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A transcendental argument is a deductive philosophical argument which takes a manifest feature of experience as granted, and articulates what must be the case so that such experiences are possible.Transcendental-arguments and Scepticism; Answering the Question of Justification (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 2000), pp 3-6.Strawson, P., Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) Premise-10. Transcendental arguments may have additional standards of justification that are more demanding than those of traditional deductive arguments.


The arguments

Typically, a transcendental argument starts from some accepted aspect of experience, and then deduces what must be true for that type of experience to be possible. Transcendental arguments are often used as arguments against skepticism, usually about the reality of the external world or other minds. So-called ''progressive'' transcendental arguments begin with an apparently indubitable and universally accepted statement about people's experiences of the world, and use this to make substantive knowledge-claims about the world, e.g., that it ''is'' causally and spatiotemporally related. They start with what is left at the ''end'' of the skeptic's process of doubting. ''Regressive'' transcendental arguments, on the other hand, ''begin at the same point'' as the skeptic, e.g., the fact that we have experience of a causal and spatiotemporal world, and show that certain notions are implicit in our conceptions of such experience. Regressive transcendental arguments are more conservative in that they do not purport to make substantive ontological claims about the world. An example is used by Kant in his refutation of
idealism In philosophy, the term idealism identifies and describes metaphysical perspectives which assert that reality is indistinguishable and inseparable from perception and understanding; that reality is a mental construct closely connected to ...
. Idealists believe that the experience of objects independent of our mind is not legitimate. Briefly, Kant shows that *since idealists acknowledge that we have an inner mental life, and *an inner life of self-awareness is bound up with the concepts of objects which are not inner, and which interact causally, *then we must have legitimate experience of outer objects which interact causally. He has not established that outer objects exist, but only that the concept of them is legitimate, contrary to idealism. Not all use of transcendental arguments are intended to counter skepticism, however. The Dutch philosopher
Herman Dooyeweerd Herman Dooyeweerd (7 October 1894, Amsterdam – 12 February 1977, Amsterdam) was a professor of law and jurisprudence at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam from 1926 to 1965. He was also a philosopher and principal founder of Reformational phil ...
used transcendental critique to establish the conditions that make a theoretical attitude of thought (not just the process of thinking, as in Kant) possible. In particular, he showed that theoretical thought cannot be neutral, rather, must be based on presuppositions that are "religious" in nature (in the sense of pre-theoretical commitment).


Kant

It was
Immanuel Kant Immanuel Kant (, , ; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and ...
who gave transcendental arguments their name and notoriety. It is open to controversy, though, whether his own transcendental arguments should be classified as progressive or regressive. In the '' Critique of Pure Reason'' (1781) Kant developed one of philosophy's most famous transcendental arguments in 'The Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding'. In the 'Transcendental Aesthetic', Kant used transcendental arguments to show that sensory experiences would not be possible if we did not impose their spatial and temporal forms on them, making space and time "conditions of the possibility of experience".


Criticisms of transcendental arguments

As stated above, one of the main uses of transcendental arguments is to use one thing we can know, the nature of our experiences, to counter skeptics' arguments that we cannot ''know'' something or other about the nature of the world. One need not be a skeptic about those matters, however, to find transcendental arguments unpersuasive. There are a number of ways that one might deny that a given transcendental argument gives us knowledge of the world. The following responses may suit some versions and not others. *First, critics respond by claiming that the arguer cannot be sure that he or she is having particular experiences. That a person cannot be sure about the nature of his or her own experiences may initially seem bizarre. However, it may be claimed that the very act of thinking about or, even more, describing our experiences in words, involves interpreting them in ways that go beyond so-called 'pure' experience. Baggini, Julian and Peter S. Fosl. 2003. '2.10 Transcendental arguments'. In ''The Philosopher's Toolkit: A compendium of philosophical concepts and methods''. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing *Second, skeptics object to the use of transcendental arguments to draw conclusions about the nature of the world by claiming that even if a person ''does'' know the nature of his or her experiences, that person cannot know that the reasoning from these experiences to conclusions about the world is accurate. *Lastly, critics have debated whether showing that we must think of the world in a certain way, given certain features of experience, is tantamount to showing that the world answers to that conception. Perhaps transcendental arguments show only necessities of our cognitive apparatus rather than realities of the world apart from us. This objection may amount to throwing doubt on whether transcendental arguments are ever more than merely "regressive".
A. C. Grayling Anthony Clifford Grayling (; born 3 April 1949) is a British philosopher and author. He was born in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) and spent most of his childhood there and in Nyasaland (now Malawi). In 2011 he founded and became the first M ...
, "Transcendental Arguments" in ''The Blackwell Companion to Epistemology'', Jonathan Dancy and Ernest Sosa, eds (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992) .


See also

*
Transcendental idealism Transcendental idealism is a philosophical system founded by German philosopher Immanuel Kant in the 18th century. Kant's epistemological program is found throughout his '' Critique of Pure Reason'' (1781). By ''transcendental'' (a term that dese ...
* P.F. Strawson *
John McDowell John Henry McDowell, FBA (born 7 March 1942) is a South African philosopher, formerly a fellow of University College, Oxford, and now university professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Although he has written on metaphysics, epistemolo ...
*
Wilfrid Sellars Wilfrid Stalker Sellars (May 20, 1912 – July 2, 1989) was an American philosopher and prominent developer of critical realism, who "revolutionized both the content and the method of philosophy in the United States". Life and career His father ...


References


Bibliography

*Brueckner, Anthony. " Transcendental Arguments I". ''Nous'' 17 (4): 551-575. and "Transcendental Arguments II". ''Nous'' 18 (2): 197-225. * Stapleford, Scott Kant's Transcendental Arguments: Disciplining Pure Reason - Continuum Publishing 2008 ( - hb) * Stern, Robert, ed.''Transcendental Arguments: Problems and Prospect''. Oxford: Clarendon. * Stroud, Barry. "Transcendental Arguments". ''Journal of Philosophy'' 65 (1968) 241-56. * Taylor, Charles. "The Validity of Transcendental Arguments". Reprinted in ''Philosophical Arguments''. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955.


External links

* * * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Transcendental Arguments Philosophical arguments Deductive reasoning Philosophical methodology German idealism