On Kant's Synthetic A Priori

 

I haven’t done a philosophy post for a while, so let’s rectify that with a blog about Kant’s synthetic a priori. To start us off, here’s a useful reminder of my summary of epistemology in 400 words.

Make any statement about reality and it will be incomplete in some way. If it is a statement that you can prove with logic or mathematics then it falls short of describing anything conclusive about any reality outside of mathematics or logic; if it is a statement about physical reality then it falls short of anything that can be conclusively proven to apply in all cases (in the black swan sense); if it is a statement of fact then it cannot be established by logic or by reason prior to initial experience; if it is a logical proposition then its subject/predicate content must be verified outside of the proposition; if it is an allusion to an inner concept then it is not knowledge (justified true belief) of the perceivable world; if it is an allusion to an inner perception of outside reality then it escapes your certainty; and if it is a statement about a metaphysical interpretation then in its proprietary form it is entirely subjective.

Everything is derived from experience (this is the basis of Hume’s fork – everything is classified as either Relations of ideas and Matters of fact), but in distinct ways: a priori is knowable without having to consult experience, except initially to understand the terms (“all bachelors are male”); a posteriori is only knowable by consulting experience (“London has a higher population than Birmingham”); analytic statements (A is A) are true by virtue of the meaning of the terms, synthetic statements (A is B) are true by virtue of meanings in relation to facts; physical statements are in relation to the material world (“the chair has four legs”), metaphysical statements are subjective ideas formed as a result of relation to the objective world (“Love and grace triumphs justice and revenge”); and necessity and contingency are related to whether or not a statement is conditioned by how the world happens to be.

Relations of ideas and Matters of fact describe everything, including all the notions like a priori and a posteriori, necessity and contingency, the physical and the metaphysical and the analytic and synthetic distinctions – they are part of our matters of fact derived through experience, and our relations of ideas that result from that experience.

Every possible distinct description of experience is covered above, because everything is either a fact (an impression) derived from experience, or a relation of ideas based on those impressions from experience.

Regarding Kant, the general historical method is that we identify all the possible mental configurations with the class of analytical and synthetic truths, and ascertain our success in tailoring models to reality. Because there is a quite seamless blend regarding the way experience requires an up and running interpretation component and how perception naturally integrates with the outside rules of nature, analytical truths and synthetic truths are really just different interpretations of the same empirical structure built from experience.

To that end, I’ve never really understood why Kant made such a mountain out of the synthetic a priori so-called problem in philosophy. I think if he’d have been steeped in 300 years of empiricist science and philosophy, as we are today, he wouldn’t have exhausted so much of his time over it.

Kant's analytic-synthetic distinction was posited to identify two types of knowledge related to our experiences of the world. In the Kantian terms, analytic statements are statements in which the concept of the predicate is included in the concept of the subject - so for example 'All triangles have three sides' or 'All bachelors are unmarried' are analytic statements because the predicate is found in the subject (i.e. a triangle, by definition, must have three sides, and a bachelor must be unmarried). Synthetic statements do not have the predicate found in the subject - so for example 'All life on earth is carbon based' cannot be shown to be true by the subject and predicate alone, it must be constituted as knowledge by external evaluation and repeated experience of the world.

The easiest way to put this to bed is to say that we cannot have any knowledge without attaining that knowledge through experience of the world. Although there is a secondary distinction regarding experience of the world that remains useful; a mind needs to experience reality to acquire all our knowledge and familiarity with patterns in that reality, so the issue of whether something can be worked out without needing to consult external facts or ideas was a pertinent philosophical question. This is where Kant’s famous example of 7 + 5 = 12 was considered as a synthetic a priori judgement. It is a priori in that we do not need to consult the world and experience 7 things and 5 things grouped together to know that they are 12 things, but it is synthetic in that there is nothing in the concept of 7 or in the concept of 5 that implies twelve; it is only when the two are combined (synthesised) that we can get twelve.

Understanding this an as empirical landscape deadens the mystery Kant was trying to illuminate. In subjecting our mind to Kant’s arithmetic, we would have these ideas formed without experience of the world, but equally at a secondary level we need not consult external facts to know that 7 + 5 = 12, so this is why the analytic-synthetic model works on those two levels.

I do not think Kant’s ideas or definitions were strong enough to capture fully the relationship between definitions and their relations regarding predication, but it wouldn’t have been so problematic to him if he was writing under a stronger empiricist framework. Our dealing with reality and our ideas about causal relations are very much grounded in both perception, experience and ideation, so they are not mutually contradictory - they are complementary, and can give a fairly accurate signpost towards sound epistemology.

A priori knowledge is claimed to be knowledge which is known not through experience. But it’s better to think of all knowledge as being acquired by experience, and analytic propositions as describing a way of knowing but not extending knowledge already acquired. The primary distinction is about how they are determined; we always discern the analytic judgment by extension to what is contained in the proposition, but it's the structure we are determining, not what it contains. That’s why structurally 'All triangles have three sides' works the same way as 'All bachelors are unmarried' even though the subjects are different. Kant’s issue with synthetic, a priori knowledge seems to me to be a twofold combination of him not fully developing why it was supposed to be a problem and, as a consequence, not reaching the conclusion that it isn’t a problem.

On Cancel Culture

Here are a few thoughts on cancel culture. By ‘cancel culture’ I mean the hostile and belligerent desire to see some people silenced, have their work censored or removed, lose their jobs, and in some cases, have their whole character publicly assassinated.  A lot of people, especially young people, seem to have bought into the notion of cancel culture. Personally, I’ve never wanted to cancel anyone, even those who I think are utterly wrong. If I have no desire to cancel people, I assume many other people share that lack of desire. 

Cancel culture of this kind is fairly new. It’s a minority exercise, and it’s almost exclusively undertaken by people with a predictable personality profile; that is, entitled, not very bright, imbalanced, reactive, tempestuous, left-leaning and attracted to identity politics. The fact that people who have bought into the notion of cancel culture fit a fairly predictable profile of individuals tells us a lot about what we are looking for as common properties - of which I think there are five primary ones:

The first property is dishonesty. That is, it’s obvious that in the vast majority of cases when proclamations of moral outrage are uttered, it’s as plain as day that the person under accusation is not actually being sexist or racist or >something<phobic – they are, at worst, being clumsy and slightly provocative, and, at best, merely spouting an opinion that the cancel culture folk wish to aggressively disavow. By and large, then, to be complicit in cancel culture, you have to be willing to accuse people of things of which you don’t really believe they are guilty.

The second property is spite. People have a lot of spite inside them, especially people who are still insecure about who they are, how smart they are, and what they will amount to later. Cancelling others gives them an opportunity to behave spitefully in a controlled way, and it has the added bonus of making them feel self-righteous while doing so.

The third property is attention-seeking. Claiming to be hurt, damaged or traumatised by other people’s words and opinions is a classic attention-seeking method. It helps them be listened to, not on the merit of what they have to contribute, but on the feelings they claim to have. Coveting offense and victim-status gets you attention, and even support and encouragement from like-minded people.

The fourth property is belonging. Find like-minded people and fight these causes together, and it soon taps into the tribalistic desire to be part of an established group, with all the tribal perks offered within the group, and all the benefits of taking the fight outside of the group to engender a sense of purpose and solidarity. 

The fifth property is power. The above four properties give people perceived power, and this power may even be used to intimidate professionals, politicians, media outlets and some of the general public.

I’m not decrying every case, and I believe there are likely instances in which brave voices need to speak up for their cause. But they are in a tiny minority, and generally speaking, most individuals complicit in cancel culture are, I would say, acting dishonestly, with perverse incentives and ignoble motives.

Why I Think We Can Do Away With The Term 'Gender'

 

In a recent blog post, and a subsequent video, I’ve been suggesting that gender is a problematic term that has been so distorted and abused definitionally that we could probably do without it. Some folks have found this one hard to swallow – you can almost hear them saying: Even though you’ve been so right on everything else, James, I think this one is a step too far.

But I don’t think it is a step too far – I’ve been debating it for a few weeks now, on the back of responses to my post about sex and coin-tossing, and nobody has been able to convince me so far that I’ve got this wrong. And I’m quite open to being convinced, because my life will probably be a lot easier if I can accept gender as a valid term. But, so far, I cannot. No one was brave enough to debate it with me on camera (the invitation still stands), so I had fun convincing Chat GPT instead.

For a fuller elaboration of my position, you should read (or re-read) my original article Sex And The Gender Agenda. Here I will lay out my position on gender even more comprehensively, and tackle the objections proffered too. I don’t think we need the term gender, and it’s for two principal reasons: 

1)     Sex is a perfectly adequate category for defining males, females, and those in the tiny minority who fall into a category that can be defined as intersex.

2)     Everything else that you can put forward as justification for the term gender is better defined under a broader category of maleness and femaleness. 

That is to say, sex is a comprehensive enough term to define males, females and intersex people, and every subset definition that people claim falls under the umbrella term gender is, I think, already adequately defined on its intrinsic terms, where gender adds no further utility to the equation. In the last few decades, we have learned a lot about how complex individuals are – and numerous revisions of the broadness of the term ‘gender’ have been put forward as ways to foster greater understanding, inclusivity and tolerance. But I submit that what we’ve actually learned is that there is a lot more to being male and female than we ever realised, and that what needs establishing are broader categories that encapsulate the deeper complexities of being male and female.

Consequently, I am compelled to conclude that gender has failed in both the ontological and the epistemological category - that is, there isn't a clear way to define what gender is (ontology), and there isn't a way we can know gender (epistemology) in any objective sense. If we can neither define gender satisfactorily or know what it is for an individual, then the term has no real utility, and promotion of it can only lead to both abuse of the term and confusion. Once you add to that the fact that identity is a melting pot of complex feelings, thoughts and sensations, and the fact that the things we tendentiously assert as being properties that make up the package of gender (masculinity, femininity, sexuality, etc) are perfectly sufficient as descriptors in themselves, it is difficult to make any case for the utility of the word 'gender'

If people identify as something that has no basis in reality - such as if a 50 year old woman claimed to be 40 or a young boy claimed to be superman, we would rightly say they are living under a delusion or a fantasy. It is, of course, slightly harder to identify the delusion of gender than the delusion of being a younger age or having superhero status, but it's still illusory if it isn't based on reality.

Struggles with identity and development are real things - but once we categorise masculinity, femininity, sexuality, hormonal development, etc as traits that can be identified and considered without the need to introduce a vague term like gender, we do not then need to cite those things as being independent criteria to which we can appeal to in order to confirm an individual's claims about their gender.

As an analogy, suppose I describe my garden as having a lawn, some flowers, a shed, 3 trees and a decking area - and you come along and say that gardens should also be underpinned by the descriptive term 'Fairydust'. That is, as well as my telling you about my garden's shed, flowers, etc, you say I have to also define what type of fairydust it is. And I ask what you mean by fairydust, and you say its category of fairydust depends on whether it has a lawn, a patio, trees, a greenhouse, bushes, sheds, etc - I'd be fully justified in saying that the fairydust category adds nothing that is already covered in the descriptive properties of the garden.

I'm not saying that humans can't introspect and come up with many different feelings, ideas and physiological experiences from which they might wish to lump them together and give them an overarching category called gender. But trying to make sense of an accumulation of human introspections by inventing an abstract term and seeking to categorise all of them combinatorically is proving to be both epistemologically impractical and societally catastrophic in this case.

On top of gender's lack of ontological and epistemological merit, the introduction of the word causes unnecessary additional confusion into the world that wouldn't otherwise be there. People struggling with their sexuality, or with their sense of self-identity, or with anxiety, or with their body shape may say they are experiencing gender dysphoria or that they are born in the wrong body, when what they are really experiencing are things within the realm of being male and female. There are, of course, other motives to ascribing gender to individual attributes - a desire to be accepted, a desire to be different or break conformity, a desire to take the pressure off particular life situations, an incentive to obtain success in other environments (like sports competitions), the need to seek attention, and so on. But so far, those debating with me have remained largely uninterested in these considerations.

Let me now tackle some objections that repeatedly came my way during the debates:

Objection 1: Denying the validity of the term gender discriminates against or trivialises the people struggling with gender dysphoria.

It’s difficult to believe that people would put that forward as an objection – they miss the obvious error in their thinking. I'm denying the need for the word for gender at all, so you can't cite gender dysphoria as a problem, when what we are questioning is the term gender itself. A fundamental tenet of my position is that I don’t believe there can be a mismatch between someone’s biological sex and what they claim as their gender identity, because the latter lacks any empirical clarity or objectivity. So citing gender dysphoria (the very definition of the aforementioned) as a counter-argument still leaves all your work ahead of you, because you haven’t provided a valid definition of gender, much less a superior argument that defeats my two primary propositions.

Objection 2: Isn’t your position denying their humanity and their right to identify however they choose?

The problems with gender that this objection tries to capture are typified by this quote from Cade Hildreth, who calls himself a non-binary LGBTQ+ entrepreneur. He says: “Gender can’t be binary, because it is a personal identity and is socially constructed. One’s gender identity could be woman, man, transgender, nonbinary, or an infinite number of other possibilities.”

Last I looked, there are over 40 listed genders in the UK on standard lists, and it has probably grown by now. How can anyone make sense of the different combinations? I've heard people refer to themselves as they/them, he/they, she/they, he/she, two-spirit - it's not possible to validate these claims. Unless you just say that anyone is anything they claim to be - in which case, it no longer bears enough resemblance to empirical reality to be meaningful. So, basically, gender is your personal identity and there are an infinite number of potential genders. This kind of thinking reflects what is happening more widely among our youth today, where a reservoir of social contagion has washed over our young, and they think that they can choose their gender to reflect their personal feelings about their unique identity. The desired ability for every individual to choose their unique gender makes the term gender utterly meaningless, as there are potentially as many different genders as there are human beings.

Objection 3: Unfortunately for you, humans don’t fit into the neat binary boxes you are trying to force them into.

Well, firstly, I’m not trying to force anyone anywhere, I’m simply questioning the validity of an empirically dubious word that no one so far has been able to define adequately. Secondly, I am not suggesting that identity falls easily into neat boxes – but that does not mean that the categories male and female are too small to encapsulate the properties that others are trying to claim under the umbrella gender. There are many traits that overlap between the sexes, which means females can show up as extreme in more masculine categories, and males can show up as extreme in more feminine categories. In other words, in some traits, females can appear more male than males, and males can appear more female than females. But I believe it is folly to mechanically confuse masculine and feminine outliers with gender dysphoria. The vast majority of people who have atypical personality profiles are still within the natural distribution of male and female identities – they are not ‘born in the wrong body’. In most cases, what is perceived as “gender identity” is part of their personality profile from within a binary sex category, usually related to masculinity and femininity, but confused with one’s sex.

Objection 4: You are disregarding all the cases where someone you know (or know of) has claimed to be so much happier and more fulfilled after they changed course and identified as someone of the opposite sex.

This doesn’t convince in the slightest. I think we all know that such a testimony is absolutely not a reliable metric for truth propositions, and nigh-on impossible to accurately measure, due to all the complex variables. For example, as Christians we all know of many people who claim to have fallen away from belief in God, and no longer want to have a relationship with Christ. In their dozens, they tell us that since they left Christianity, they are happier, more fulfilled and less pressured - but those of us who know the Lord Jesus know that this perceived change for the better is a huge misjudgement. How we say we feel about something is often transitory, incomplete, and not necessarily a reliable measure of what's true and factual.

Objection 5: What about transgender people? – they are being discriminated against in your argument.

Same as with gender dysphoria, if you can’t satisfactorily define gender, then you can’t satisfactorily define transgender either. You can’t keep referring to transgender people without really defining what you mean by gender, how you define a transgender person, and how you explain your metric for defining a transgender person amid the clams people are able to make about themselves in terms of their complex identity. Would you define me as a transgender person if I declared myself a woman in order to enter female weight lifting competitions? If so, why? If not, why not? What are your metrics? If you can't answer these questions, then you can just say so. If you don't know why these questions are important, then you can also say so, and I'll try to elaborate. But if you fail to see the importance of these questions, and either ignore them, pretend they are not necessary, or change the subject, then you're not engaging at the level required to be having this discussion in the way you are trying to.

Objection 6: Denying people the ability to identify as whatever gender they choose is an abuse of their individual liberties.

I'm certainly not trying to gainsay people's individual feelings or internal senses of experiences - I just don't know of a rigorous scientific definition that encapsulates what gender actually means. People can identify as made-up genders if they wish – but it doesn’t mean I have to think it’s a good idea that they do so.

But this works both ways too; there are plenty of people who have had their individual liberties compromised by this wave of gender-based ideology – and none of the people debating this with me are acknowledging any of the costs. For example, in the UK, there have been quite a few high profile cases where men have claimed to identify as a women and won medals in the female categories of sporting events - even in weightlifting and boxing on two rather infamous cases. They have an unfair advantage, and that undermines the sport because it's grossly unfair to the women competitors. There have also been high profile disasters with men in women's prisons, and lots of disgruntled women fighting back against men (identifying as women) being freely encouraged to use female toilets if they wish. My position on this is clear; I do not think anyone born a male should be able to do these things.

And perhaps the greater costs of all are borne by children (and their parents) who are being infected with these disturbing mind pathogens about sex and gender that are invoking confusion and distorted perspectives on reality. What begins as perceived lack of congruity between a person’s biological sex and their gender presentation usually gets washed out in maturity, where one becomes clear about one’s sex and identity. But until then, there is widespread confusion about the distribution of sex-related personality and behavioural distinctions, and this is creating a crisis of irresponsible teaching. Young children shouldn’t be telling us they have been born in the wrong body - but when this happens they should be carefully nurtured towards more facts and greater wisdom, and given time to grow and develop. The trend towards alarmism, pandering to their whims, and worse, irreversible and harmful medical and surgical interventions are a damaging development that needs urgently addressing. 

I think society has become too craven and too ridiculous when it comes to all these daft pronouns on offer: a multitude of superfluous pronouns like co, ey, xie, ze etc that don’t have any scientific basis, and only serve to create attention-seeking demands and misguided attempts to deal with psychological/emotional issues that are best addressed in more empirically evidential ways.

I'm not saying that humans can't introspect and come up with many different feelings, ideas and physiological experiences from which they might wish to lump them together and give them an overarching category called gender. But trying to make sense of an accumulation of human introspections by inventing an abstract term and seeking to categorise all of them combinatorically is proving to be epistemologically impractical, because there is no exogenous, objective definition we can agree on to define gender.

Conclusion
It wasn't difficult to get Chat GPT to agree with me that a society tends to function better when terms are defined more clearly and factually, and when there are fewer ambiguous terms embedded into our discourse, especially in highly emotive areas where reason and facts are often not prioritised - it's just a shame that the social scientists who debated with me couldn't yield to the same kind of rigorous persuasion.

This issue is clearly an issue of high sensitivity, and there are going to be significant costs with whichever position one takes. For me, it's perhaps wise to think of this in terms of type 1 and type 2 category errors. A type 1 error, as you may know, is the incorrect rejection of a null hypothesis that is true. An example would be, when a jury delivers a guilty verdict in the trial of an innocent defendant. A type 1 error is generally an error that infers an effect or correlation or causality that doesn't actually exist (a false positive). A type 2 error is the failure to reject a false null hypothesis. An example would be when a jury delivers an innocent verdict in the trial of a guilty defendant. A type 2 error is generally an error that fails to infer an effect or correlation or causality that does actually exist (a false negative).

What we are all doing, for ourselves and on the basis of what we believe, is considering what type of error we are most willing to risk. Because there's a risk that by not calling someone, say, they/them at their request you're making an error that's unfair to that individual (and by extension to the wider society), but there's also a risk that by calling someone they/them at their request you're making an error that's also unfair to that individual (in the longer term, and by extension to the wider society). I've tried to weigh up both sets of circumstances, and tried to undertake my own individual risk calculi, in accordance with what I believe, in conjunction with the arguments I can make and the arguments I hear others make, and that's how I've arrived at the position I have. Those accusing me of being cruel and dehumanising are not even pretending to engage with the depth and severity of the situation.

The upshot of all this is that humans are complex, in terms of having different experiential variables; they have differing levels of masculinity, varying places on the sexuality spectrum, different phenotypical structures, different levels of comfort with their bodies, different affiliations with both sexes, different temperaments, different levels of anxiety, varying emotional connections with others, different tastes, different responses to physical touch, diverse ranges of neurological development, multiple ways of expressing themselves in terms of looks, style and fashion, and a highly complex and dynamic sense of self and personal identity in a multitude of places and stages in life. We know so much about psychological factors related to identity, to hormones, to masculinity and femininity, to sexuality, etc - and what that does, I believe, is show us that being male and being female encapsulates a whole range of subset traits, feelings and identities to do with the above. That doesn't mean that we stop becoming male or female, it means we expand our conceptions of maleness and femaleness.

If you look at male and female personalities in totality, their similarities far outweigh their differences, but there are plenty of differences too, and these play out in their respective relationships, attitudes, careers and priorities (to name but four). Personality differences are significant, but they are not the same as sex differences - hence sex and gender should not be used interchangeably - and the fact that they so often are is not helping the debate, especially for our children.

All of these are profound things to explore and assess, and our best efforts to do so reveal lots of subset elements about the nature of being human. But I maintain that adding the extraneous term 'gender' to all this adds no value to the considerations, and instead imputes needless ambiguity and confusion. What is needed, I submit, is the admission of a broader understanding of the categories of male and female, and the realisation that the traits being claimed to have one foot in one camp and one in the other are really just claims that misunderstand the true breadth and depth of the two fundamental categories.

We can look back at every age that preceded us and identify things they were doing that were absurd, wacky, ignorant and extreme - and I believe it's prudent for every contemporary age to do the same, including us. What are we of today doing that our descendants will look back on with complete horror and incredulity? I am fairy confident that this wanton abuse of the reality of biological sex and the liberal assault on language with the ‘gender’ constructions will be seen as one of them.

In closing, I've spent a fair amount of time discussing gender with scientists in various fields, and despite my open invitation and diligent considerations of their points, no one has been able to justify the efficacy of the word 'gender' to me in terms of its ontology and epistemology, so I remain unconvinced of its merits.  

Who Is Looking Out For The Strong & Wise People?

People who are consistently strong and wise are valuable to others in so many ways; they offer support, they give sound guidance, they come up with solutions, and they are a real force for good in the world. Because their strength of character and wisdom is a real blessing to many, they are naturally popular too, and in high demand.

Which leads to my somewhat rhetorical question: Who is looking out for the strong and wise people? Are they getting the support they may need?

Here are some things to consider about these forces for good. They are likely to be the smartest and strongest people in most interactions (be they individual or group interactions), they are going to be an absolute rock for some people, and highly sought after by many others, and they will provide a lot more strength and wisdom than they receive. All this is to be expected – those who have the most to offer usually carry more and deliver more than those who have less – in fact, there is probably a weighty responsibility for them to be that force for good.

But these forces for good in the world are playing a kind of guardian role too - and the chances are, they are so accustomed to being the strong, wise one, that they may not have many people (if any) they feel they can turn to, to meet their own emotional, practical, psychological and spiritual needs. They are so used to being a tower of strength and a vehicle of good counsel, that they may often (if not always) feel unable or unwilling to ask for help, to show weakness, to express vulnerability, or to confide in someone to solicit guidance. They are so used to giving, that they have forgotten how to receive; they are so used to being strong for others, that the ability to be vulnerable for themselves has elapsed; and they do so much for the needs of others that their own needs have been neglected to the point of being largely unconsidered. I don’t just mean unconsidered by others – I mean it’s likely that they can become so familiar with a reality in which their needs remain consistently derelict that they neglect to adequately process their own internal needs, vulnerabilities and perceived weaknesses, because there isn’t any sufficient outlet for their external attendance.

I believe we can make the world an even better place by ensuring we look out for the strong, wise forces for good in our world; check in on them, offer to be a listening ear, and be mindful that in being such a light in so many people’s lives, their own needs might often fall behind - perhaps even to the point they feel quite emotionally isolated and barren, where their own requirements and well-being are left perennially unchecked. Even the strongest and wisest people need people too.