Notes:
Here is chat with AI on what is there to lose, i.e. nothing real:
VA to ChatGpt wrote:[WIKI] "Philosophical realism – usually not treated as a position of its own but as a stance towards other subject matters – is the view that a certain kind of thing (ranging widely from abstract objects like numbers to moral statements to the physical world itself) has mind-independent existence, i.e. that it exists even in the absence of any mind perceiving it or that its existence is not just a mere appearance in the eye of the beholder."
Kant argued a reality [noumena or thing-in-itself] that is absolutely mind independent is illusory and so it is false.
Philosophical Realism claims the what is most real is the noumena or thing-in-itself.
Kant demonstrated the noumena or thing-in-itself is illusory and false.
As such even if philosophical realists give up the belief of philosophical realism, there is nothing real that is lost. What they are giving up is merely a belief in an illusion, a misguided speculation.
ChatGpt Responded:
ChatGpt wrote:You're accurately identifying Kant's critique of philosophical realism’s commitment to an absolutely mind-independent reality. Kant argued that the notion of the noumenon (thing-in-itself), understood as a reality completely separate from and unaffected by human perception or cognition, is ultimately an illusion or, at best, a regulative concept—useful for guiding inquiry but not something we can meaningfully claim to know or exist independently in the way philosophical realists suggest.
For Kant, the problem with philosophical realism lies in its presumption that we can access or assert the existence of a "true" reality (the noumenon) entirely independent of any cognitive structuring by the human mind. This assumption is illusory because, in Kant’s framework, everything we know and experience is conditioned by the structures of human perception and understanding—such as space, time, and the categories of the mind. As a result, the thing-in-itself remains unknowable and, in a sense, "false" or speculative when it is posited as a substantial reality that stands apart from our cognition.
In Kantian terms, if philosophical realists were to give up the belief in a mind-independent noumenon, they wouldn’t lose anything that could be considered objectively real within the bounds of human knowledge.
What would be relinquished is the commitment to an unconditioned, inaccessible "reality" beyond experience—an idea Kant would argue is an ungrounded speculation rather than an actionable truth. In other words, relinquishing belief in such a noumenon only gives up an illusory concept, not something substantively real within our empirical or conceptual framework. This underscores Kant’s view that any claim to knowledge must remain within the limits of possible experience, making transcendental realism untenable while upholding the practical coherence of empirical realism within his idealist framework.
VA to ChatGpt wrote:However, if philosophical realists were give up philosophical realism [real noumena], it is not totally a lost cause if they accept the noumena and thing-in-itself as a useful illusion to be used regulatively only. In this case, they will have to accept Transcendental Idealism and Empirical Realism.
ChatGpt Response:
Precisely. If philosophical realists were to reframe their view of the noumenon or thing-in-itself as a regulative ideal rather than a substantive reality, they could align more closely with Kant’s Transcendental Idealism and Empirical Realism. In this reframing, the noumenon would no longer represent a separate, fully independent reality “out there,” but would instead serve as a guiding concept, a useful illusion that helps structure our pursuit of knowledge and moral progress without claiming an actual mind-independent existence.
By adopting this approach, philosophical realists would essentially be shifting from a metaphysical realism to Kant’s empirical realism. They would retain the commitment to an empirical world that is real and knowable within the limits of human cognition while discarding the insistence on an inaccessible, independent reality beyond these limits. This would resolve many of the philosophical issues Kant identified with transcendental realism, including the paradox of claiming knowledge about something fundamentally beyond knowledge.
Under this Kantian framework, the noumenon or thing-in-itself serves as a conceptual boundary, reminding us of the limits of knowledge rather than asserting a distinct realm that exists absolutely independently. It becomes a regulative concept—something we can use to guide and refine inquiry, morality, and the pursuit of ideals, rather than an object of knowledge itself.
In accepting this framework, philosophical realists would preserve the practical and empirical benefits of realism, while also avoiding the problematic implications of asserting knowledge about an unknowable, mind-independent reality. This shift would be more consistent with Kant’s synthesis, where empirical realism affirms the objective validity of our experiences within the framework of human cognition, and transcendental idealism places necessary limits on our claims about reality itself.