RI Kant 2023

KantA Middle Ground

OverviewFailure of Foundationalism01Kant’s Copernican Turn02 Strengths03Weaknesses04

Failure01

Failure of Foundationalism●Rationalists –able to provide absolutely certain knowledge (mathematics, analytic a priori truths and transcendental arguments)…●But very little●Empiricists –able to provide quite a bit of knowledge…●But only if we allow uncertainty into the system●Hume threw the whole of Newtonian Science into doubt with his attack on causation and induction●End result? Scepticism reigns!

—Kant (Preface tohisProlegomena to Any Future Metaphysics4:260) I freely confess: it was the objection of David Hume which first, many years ago, interrupted my dogmatic slumber

Turn, turn, turn! 02

Kant’s Disagreement●Kant disagreed with both the Rationalists and the Empiricists.●Reason, with all its concepts and frameworks, cannot give knowledge if it has no raw data to work with.“Concepts without intuitions are empty.”●Empiricists, with all its raw data, cannot give knowledge if it has no concepts or frameworks with which it can make sense of the raw data the senses give us.“Intuitions without concepts are blind.”

Concepts & Intuitions

Kant’s Copernican Turn•Kant: we should use all means in order to resolve the problems of Epistemology that R & E tried to address and failed.•Like Copernicus, he was turning things on their heads in an attempt to see if that would make things work out a lot better•Copernicus: the geocentric model of the solar system results in weird planetary movements•Copernican turn: assume the opposite!•Kant: Is there anything common between the Rationalists and the Empiricist? •Both saw the mind as a PassiveRecipient/Observer of Phenomena•i.e. the mind conformsto the objects, rather than the other way round•Kant’s Copernican Turn: postulate the Mind as an Active Constituter instead, i.e. that objectsconformed to how the mind represented them

Kant’s IBE•In essence, Kant’s argument works like an IBE (Inference to Best Explanation)•He postulated: -a hypothesis(Mind as Active Constituter rather than Passive Receiver) -to see if it best explains how we are able to usually trust our experiences (e.g. that we don’t doubt that there is a table in front of us) -and thus resolve the problems faced by -the Rationalists (moving beyond analytic and mathematical statements) -and the Empiricists (recovery of Newtonian Science)