Tonight is the night in which we should better start discussing epistemic and metaphysical modality, but Rome was not built in a day my friends, especially if you aren't on a familiar ground, especially if curiosity, much to my delight, is effectively pushing you to navigate this major matter for the first time in your life.
"Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people."
- Eleanor Roosevelt -
Mathematicians or not, every decision we make, every sentence we form, every thought we have and every theorem we prove, yields the following: they are not in fact popping out of nowhere! Isn’t it? Somebody has fixed the rules of the game, somebody has pinned out there a list of axioms to follow in order to draw a conclusion. Well, they have establish a formal system allowing us to deal with what is possible and what must be, i.e. is necessary.
And "Yes!“ - Genau so: That's all a modal logic is. Was not that difficult at the end, no? You are indeed making use of a wide variety of them everyday, just no one has told you about them. Ops!
I promised though, what is a judgement?
Denken (s. d.) ist wesentlich Urteilen, und dieses ist die Verknüpfung von Vorstellungsinhalten zur Einheit des (logischen) Bewußtseins. Ein Urteil ist (rein verstandesmäßig) nichts anderes als "die Art, gegebene Erkenntnisse zur objektiven Einheit der Apperzeption zu bringen".
- Eisler -
[Thinking is essentially judging, and this is the connection of the contents of ideas to form the unity of (logical) consciousness. A judgment is (purely intellectually) nothing else than "the way of bringing given cognitions to the objective unity of apperception".]
Now, da ich klar Schiff gemacht habe, we can move forward.
Last time, we were dealing with categories, but Aristotle-styled. There was another prominent philosopher using them, Ladies and Gentlemen: Immanuel Kant.
He came up with the following first idea: let us have two modalities, one for the formal truth, called judgmental and one for existence, called categorical. Fair and square enough, the former is the modality of thinking, i.e. of connecting representations, therefore is not objective - one can think whatever, roughly. The latter, by contrast, connects a concept with its object, it is trascendental, it is real! Is not just logical!
(Notice that philosophy has an extremely precise language, one has always to double-check the semantics before jotting down things. You will get used to it, do not worry!)
Despite this nice twofold classification, expect the unexpected: There is a third truth, the material truth, where both judgmental and categorical modalities apply, as we consider also the existence of the object, whereas in the formal one we just make a statement on the object.
Table of judgments and categories:
​ | Judgments | Categories |
Quantity | universal | unity |
​ | particular | plurality |
​ | singular | totality |
Quality | affirmative | reality |
​ | negative | negation |
​ | infinite | limitation |
Relation | categorical | inherence and subsistence |
​ | hypothetical | causality and dependence |
​ | disjunctive | community |
Modality | problematic | possibility-impossibility |
​ | assertoric | existence- non existence |
​ | apodictic | necessity-contingency |
In conclusion, to summarise the former discussion and give a meaning to the labour you just put into the understanding – not easy at first glance, I can totally relate - of my post tonight, here you are the final definitely easy question:
How we gain knowledge?
Well, according to Kant, from the intuitions, concepts (classes of them by similarities) are synthesised by means of categorical modality, and then from concepts, following the rules of judgmental modality, judgements are made.
For the next time: Do you think any judgement is a good one? Is any statement viable? Take your time ...
See you next week!
Federica
P.S. Tomorrow we celebrate World Philosophy Day 2022!
References:
Eisler, R., Kant - Lexikon, Urteil, available at: https://www.textlog.de/32723.html;
Kannisto T., Modality and Metaphysics in Kant, DOI: 10.1515/9783110246490.1469.
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