Transcendental arguments

A transcendental argument is a philosophical argument that starts from what a person experiences, and then deduces what must be the case for the person to have that 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]

Transcendental arguments explained

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.

Use of transcendental arguments

Transcendental arguments are often used as arguments against skepticism.

Kant

Immanuel Kant developed one of philosophy's most famous transcendental arguments in his chapter 'On the Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding' in the "Critique of Pure Reason". [Kant, Immanuel. 1998. "Critique of Pure Reason". Translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.] Kant attempted to use transcendental arguments to show that our experiences could not be as they are without the existence of, for example, time and space. [Kant, Immanuel. 1998. "Critique of Pure Reason". Translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: B118]

Criticisms of transcendental arguments

The skeptics' response

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 about the nature of the world. There are two ways that the skeptic can reject the claim that transcendental arguments give us knowledge of the world; the skeptic can object to the premise of the argument - the claim that we know about the quality of our experiences, or object to claims that we can draw conclusions about the world from the characteristics of those experiences. First, a skeptic could respond to such transcendental arguments by claiming that the arguer cannot be sure that he is having particular experiences. The claim that a person cannot be sure about the nature of his or her own experiences may initially seem bizarre. However, 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. Second, skeptics can 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, the person cannot know that the reasoning from these experiences to conclusions about the world is accurate. No matter how justifiable transcendental arguments may be, when people use them, they can still reach false conclusions.

References

ee also

*Transcendental idealism