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I'm just wondering what evidential support there is for Kant's epistemology presented in the Critique of Pure Reason.
2 Responses to “Is there any objective evidence supporting Immanuel Kant’s epistemology?”
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November 16th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
In so far as Kant held that a description of the phenomenal world (called by some the objective world) is a function of a priori principles (the conditions of our knowing, and the patterns of our mind’s operation) then, yes, there is some objective evidence supporting this epistemology, but, in order to get to that evidence a short review of the historical evolution of “objectivity” will probably be helpful.
In the early history of myth and magic, the sign and its significance merged into one another. For people about to embark on a dangerous hunt, the painted picture of the successful hunt on a cave wall, was not just a picture, it was ‘reality.’ No distinction was made between the painting and what it represented. The painting of the successful hunt and the upcoming hunt became ‘one.’ By such means early people gained control over their world and predicted many, if not most of the events.
As language developed, and human societies became more intricately organized, a more symbolic intuitive function began to dominate. Language differentiated the perceptual world into spatially and temporally related material objects. The expressive ‘magical function’ that animated everything with human impulses and desires gave way to a more efficient, predictive power. The predictive power of ‘common sense’ worked to displace the predictive power of myth and magic. Now, however, even that predictive power has come under fire. Magic was the first to go. Now ‘common sense objects,’ the bearers of both subjective and objective properties, also must go.
Science and mathematics–the conceptual world of relations, as opposed to the ‘reality’ of substances–owes its existence to the symbolic conceptual function (the conditions of our knowing, and the patterns of our mind’s operation) and progress here means progress not in knowing the world of ‘common sense,’ but rather in knowing the ‘ideal meanings’ we use to answer questions that take us out of the comfort zone of ‘common sense’ objects. For instance, at the micro level of our experience we have a description of the ‘now you see it, now you don’t world’ of quantum mechanics, and at the macro level of experience we have a description of the curved surface of the four-dimensional space-time continuum. I am not suggesting here that new science has replaced old science; the laws of motion are still the laws of motion. However, some things have changed; the relativity of space and time for instance, and the reduction of space to geometrical presuppositions, the ‘ideal meanings’ that get used in the interpretation of phenomena. This list continues with the uncertainty relationships for smallest particles, the behavior of micro-world particles conforming to laws of probability,–and these changes, at best, complicate matters, and, at worst, contradict the worldview principles that followed naturally from our common sense experience.
To sum up, all claims to ‘reality’ are subject to change because ‘reality’ is contingent upon the conditions of our knowing, and the patterns of our mind’s operation. These examples provide some evidence for Kant’s epistemology. The ‘ideal meanings’ that get used in the physics of both the macro and micro world adds to this evidence. But, ultimately, support for Kant’s epistemology, is found in our creative imagination, albeit an imagination that runs concomitant with the rules that we use to extend and restrict imagination, but still, it is this imagination that comes to rescue every time we are faced with the absurd–with a question that makes no sense until we create a sensible answer.
November 16th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
Evidence for a theory of thinking? Well, as Kant would say, there are two apriori conditions necessary for any possible human experience: Space and Time. Do those count as evidentiary? If not, then Logic and Mathematics are, for Kant, evidence of Reason.