You could not learn your left from your right if there were no difference between left and right.

So it's not just something you learn.

It may not be just something I learn, and I suspect that's so. There's a difference that makes a difference.

I wouldn't be surprised, though, if other fellow humans might have developed other ways to talk in this manner -- it's not like space suddenly got divided into quadrants after Descartes; rather, that's an idea for thinking about space (else, how did pre-Cartesians have a notion of space?)

There is supposedly a language, Guugu Ymithirr, that could only phrase things in terms of absolute directions. So "raise your right hand" might be "raise your north hand". The culture placed great emphasis on knowing which way one was facing.

I think I'm tempted to put that in the same category -- unless someone showed me which was my north hand when then... absolute or relative, I would not have known it without that showing.

Though, upon reflection, that indicates that when I learn I learn about something.

I'm not skeptical about realism: only still thinking it through, and mostly tempted by absurdism.

If I were raised by wolves, or not raised at all -- feral children come to mind for me -- then I think my beliefs about directionality would be different, even though I believe there's a non-imaginative, realist metaphysic that I don't know how to articulate.

…..people have difficulty detecting philosophical problems…. — frank

….which presupposes there is one. Well, shucks, Mr. Bill, seeing as we’re all human, of course there is one. But which one is at issue here? It certainly can’t be as simple as telling one’s left from his right hand. Left is over here, right is over there and n’er the twain shall meet. What’s the big deal?

“….his (Kant’s) basic argument in the 1768 essay is that Leibniz’s view does not enable one to distinguish between a left handed glove and a right handed glove….”

That’s the basic philosophical problem, circa1768, and I’ll wager people have difficulty detecting it, because they haven’t a clue as to what the ground of the basic philosophical problem actually was, insofar as it requires knowing what Leibniz’s view was.

Leibniz 1679 and Wolff 1716 maintained similarity and equality as necessary and sufficient conditions for the congruency of things, re: enclosable in the same limits. Pre-Critical Kant maintained similarity and equality may be necessary but are not in themselves sufficient, in that orientation is also required to entail congruent counterparts. It follows that incongruent counterparts are those entailing similarity and equality of constituent structure but of dissimilar orientation.

Dissimilar orientation: left is over here, right is over there. That’s how I tell one from the other. Which is quite an empty consolation, altogether haphazard, which highlights the REAL philosophical problem: how to get from the absolute space implied by the equality/similarity conditions for the congruency of things, to the apprehension of spatial relations in and of themselves, irrespective of things in spaces, yet serves to “prove” the implications of “Leibniz's theorem” wrong?

Anyway….Kant’s 1768 proof was itself falsified by the Möbius strip and the Klein bottle, even though he himself had given up on it by 1770’s PhD dissertation and his Critical-era 1786 Metaphysics of Natural Science, in which was deconstructed the Newtonian notion of absolute space, and with it, by extension, the Leibniz/Wolff conditions.

As my ol’ buddy Paul Harvey used to say, now you know the rrresssssst of the story.