kant's epistemology
TRANSCRIPT
8/10/2019 Kant's Epistemology
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/kants-epistemology 1/21
Immanuel Kant’s
Epistemology• Life
– Born in Königsberg, Prussia (now part of
Russia) in 1724.
– His family was originally from Scotland.
(The original family name was „Cant.‟)
– The family immigrated to Prussia to avoidreligious persecution.
– Never traveled more than 60 miles from
Königsberg, and didn‟t leave it at all
during a forty year stretch.
8/10/2019 Kant's Epistemology
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/kants-epistemology 2/21
– Attended the University of
Königsberg from 1740 – 1755. – In 1755, received his doctorate and
became a Lecturer at the University.
He was named full professor in 1770.
– Author of three of the greatest works
in the history of philosophy.
• The Critique of Pure Reason (1781) – on Epistemology
• The Critique of Practical Reason
(1788) – on Ethics
8/10/2019 Kant's Epistemology
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/kants-epistemology 3/21
• The Critique of Judgment (1790) –
on Aesthetics – A man of precise habits.
• Would stroll every day, for exactly
one hour, eight times up and downthe same street.
• The street came to be called “The
Philosopher‟s Walk.” • So punctual, that the housewives of
Königsberg set their clocks by the
time he took his walk.
8/10/2019 Kant's Epistemology
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/kants-epistemology 4/21
– Died, very sadly, totally senile, at
Königsberg in 1804.• Response to Hume
– Given his temperament, Kant was
not the sort of man who could abideHume‟s suggestion that humans are
emotional, not rational, beings.
– Nor could Kant abide Hume‟s claimthat, at best, science and philosophy
are games people play to have fun,
rather than ways of attaining truth.
8/10/2019 Kant's Epistemology
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/kants-epistemology 5/21
– Still, in a sense, Kant gave Hume the
credit for all he accomplished:• “I openly confess my recollection of
David Hume was the very thing
which many years ago first
interrupted my dogmatic slumber
and gave my investigations in the
field of speculative philosophy a
quite new direction.”
Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to any
Future Metaphysics (1783)
8/10/2019 Kant's Epistemology
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/kants-epistemology 6/21
– Hume had reasoned that, since it is
neither a Relation of Ideas nor aMatter of Fact, the Principle of
Universal Causation (PUC) is,
philosophically speaking, bogus.
– Kant conceded that PUC is neither a
Relation of Ideas nor a Matter of Fact.
– Kant insisted, however, that this does
NOT mean that PUC is
philosophically bogus.
8/10/2019 Kant's Epistemology
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/kants-epistemology 7/21
• Kant‟s Analysis of Perception
– Every perception is a two-fold reality:i.) raw sense data and ii.) the
organizing and structuring of that data
by the mind.
– Sense data, in and of itself, is a
meaningless jumble.
– Sense data makes sense only after ithas been organized and structured by
the mind‟s categories.
8/10/2019 Kant's Epistemology
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/kants-epistemology 8/21
– Category: A built in, “hard-wired”
capacity of the human mind by whichit organizes and structures raw sense
data. One of the categories is PUC.
– One may see a similarity between
Kant‟s view of perception and
Aristotle‟s view of substance.
– For Aristotle, a substance is created
when a form organizes and structures
inherently formless and structureless
prime matter.
8/10/2019 Kant's Epistemology
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/kants-epistemology 9/21
8/10/2019 Kant's Epistemology
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/kants-epistemology 10/21
• You cannot go to the store and buy
something with a massive, mixed up
heap of coins.
• Before you can spend the coins, you
have to sort them with a coin sorter.
• The coins don‟t really have any truevalue until they are sorted by the coin
sorter.
• In this analogy, raw sense data is likethe massive, mixed up heap of coins.
• In itself, raw sense data is
meaningless jumble.
8/10/2019 Kant's Epistemology
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/kants-epistemology 11/21
8/10/2019 Kant's Epistemology
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/kants-epistemology 12/21
• How does Kant‟s analysis of perception
show that PUC is not philosophically
bogus?
– “[PUC] is neither a generalization
from experience [a Matter of Fact] nor
an analytic truth [a Relation of Ideas],
but, rather, a rule for „setting up‟ our
world . . . . Like a rule in chess, [PUC]
is not a move within the game but oneof the rules that defines the game . . .
. So too, for our belief in the „external‟
or material world . . . .
8/10/2019 Kant's Epistemology
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/kants-epistemology 13/21
– “Our experience alone will not tell us
whether we are dreaming or not, and
the idea of the material („external‟)
world is not a [Relation of Ideas] . . . .
[The material world] too is one of the
rules that we use to constitute ourexperience, namely, that we shall
always interpret our experience of
[sensible] objects [as being] in space,external to us, and material.”
Robert C. Solomon, Introducing Philosophy ,
p. 215
8/10/2019 Kant's Epistemology
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/kants-epistemology 14/21
– PUC and the other categories are, as
it were, the “laws of experience.”
– They are not true; rather, they make
empirical truth claims possible.
– Asking why the mind organizes rawsense data by PUC, or by any of the
other categories, is exactly as silly as
asking why a criminal is put in jail.
– The answer, in both cases, is the
same: “That‟s the law.”
8/10/2019 Kant's Epistemology
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/kants-epistemology 15/21
• Kant‟s Two Worlds
– A consequence of Kant‟s analysis ofperception is that there are really two
worlds: The Noumenal World and the
Phenomenal World.
– Noumenal World
• The world of “things in themselves.”
• This the the world from which rawsense data originates.
• Human beings do not live in this
world and have no knowledge of it.
8/10/2019 Kant's Epistemology
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/kants-epistemology 16/21
– The Phenomenal World
• The world of perception.• The world of sense data after it
has been organized and
structured by the mind‟scategories.
• This is the world in which
humans live and of which theyhave knowledge.
8/10/2019 Kant's Epistemology
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/kants-epistemology 17/21
– “[W]e indeed, rightly considering
objects of sense as mere
appearances, confess, thereby, that
[the appearances] are based upon a
thing in itself, though we know not this
thing as it is in itself, but only know itsappearances, namely, the way in
which our senses are affected by this
unknown something.” Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future
Metaphysics
8/10/2019 Kant's Epistemology
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/kants-epistemology 18/21
8/10/2019 Kant's Epistemology
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/kants-epistemology 19/21
• Two Very Important Questions:
– Can we be sure that each human mindorganizes and structures the raw sense
data of the noumenal world in the same
way, by means of the same categories?
– Since the noumenal world might as wellbe Heraclitus‟ formless flux, isn‟t it
possible that, à la the ancient Protagorian
relativists, each human being projects a
different order and structure on the
noumenal world, thereby creating his/her
own individual and unique phenomenal
world?
8/10/2019 Kant's Epistemology
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/kants-epistemology 20/21
– By means of what he called a
“Transcendental Deduction,” Kantattempted to argue, in The
Critique of Pure Reason, that the
answers to these questions arerespectively “Yes” and “No.”
– To challenge Kant, an episode ofStar Trek: The Next Generation
8/10/2019 Kant's Epistemology
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/kants-epistemology 21/21
• The consensus among philosophers is
that Kant‟s “Transcendental Deduction”
failed.
• At this point, therefore, we mustconcede that the Protagorians could
have been right all those thousands of
years ago. It‟s possible that each
human being lives in his/her own world,
a world of his/her own making.