Aristotle: there are TEN categories of understanding

>who is right?
rsbakker.wordpress.com/2013/02/08/reengineering-dennett-intentionality-and-the-curse-of-dimensionality/

"Take memory research as a case in point. In the Theaetetus, Plato famously characterized memory as an aviary, a general store from which different birds, memories, could be correctly or incorrectly retrieved. It wasn’t until the late 19th century, when Hermann Ebbinghaus began tracking his own recall over time in various conditions, that memory became the object of scientific investigation. From there the story is one of greater and greater complication. William James, of course, distinguished between short and long term memory. Skill memory was distinguished from long term memory, which Endel Tulving famously decomposed into episodic and semantic memory. Skill memory, meanwhile, was recognized as one of several forms of nondeclarative or implicit memory, including classical conditioning, non-associative learning, and priming, which would itself be decomposed into perceptual and conceptual forms. As Plato’s grand aviary found itself progressively more subdivided, researchers began to question whether memory was actually a discrete system or rather part and parcel of some larger cognitive network, and thus not the distinct mental activity assumed by the tradition. Other researchers, meanwhile, took aim at the ‘retrieval assumption,’ the notion that memory is primarily veridical, adducing evidence that declarative memory is often constructive, more an attempt to convincingly answer a memory query than to reconstruct ‘what actually happened.’

The moral of this story is as simple as it should be sobering: the ‘memory’ arising out of casual introspection (monolithic and veridical) and the memory arising out of the scientific research (fractionate and confabulatory) are at drastic odds, to the point where some researchers suggest the term ‘memory’ is itself deceptive. Memory, like so many other cognitive capacities, seems to be a complex of specialized capacities arising out of *non-epistemic* and epistemic evolutionary pressures. But if this is the case, one might reasonably wonder *how Plato could have gotten things so wrong*. Well, obviously the information available to metacognition (in its ancient Greek incarnation) falls far short the information required to accurately model memory. But why would this be? Well, apparently forming accurate metacognitive models of memory was not something our ancestors needed to survive and reproduce."

Interesting quote about memory but utterly irrelevant to the discussion of categories. I get the subtext you're reaching for but:
>not an argument.

There's only 1 category of underatanding. The percentage amount to which you understand (0-100‰).

Kant believed that the understanding makes judgements, and nothing beyond that. Consequently, by enumerating all the ways we can make judgements, we exhaustively characterize the understanding. Each way we can make judgements (there are 12) has a concept associated with it, for in order for us to make judgements we must have concepts to make judgements with. These are the 12 categories.

There is only one category, if it is or if it ain't. Time is merely things shifting from being to non-being, from is to ain't and back again. Space is comprised of height, depth, and width all of which are just different variations of is or ain't - something either is at these coordinates or it ain't.
As a side note, I know what your thinking: yes, a lot like a digital computer.
All things are a specific arrangement of things that is and ain't. The universe is a shifting arrangement of where there is energy and where there ain't. Those combinations make all things and all phenomena. All events, all causality is simply complex arrangements of is and ain't. Kant and Aristotle's categories are just describing the ways these things can be fit together.
If you still don't get it, think of this LCD screen you're likley reading this off now. The image is comprised of tiny little pixels, probably in groups of three - Red, Blue, Green. Each of these letters are comprised of where there is light and where there isn't, the different combinations cause recognizable shapes of letters. Those letters in different combinations form words, words sentences, sentences posts. But the same principle applies to books. To atoms, to molecules, to amino acids, to cells, to humans and all animals.
But yes, this is why some people believe that reality is not just any illusion, but specifically a computer simulation, because it is possible if the universe is comprised of only one fundamental category: is and ain't. Then the entire universe can be represented in binary, which theoretically means it could be the current state of a computer simulation.
I believe that ain't the case.

>judgements
What is a 'judgement' in Kantian terminology? And what is 'understanding' and 'concept' too? I know never to trust vernacular definitions, especially when there's so many shitty translations choosing words with the wrong connotations about.

>Judgement
Propositions relating a subject to a predicate concept. There are 4 ways to classify them, in terms of quantity, quality, relation, and modality (not its currrent usage), and 3 kinds of each, for a total 12.
>Understanding
A faculty of the mind, which makes judgements.
>Concepts
Mediate representations of objects. It should be noted that these are not objective objects, but rather objects in the sense that they can be brought under concepts and thus recognized as objects.

I think I got what a judgement is. But the definition of Understanding feels a bit tautological... because >Kant believed that the understanding makes judgements
So what _is_ "the understanding" especially since it is characterized by judgements?
And concept... like I'm totally lost. What the heck is an object? And no don't say "it's something apprehended by a subject", because then I'll have to ask "what is a subject" and you'll say "a entity that apprehends objects".
>but rather objects in the sense that they can be brought under concepts and thus recognized as objects.
But what _is_ a concept.
Why do all these definitions turn into a Escher painting or feel like dealing with government bureaucracy?

>So what _is_ "the understanding" especially since it is characterized by judgements?
rsbakker.wordpress.com/2014/05/12/the-metacritique-of-reason/

"the Intentionalist thinks they can overcome neglect via intuition and intellection, that theoretical metacognition (philosophical reflection), once alerted to the existence of the transcendental, suddenly somehow possesses the resources to accurately describe its structure and function. The Eliminativist, on the other hand, asks, ‘What resources?’ Lay them out! Convince me! And more corrosively still, ‘How do you know you’re not still blinkered by neglect?’ Show me the precautions!

The Eliminativist, in other words, pulls a Kant on Kant and demands what amounts to a metacritique of reason.

The fact is, short of this accounting of metacognitive resources and precautions, the Intentionalist has no way of knowing whether or not they’re simply a ‘Stage-Two Dogmatist,’ whether their ‘clarity,’ like the specious clarity of the Dogmatist, isn’t simply the product of neglect—a kind of metacognitive illusion in effect. For the Eliminativist, the transcendental (whatever its guise) is a metacognitive artifact. For them, the obvious problems the Intentionalist faces—the supernaturalism of their posits, the underdetermination of their theories, the lack of decisive practical applications—are all symptomatic of inquiry gone wrong. Moreover, they find it difficult to understand why the Intentionalist would persist in the face of such problems given only a misplaced faith in their metacognitive intuitions—especially when the sciences of the brain are in the process of discovering the actual constitutive activity responsible! You want to know what’s really going on ‘implicitly,’ ask a cognitive neuroscientist. We’re just toying with our heuristics out of school otherwise."

>Intentionalist
>Eliminativist
> ‘Stage-Two Dogmatist,’
Hell no. Explain it in plain English, don't hide behind these snooty words.
I asked what is a concept, what is the understanding. Now you're explaining these words by introducing even more esoteric words. That's not explaining, that's obscuring.
What is a Kantian concept?
What is "the Understanding" to Kant?
Explain them in plain English. Use your own definitions if you have to.

>Why does Kant not make sense
Because he is a terrible writer. Top Kant scholars disagree on what he is trying to in the Deduction.
>What is the understanding
In Kant's words, not mine, it is the faculty of judgment. Faculty might best be understood in terms of cognitive psychology, where different functions of the mind are compartmentalized, as in long term memory, working memory, executive control etc. For Kant, there are two main faculties, sensation, which is a purely receptive faculty that takes in external stimuli and presents it as intuitions, and understanding, which is responsible for cognition. Cognition is defined as thought united with a concept. This is a judgment though, either in judging intuitions to be under a concept, or in a subject-predicate relation between concepts.
>What is an object
This is difficult to answer because we do not have access to objects in the sense of things truly external to us (noumena). Objects, as Kant generally uses the term, are in our minds, and what concepts relate to and intuitions refer to. An example: I see a chair, the intuition is the manifold of sense data, the concept is the abstract chair, the object is the chair as I perceive it, presumably a being.
>What is a concept
Hopefully the preceding discussion clarified this. They are what in other philosophies would be abstract universals, but are not universal in that they are entirely subjective.

>I asked what is a concept
You have been replied, that you don't possess a toolkit to ask these questions. 'Concept' is a spook, which your brain uses to work around its own inability to get access to its neural processes.

You can say "I know", but cannot provide a theoretical explanation, only pinpoint examples.
You can say "apples are red", but good luck trying to explain that to the blind.

rsbakker.wordpress.com/2013/03/11/the-ptolemaic-restoration-object-oriented-whatevery-and-kants-copernican-revolution/
"If it is the case that the sciences more or less monopolize theoretical cognition, then the most *reasonable* way for reason to critique reason is via the sciences. The problem confronting Kant, however, was nothing less than the problem confronting all inquiries into cognition until very recently: the technical and theoretical intractability of the brain. So Kant was forced to rely on theoretical reason absent the methodologies of natural science. In other words, he was forced to conceive critique as *more philosophy*, and this presumably, is why his project ultimately failed.
The best Kant could do was draw some kind of moral from the sciences, a ‘procedural analogy’ as he puts it."

So 'chair' can be a concept? In the same way that 'Semi-Trailer' or 'Doctor' might be concepts? How do they differ from Aristotelian substances?
>For Kant, there are two main faculties, sensation, which is a purely receptive faculty that takes in external stimuli and presents it as intuitions, and understanding, which is responsible for cognition.
Ahh yeah I get that. Thanks! The Understanding might be equated with 'processing' that external stimuli right? That's where sensation becomes 'thinking'?
>Cognition is defined as thought united with a concept.
Ooh okay, now what distinguishes a concept from a thought? Colloquially they often are interchangeable, and again, I know that you can't trust the colloquial understands of words when discussing philosophy, let alone translations of words used by German Idealists.
>An example: I see a chair, the intuition is the manifold of sense data, the concept is the abstract chair, the object is the chair as I perceive it, presumably a being.
Is an 'object' then is a specific instance of an abstract concept? That is currently being 'held' by the Understanding? If I see a Staff of Asclepius on the side of a building, is the connotation of "doctor/health" a object? Or is only the visual image of that Staff, and recognizing it from the light that bounces into my eye as this snake and a staff the object? Is the connotation of that symbol a 'concept' not an 'object'?

>'Concept' is a spook
Fascinating concept, this "spook" you mention. Care to EXTRAPOLATE?

>Care to EXTRAPOLATE?
See some fucking animals on the cave-wall? Why does your brain triggers as if sees the animals, if there are just curves made of shit and piss?

Type I False Positive Error is vital for your survival. What you model is not what actually is.

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>Type I False Positive Error
>model
>actually is.
That is a lot of spooks user. Time to be quiet.

>How do concepts differ from substances
Concepts are entirely in the brain. Say you see a chair. Your optical nerves dont see a chair though, they are individually activated. You preprocess this raw data in sensation with space and time, so you have a manifold of data in time and space. Through some other processes, this is given to the understanding as a representation of a chair, but you, as consciousness, do not know it is a chair. This can only be done when you unite what you perceive with an existing concept, the chair. The concept is learned through experience btw, as another process.
>Is an object a specific instance
Not really. When we have intuitions we dont have intuitions of a noumena - we have intuitions that we are being affected by something. We can represent this something as an object. When we have concepts, they arent concepts of the sets of intuitions, they are concepts of the object. This object is purely phenomenal though.

>You have been replied, that you don't possess a toolkit to ask these questions.
They're simple semantic questions, your failure to answer them in plain English either means you don't understand Kant as well as you profess to
>'Concept' is a spook, which your brain uses to work around its own inability to get access to its neural processes.
What does it mean in the context of Kant, I don't need your second hand editorializing by linking to some bozo, I just want to know what a 'concept' is when discussing Kant so I can understand the distinction between a 'Judgement' and a 'Category' in Kantian terminology. A nominative quest like this is not nearly as hard to accomplish as you pretend to make it. And you lack of penetration into Kant is obvious.

>That is a lot of spooks
It is. Problems?

"For us, the falsity of a judgment is still no objection to that judgment —that’s where our new way of speaking sounds perhaps most strange. The question is the extent to which it makes demands on life, sustains life, maintains the species, perhaps even creates species. And as a matter of principle we are ready to assert that the falsest judgments (to which a priori synthetic judgments belong) are the most indispensable to us, that without our allowing logical fictions to count, without a way of measuring reality against the purely invented world of the unconditional and self-identical, without a constant falsification of the world through numbers, human beings could not live" (Nietzsche, "Beyond Good and Evil", #4)

Chad response is that there's actually zero categories of understanding.

More spooks. Quietism please.

This makes sense. It is difficult to talk about Kant without making reference to what has later been discovered about cognition. While the analytic is more rewarding, Ive begun to think that the dialectic makes the bigger controbution to modern discourse.

If anyone understood anything we wouldn't have philosophy at all.

lol. why is Peirce more necessary than Aristotle?

>You preprocess this raw data in sensation with space and time, so you have a manifold of data in time and space
Yep I get that.
>Through some other processes, this is given to the understanding as a representation of a chair,
Yep I get that too. The light that hits your eye, the neuronal impulses down the optic nerve do not make the understanding of there being a chair in the room make. With you so far.
> but you, as consciousness, do not know it is a chair.
Bit lost here.
>This can only be done when you unite what you perceive with an existing concept, the chair. The concept is learned through experience btw, as another process.
I think I get this: in the same way that I can't read Chinese, I receive the raw data of the characters, but it would only be through prior experience of learning what those symbols mean that I could understand those characters.
Or how some people can distinguish between what different guitar distortion pedals were used. The raw data is the assume, but the prior experience like learning a 'concept' allows you to understand it as such.
>We can represent this something as an object. When we have concepts, they arent concepts of the sets of intuitions, they are concepts of the object. This object is purely phenomenal though.
Hmmm okay bit lost here. What might be an example of a object and it's accompanying concept? Or better yet, two objects and one concept?

Pseud

>presents another spook
Go survive and be quiet, and enjoy (spook) babby's first vitalist-reading-of-epistemology.

Kant thinks we are given a manifold of sense data ordered in space, and are able to delineate objects in it without identifying the objects. In the understanding, the identification occurs. This isnt a wild idea either, thereve been studies that show that our eyes linger on meaningful things from a cursory glance without being able to recall them after.

>objects
We can intuit something and intuit something later. We have different sense data. Yet, we represent this as the same object. This object is not an objective reality but it is our reality. An example is the chair, its accompanying concept the concept of the chair. If this is still difficult, look at the SEP page for phenomenology

I just want to thank you for persevering with me through this. I think we're nearly there.
>This object is not an objective reality but it is our reality. An example is the chair, its accompanying concept the concept of the chair.
Funnily enough that whole part I understand, that the representation in the mind or even the sensory data is not the thing that is supposedly 'out there' in objective reality. That's like pretty well understood.
I just don't understand the terminology of what is or isn't an "object" and what distinguishes an "object" from a "concept" in Kantian terminology. It's the specific words I have difficulty with, not the overarching ideas.
That 'identifying' something isn't instantaneous and not an necessary part of delineating what you're calling "objects" sure. I get that. It seems pretty obvious, like when you 'catch something in the corner of your eye' - you haven't recognized or identified what the thing is, but you've already been attracted to some raw data that possesses certain attributes: like a quick movement, or a unusual color saturation. What it actually is, it could be a predatory animal, a beautiful woman, a fast moving car, the sun reflecting off some tinsel is not identified at the same time as delineation. Got that. Yup.
But what is a 'concept' and how does it differ from an 'object'

Concepts are mediate representations of objects. They are mediated by the understanding.

...and what is an object again? Is the 'object' the raw data of the chair before you recognize it as a chair? But obviously not the physical tangible chair which by touch, sight, or taste you might receive some external raw data? But that raw data before it reaches the Understanding, yeah?
>>Is there something really obvious that I'm missing here?

>Well, apparently forming accurate metacognitive models of memory was not something our ancestors needed to survive and reproduce."
There was no need for "accurate" metacognitive models of memory because the memories of our ancestors were stronger. e.g. memory palace techniques

Tried to augment this thread with some reading, and this is what I got so far:
>Categories - the 12 ways in which the Understanding can make a Judgement, each one is associated with a Concept, the categories are Unity, Plurality, Totality, Reality, Negation, Limitation, Inherance and Subsistence, Causality and Dependence, Community, Possibility, Existence, and Necessity
>Cognition - the conscious representation of an Object
>Concept - the output of the Understanding, mediate representation of an object.. A function. "Predicates of possible judgements"..."the unity of the act through which different representations are ordered under a common one." Space may be a concept
>Object - ? ? ? ?
>Judgement - propositions relating a subject to a predicate concept, they can be classified in four ways: Quantity, Quality, Relation, or Modality. Each Judgement is linked to three Categories: Quantity is related to Unity, Plurality, and Totality, and so on...
>Subject - ?
>The Sensation - the mental faculty that takes in Intuition but doesn't identify or delineate objects
>intuition - the im-ediate representation of an object, output of Sensation as the Concept is to the Understanding, it is the raw data like sight and smell etc. Confusingly - time and space may be intuitions
>The Understanding - the mental faculty or the "faculty of cognitions" that is NOT the Sensation, it is responsible mediating objects, for thought united with a concept, it makes Judgements. "This consists in the determinate relation of given representation to an object."
But what _is_ an object?

>language used to describe Substances.
Substance is one of the categories retard

Not a contradiction of anything I said.
Hint: Retard is you.

the pepe poster gets it. as usual.

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What are the best categories for delineating categories in a way that always best suits the intended purpose?

>Suitable
>Unsuitable

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>Aristotle invented the categories to describe one of the categories
Yes, you are the retard.

The first category is the Secondary Substance, not the first. You'd know that if you read Aristotle. Also 9 is bigger than 1, so even if you're retarded enough to conflate the Primary and Secondary Substance, there'd still be 8 other categories to describe them.
>>Aristotle invented the categories to describe one of the categories
Yes. Because Substances predicate other Substances. Again, if you read Aristotle you'd know this.

There’s actually 7

Not that Peirce is more necessary. That the 12 categories are not necessary to build a system of logic and from this metaphysics. Aristotle may end at a similar conclusion but by a different mean.

Aristotle was more intelligent and had more to say than all American philosophers together

Me. I'm right.

There is only one category: being me. Everyone else is wrong about everything.

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based

There is only one: psychosis

But I mean if you dont understand then you have to know on some level you dont understand. Knowing nothing is knowing something. And that's how you enter the mental masturbation trap of philosophy.

There are but two categories for this:
>Primarily Purposeful
>Secondarily Purposeful
Anything which isn't Primarily Purposeful is Secondarily Purposeful, and between those two Categories is included all possible Objects, Events, and Relationships or Web of Relationships between Objects and Events. Of course anything can be Secondarily Purposeful, even things which appear at first to be self-defeating or undermine things which are categorically Primarily Purposeful (i.e. walking in the opposite direction to your destination - but the earth is a sphere, or you simply walk the long way around a city block). Which is why Secondarily Purposeful is, like Aristotle's category of Quality admits variations of degree.
The Categories are Objective, they do not admit the perception or expectation of Purposefulness, for example if you walk down a path which seems a direct route to your destination but is actually blocked - then despite it's appearance of being Primarily Purposeful, it is Secondarily Purposeful.
Conversely if you are looking in the back of your couch for a 20 dollar note you lost and find a 100 dollar note you lost previously, this may be considered Primarily Purposeful since you found more money than you were seeking to retrieve.
Expectations have no bearing on which category it belongs to.
However the intent is reached is irrelevant, only whether it is.
>"What about necessary intents?"
Yes, the categories can be predicated by other categories. So if you want to make a Chicken Parmigiana then obviously it is Primarily Purposeful for you to make a sauce. It is also Primarily Purposeful to pre-heat the oven. A trip to the Grocery store to buy the tomatoes or tomato paste, the onions or whatever you'll use for the Sauce is obviously necessary to make the sauce: these are Primarily Purposeful of making the sauce which is a predicate of making the Chicken Parmigiana.
Indeed, without getting too Hegelian, you could see the making of the Chicken Parmigiana of a long chain of purposefulness that began at the creation of the Universe.

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To know that I do not know I need to know that I know not and in knowing I know not I then I know.
But if I think I know that I know when I know not then I simply do not know, because if I know I would know that I know not.

I would say everything that is a concept (meaning it exists, in some form) is either abstraction or concentration. it either exists as a concept or it exists outside human experience.

Uhm, sweetie... there's like 100 then