have in your mind. These "facts" are grouped in an ensemble which defines what a dog, or a cat, are.
So, as you can read in Adrian comment, "concepts" can be considered ensembles of "facts" that, when you have a new "fact" in your mind (someone shows you the picture of a dog), you can analyse, compare and conclude that this new "fact" is similar to the "facts" that are in the ensemble dog. For the math people: it is like if these ensembles were spaces of infinte dimensional vectors, and if the new vector (fact) projected into this space is not ortogonal (or almost) to the vectors of this space, then you've found to which "concept" this vector belongs...
One can also say that "concepts" are attached to language. Clearly there are concepts referenced in your mind with language, but there are things that you know what they are, but you have no name for them. Thus these "fact ensembles that define patterns" are not obligatory linked to language. For Kant they are not even linked to "real", being defined in your mind without the need of experience (the so called syntethic a priori judgments, which, since are not based in facts, cannot be defined as an "ensemble of facts").
Getting to the root of the thing, let's see what is the "Concept" of "concepts".
Applying the same rule defined before to the thing itself: There you can see, as for the "concept" of dog, that the "concept" of ""concepts"" is nothing else then a "ensemble of facts that define a pattern". The pattern that tells you what "concepts" are.
The problem is that, since a priori judgments seem to exist (even thought they are not allways right..), the conclusion i get is that our mind works with rules (to allow a priori syntethic stuff to exist) and comparisons...
i mean, the comparisons are the process of comparing the new fact to the "ensemble" defined in your mind. A good analogy would be to compare these things to the anglo-saxon and french law systems: one is based on jurisprudence, the other on codes. One on comparisons, other on rules.
But, as for the deconstruction process of this post, i think we're finished. Possibly knowing better what they are, and what's the usage of them. Maybe one other day i'll write a post to show how this works with the "Infinite Transforms" approach i like to use, but it seems to me that noone here likes maths....
Rgs. Uula
This post is also due to some comments from Adrian on the last one.
So i thought of analysing a little bit of the concept of "Concepts" that i've read (and sometimes use) from Kant's work. If you do not know it, please take a tour on this post here, or this one here, to get into the subject better.
The thing is: i need to decontruct "concepts" to validate (or not...) the usage of them.
Concepts, acording to Kant, are those things that help you categorize and imagine things, but are not the thing in itself. I mean, when you see a dog, you know it is a dog, but can you really describe it in a way that the dog would be completely defined?
I mean, one can start: dogs have tails, fur, make specific kinds of sounds, have specific kinds od behaviour, etc.
But cats and lions have also tails and fur, make specific kinds of sounds, etc. You can't say exactly which kind of sounds dogs make, even because they're quite different from dog to dog....
But when you see a dog, you know that it's one. Why? For Kant, because of the concept of dog that exists in your mind. It would be like a frame, a pattern in your mind, that checks if the "fact" you have fits or not in it.
So, how did these "concepts" of things got into your mind? By the usage of examples. (disconsidering the a priori ones, which i'll talk about later) Of "facts" that you have in your mind. These "facts" are grouped in an ensemble which defines what a dog, or a cat, are.
So, as you can read in Adrian comment, "concepts" can be considered ensembles of "facts" that, when you have a new "fact" in your mind (someone shows you the picture of a dog), you can analyse, compare and conclude that this new "fact" is similar to the "facts" that are in the ensemble dog. For the math people: it is like if these ensembles were spaces of infinte dimensional vectors, and if the new vector (fact) projected into this space is not ortogonal (or almost) to the vectors of this space, then you've found to which "concept" this vector belongs...
One can also say that "concepts" are attached to language. Clearly there are concepts referenced in your mind with language, but there are things that you know what they are, but you have no name for them. Thus these "fact ensembles that define patterns" are not obligatory linked to language. For Kant they are not even linked to "real", being defined in your mind without the need of experience (the so called syntethic a priori judgments, which, since are not based in facts, cannot be defined as an "ensemble of facts").
Getting to the root of the thing, let's see what is the "Concept" of "concepts".
Applying the same rule defined before to the thing itself: There you can see, as for the "concept" of dog, that the "concept" of ""concepts"" is nothing else then a "ensemble of facts that define a pattern". The pattern that tells you what "concepts" are.
The problem is that, since a priori judgments seem to exist (even thought they are not allways right..), the conclusion i get is that our mind works with rules (to allow a priori syntethic stuff to exist) and comparisons...
i mean, the comparisons are the process of comparing the new fact to the "ensemble" defined in your mind. A good analogy would be to compare these things to the anglo-saxon and french law systems: one is based on jurisprudence, the other on codes. One on comparisons, other on rules.
But, as for the deconstruction process of this post, i think we're finished. Possibly knowing better what they are, and what's the usage of them. Maybe one other day i'll write a post to show how this works with the "Infinite Transforms" approach i like to use, but it seems to me that noone here likes maths....
Rgs. Uula
| 32 |
| Vote |
Subscribe to this blog
