Kant's Epistemology

8/10/2019 Kant's Epistemology

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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.



– 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



• 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.



– 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.



– 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)



– 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.



• 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.



– 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.





• 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.





• 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 . . . .



– “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



– 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.”



• 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.



– 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.



– “[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





• 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?



– 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



• 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.

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Kant's Epistemology