By “universal” he means it holds for all rational creatures, and it's based on a priori structures of knowledge that are independent of experience (though they only produce knowledge when applied to experience). — Jamal
What do you take to be the a priori structures of knowledge?
This paper (https://philarchive.org/archive/MARIKT-2#:~:text=With%20epistemic%20conditions%20of%20understanding,such%2C%20bring%20about%20experiential%20knowledge.) in reference to a paper by Strawson, states it is two things: (1) the receptive faculty and (2) the active faculty. The first references space and time (which is how we receive information) and the second references how we understand the information through concepts.
So, (1) we must receive all knowledge under the constraints of space and time in order for it to be at all intelligible to us, and (2) we must then do something in our minds to create concepts from the information we receive.
#1 are the basic intututions and #2 is the transcendental unity of apperception that holds our thoughts together as thoughts.
Assuming I got all that right, my next question is whether your comment that "By 'universal' he means it holds for all rational creatures," is itself a priori true or a posteriori true, meaning must #1 and #2 logically exist for a creature to be rational or does it just happen to be the case that rational creatures on planet earth have #1 and #2 and that makes them rational, but one could be rational with other a priori structures?
I ask this because if Kant can say that these faculties we have are the only faculties that can yield rational results, then he could possibly escape idealism because he'd be saying we have that which we must have in order to have true knowledge.
I don't like that solution. It feels like Descartes' injection of God into the mix by just declaring that there's no way we'd see things in a wrong way and that the way we see things must be right.
Objectivity is not transcendent, but immanent... It might be fair to interpret Kant as establishing objectivity only by downgrading it to a feature of the subjective. — Jamal
Saying "objectivity is immanent" is tantamount to saying it is subjective isn't it? Doesn't immanent mean to be something that comes from within the perceiver?
Real objects, objects we can know, are objects in space that are given to us in perception; these phenomena are beings of sense, whereas noumena are beings merely of understanding. — Jamal
I don't follow this. What would be an example of a noumenal being of the understanding? It would not be something we could sense for sure, but what is something just in my understanding? This almost sound like Plato's forms.
I posted a long response to you on the old forum, attacking your notion of distortion and attempting to show that it was incoherent. Looking back, it might have been badly written--you never did reply--but I'd still want to make the same point. — Jamal
I'd like to think you've been checking back daily for a response for the past decade like a spurned lover only to feel the relief now of a reply.
Only a signal can be distorted. That is, only one's perception is subject to distortion. The object perceived cannot itself be distorted by its perception.* The noumenon is the concept of a purported thing beyond possible experience, and as such cannot be distorted.
That is to say, there is nothing there to be filtered or distorted. Simply to be an object of knowledge is for a thing to be known via the senses and understanding. If there is no possible disembodied, unperspectival way of apprehending a thing, then the idea of distortion has no meaning. — Jamal
Going back to the article I cited above, where it describes the information (and I don't know a better term for this because I think I'm describing the noumena) brought in through the senses that is then registered as being in space and time and then it is formed into a concept of my understanding and then I have what we call "phenomena."
Is it not correct to describe the phenomenal state as a modification of whatever that primordial mass was that that preceded the formation of the phenomena? I use modification and distortion interchangably here, unless you think that's not a fair move for some reason.