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.

Dissimilar orientation: left is over here, right is over there. That’s how I tell one from the other. — Mww

Are you laying something like an x-y axis over your visual field?

Apparently, Kant had long been interested in incongruous counterparts. Prior to his "critical turn," Kant had used a similar argument to support the Newtonian view of "absolute space" against Leibniz view of space as essentially relational.

Understanding Leibniz' view is helpful for understanding where Kant is coming from here. Given Section 12 of the Prolegomena, Kant seems to be thinking of geometry in these rationalist terms, at least in terms of the "pure understanding." Chriality, "handedness," does not seem to show up in these terms, which look only at the points and their distance from one another. Hence, chirality must have to do with how the mind "represents" things rather than how things are.

Personally, I am not convinced by this argument. I have either misunderstood it, or perhaps it makes more sense in the context of how people though about mathematics at the time. The fact that the letter "q" can be rigidly rotated to become congruous with a "b" (at least in simple fonts) is a property of that shape itself. Kant seems to agree with this because he doesn't put forth rotational asymmetry as an example here, which would be a far more simple example, but instead points to chirality in particular.

However, the fact that you can flip a "q" or "b" over a mirror line (i.e. reflection) and that the resulting shape will not be congruent with the original shapes through rigid rotation also seems to be a property of that shape. That is, just from the shape, taken alone, you can tell if it has chiral asymmetry, just as you can tell just from a shape alone if it has rotational symmetry or not (e.g. a circle looks the same regardless of how rotate it, and this a property of that shape). I am not sure if Kant thinks relations involving reflection are different from those involving rotation, such that reflection does not relate to the "in-itself" of shapes?

There certainly is a sense in which a mind must be present to determine which shape (or spin) will be considered "left" or "right," but it seems to me that the asymmetry is already always there, implied by the relations between the points that make up the shape themselves.

Anyhow, this little example has spawned a lot of literature, some of which gets very into the weeds (e.g. discussing how a disembodied hand must be made of subatomic particles, which themselves have chiral asymmetry), and is a pretty interesting topic. You can also imagine a very similar argument based on rotational asymmetry. For example, we can't imagine a "t" that isn't right-side up, upside-down, or on its side. It's orientation cannot be determined from the points that make it up alone. However, this seems to reduce to the triviality that nothing is observable without an observed, not that chirality must be a sui generis product of the mind.

Also, the insight that a mind is needed to actualize space and time doesn't require a view like Kant's. For a t to be oriented up or down, or on either side, requires some observation points/observe. But this is consistent with something like saying Aristotle's view:

It has to come as a surprise to the new student of Aristotle to learn that time and space for Aristotle exist in nature only fundamentally. Formally and actually time and space exist as the action of thought completes nature by creating in memory a series or network of relations which constitute the experience of time and space. Thus the “continuum of space and time” belongs neither to the order of being as it exists independently of the human mind nor to the order of what exists only as a consequence of human thinking, but exists rather objectively as one of the most intimate comminglings of mind and nature in the constitution of experience.

Let us begin with time, that ever mysterious “entity” in which we live out our lives. What is time? How does time exist? According to Aristotle, apart from any finite mind, there is in nature only motion and change and the finite endurance of individuals sustained by their various interactions, as we shortly consider in more detail.

Enter mind or consciousness. Now some object changes its position or “moves in space”, and the mind remembers where the local motion began, sees the course of the movement, and notes where it terminates: the rabbit, for example, came out of that hole and ran behind that tree, where it is “now” hidden. The motion was not a “thing”; the rabbit is the “thing”. The motion exists nowhere apart from the rabbit’s actions – nowhere, that is, except in the memory of the perceiver which preserves as a continuous whole the transitory movement of the rabbit from its hole (the “before”) to the tree (the “after”).

John Deely - Four Ages of Understanding

The problem I see is that the conclusion Kant draws from this example is completely unwarranted. Chirality is a property of shapes. So is rotational symmetry. This is true even on the Leibnizian view of geometry. The role of the mind vis-á-vis perspective doesn't entail that space and time do not exist fundamentally in nature qua nature. Indeed, if nature is "mobile being," time must exist in it fundamentally as the dimension across which change occurs.

The problem I see is that the conclusion Kant draws from this example is completely unwarranted. Chirality is a property of shapes. So is rotational symmetry. This is true even on the Leibnizian view of geometry. The role of the mind vis-á-vis perspective doesn't entail that space and time do not exist fundamentally in nature qua nature. Indeed, if nature is "mobile being," time must exist in it fundamentally as the dimension across which change occurs — Count Timothy von Icarus

Where do we get the idea that there can be a difference in degree that is not accompanied by a change in kind? Do we get this idea from nature or do we impose it on nature? This is key , because the concept of time as motion depends on the concept of changes in degree of spatial displacement of a quality that remains constant in its sense over the course of the movement. If this only appears to be the case as the result of an an abstractive act on the part of the mind, this doesn’t necessarily mean that a mind is necessary for the actualization of space and time. It means that agency is necessary, and that material configurations function to ‘subjectively’ orient time and space in relation to a point of view, much the same as minds do. Agency doesn’t mean material configuration is sentient, it means it situates time and space according to changing configurations of relevance.

Time has a history. Hence it doesn't make sense to construe time as a succession of evenly spaced moments or as an external parameter that tracks the motion of matter in some preexisting space. Intra-actions are temporal not in the sense that the values of particular properties change in time; rather, which property comes to matter is re(con)figured in the very making/marking of time. Similarly, space is not a collection of preexisting points set out in a fixed geometry, a container, as it were, for matter to inhabit. (Karen Barad)

Dissimilar orientation: left is over here, right is over there. That’s how I tell one from the other.
— Mww

Are you laying something like an x-y axis over your visual field? — frank

From a non-philosophical perspective, I suppose something like that suffices. For any plurality of things, there is a necessary spatial relation inhering in all of them amongst themselves (the x-y axis notion), which is irrelevant with respect to a single thing, even though all quantitative conditions whatsoever, including singulars, necessarily relate to that which observes them (the visual field notion).

But you’re asking how do we tell left from right, in conjunction with an overlooked philosophical problem. That problem has nothing to do with reference frames represented by x-y coordinates in visual fields, which is merely a constructed explanatory device to enable us to tell left from right, but says nothing at all about what Kant 1768 calls “the inner ground”, re: the presupposition that
apprehension of relative spatial distinctions is given as intrinsic to human intelligence and is necessarily antecedent to the conceptual representation used to distinguish congruent or incongruent things.

But it is pretty clear this sort of philosophical problem doesn’t have much bearing on life in general, especially nowadays, when all the aforementioned philosophical proofs/claims/argumnts are laid waste.

If you’re interested, see https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rogerio-Severo/publication/229153077_Three_Remarks_on_the_Interpretation_of_Kant_on_Incongruent_Counterparts/links/0912f5100284fc9f99000000/Three-Remarks-on-the-Interpretation-of-Kant-on-Incongruent-Counterparts.pdf

But you’re asking how do we tell left from right, in conjunction with an overlooked philosophical problem — Mww

Actually, I was looking for a discussion in which people explored the question for themselves. I first came across the issue in a book about jewelry design of all things. That led me to ponder it on my own. I take it the issue bores you.

I take it the issue bores you. — frank

How I tell left from right kinda does, but looking into the philosophical problem of what it means to be left or right, or the origin of the conceptions themselves, is interesting enough.