Theme 1, Theory of knowledge and theory of science, Post 1

Critique of Pure Reason

In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant questions what reason alone can determine, without any help of the senses or any other faculties. Kant makes two different and important distinctions, one between synthetic and analytic judgment, and between a prior and a posterior knowledge. A posterior knowledge being the knowledge we gain from experience, and a prior knowledge being the universal knowledge we have even without experiences.

Kant argues that we cannot know for certain what we know independent from our experiences. According to Kant, the mind does not just receive information, it also gives that information shape.

In the preface to the second edition of Critique of Pure Reason (page B xvi) Kant says:

Thus far it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to objects. On that presupposition, however, all our attempts to establish something about them a priori, by means of concepts through which our cognition would be expanded, have come to nothing. Let us, therefore, try to find out by experiment whether we shall not make better progress in the problems of metaphysics if we assume that objects must conform to our cognition.

So, what does this mean? Before the assumption was that all cognition, such as thought, experience, and the senses, must conform to objects. That the object, the “things-in-themselves” as Kant calls the stimuli, is what is known, and our cognition are based on those.

Kant explores the idea of the opposite. That objects must conform to our cognition. That “things-in-themselves” are what they are because of how they are perceived. That our senses react to stimuli coming from outside the mind, but that we only have knowledge of how they appear to us, once they have been processed by our understanding and faculties of sensibility. Kant differentiates between the world of things-in-themselves, and the world as it appears to our minds.

 

Theaetetus

Plato’s dialogue is dominated by a question-and-answer exchange, where they are trying to get the answer to “what is knowledge”. Throughout the dialogue Theaetetus gives several suggestions of what knowledge is, all of the proposals being rejected after discussion. The dialogue finishes without the discovery of what knowledge is, but with the discovery of what knowledge is not.

At the end of the discussion of the definition "Knowledge is perception", Socrates argues that we do not see and hear "with" the eyes and the ears, but "through" the eyes and the ears. How are we to understand this? And in what way is it correct to say that Socrates argument is directed towards what we in modern terms call "empiricism"?

My interpretation of Socrates argument that we see “through” the eyes and ears is that he means that not one organ, such as eyes or ears, interprets colors or sound or taste, but our senses. We experience objects not just with one organ, but with our mind, that the color blue is not just a color, but a feeling. It’s all connected, if we see the color yellow, we might think of the sun, and feel warm. Or that you can still hear the sound of your favorite song, without actually hearing it, as you can hear it with your mind and not your ears. Our human senses are far more complex than we can imagine, and the organs are as Socrates describes it are the instruments, and with which through them we perceive objects of sense. Simply seeing with the eyes, would imply that we only see objects, not experience and understand them. A song or a picture contains much more information than our eyes or ears can register alone. 

Empiricism often argues that knowledge is based on experiences, my knowledge of color is based on the previous sights of different colors. My knowledge of how music sounds, is based on me hearing music, I can have no knowledge of how Beethoven sounds, if I have not previously heard it, or something similar to associate it with. Socrates argues that we see “through” our eyes and ears, through our senses, based on the experiences we previously have had.