Notes for PHIL 251: Intro to Philosophy

Epistemology: Kant and Theories of Truth

I. The debate between empiricists and rationalists prompts Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) to highlight differences between the kinds of statements, judgments, or propositions that guide the discussion. For Kant, the distinctions between analytic and synthetic and a priori and a posteriori judgments must be kept separate, because it is possible for some judgments to be synthetic and a priori at the same time. What Kant proposes is this: Surely all a posteriori judgments are synthetic judgments, since any judgment based solely on experience cannot be derived merely by understanding the meaning of the subject. But this does not mean that all synthetic judgments are a posteriori judgments, since in mathematical and geometrical judgments, the predicate is not contained in the subject (e.g., the concept 12 is not contained either in 7, 5, +, =, or even in their combination; nor does the concept "shortest distance between two points" contain the idea of a straight line). Such propositions are universal and necessary (and thus a priori ) even though they could not have been known from experience; and they would be synthetic a priori judgments. If there are such judgments, then how are they possible? Kant's answer: the rationalists are right in saying that we can know about things in the world with certainty; and the empiricists are right in saying that such knowledge cannot be limited merely to truths by definition nor can it be provided by experience. Instead, we know about the world insofar as we experience it according to the unchanging and universally shared structure of mind. All rational beings think the world in terms of space, time, and categories such as cause and effect, substance, unity, plurality, necessity, possibility, and reality. That is, whenever we think about anything, we have to think about it in certain ways (for example, as having causes, as existing or not existing, as being one thing or many things, as being real or imaginary, as being something that has to exist or doesn't have to exist), not because that is the way the world is, but rather because that is the way that our minds order experience. There can be no knowledge without sensation, but sense data cannot alone provide knowledge either. We can be said to know things about the world, then, not because we somehow step outside of our minds to compare what we experience with some reality outside of it, but rather because the world we know is always already organized according to a certain fixed (innate) pattern that is the mind. Knowledge is possible because it is about how things appear to us, not about how things are in themselves. Reason provides the structure or form of what we know, the senses provide the content. Objections to Kant:

We can never know anything about things we do not experience and organize in terms of the mind's structure--for example, God, soul, and other metaphysical topics; and that seems a shame. Kant's solution means that we will never know if our ideas about the world are true; or it means that we have to redefine reality as that which we experience rather than that which

experience represents. In short, if we are limited to phenomena (things as they appear), either we will never know if our ideas are true or we have to redefine what truth is. If Kant is right, then why do cultures seem to differ on the categories of understanding? One possible is that even though the categories seem to vary, such differences are due only to differences in the "surface grammar" of language, the ways in which things are understood as meaningful. When asked why languages are structured in certain ways, some theorists claim that the brain and our neural networks form the "deep grammar" of what things mean.

II. Maybe the search for indubitable foundations (innate ideas, sense data) is itself flawed. Perhaps there is nothing about knowledge that is ultimate, but rather a web of interlocking beliefs. According to Rorty, knowing is not like seeing: justification does not relate a belief to some object, but rather it relates a belief to arguments supporting it. Justification is thus a social, historical phenomenon. The fault of epistemology is that it has tried to eternalize normal discourse (i.e., discourse with agreed-upon criteria for reaching consensus). Abnormal discourse lacks such criteria. Periods of social change are characterized by struggles between normal and abnormal discourse. III. The second objection above to Kant raises the question: What does it mean to say that a proposition is true? There are three main theories of truth:

Correspondence theory of truth: a statement or belief is true if it corresponds to the facts. Truth is thus a property of a statement. The facts exist independently of our knowledge of them. Accurate observations can report actual states of affairs and cannot result in reasonable disagreement. Einstein and other "scientific realists" (proponents of the view that theories are true if they describe reality) endorse this idea and claim that our task is to find out the truth about nature, even if that means changing the basic presuppositions of our theories. Problems: How can we know whether our perceptions are correct? What justification/reasons do we have for a belief? This changes the notion of truth away from a property of a statement to the reasons we provide for beliefs. But then, how can we know whether our beliefs about the facts are justified? We cannot know the world apart from our knowledge. o Besides, what about truths that correspond to no particular "facts" (e.g., philosophic principles, scientific theories like evolution, love, justice)? o And how do we tell whether generalizations are adequate? Coherence theory of truth: Since the only way to know something is by appealing to beliefs, that which is true is that which is consistent with our overall network of beliefs. A claim is true if it meets the requirements of science (simplicity, comprehensiveness, predictive). This position is supported by philosophers of science Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, who support this view because, they argue, there is no one truth because there is nothing "really out there."
o

Problems: Beginning assumptions cannot be proved, so what if the whole network is wrong? Why can't equally coherent and seemingly acceptable systems be reconciled? Pragmatic theory of truth: A statement is true IFF (if and only if) it would satisfy our expectations were we to act upon it. That is, the consequences of being able to integrate knowledge, predict events, achieve goals determine whether a belief is true. Truth is thus a function of human endeavor, not some existence apart from us. This theory of truth supports a view of science called instrumentalism, which argues that theories are instruments that are useful for calculating and predicting. According the physicist Niels Bohr, this is especially applicable in quantum theory. Problems:
o o o o

If what is effective can change, so can the truth. But truth should be constant. Just because something works (for us) doesn't make it true. For example, if we tell a small child that if she goes into the street the boogeyman will get her (in order to prevent her from being hurt), the success of our lie in protecting her does not make what we said true. Besides, the reason something works is that it is true, not the other way around.

IV. Perhaps the problem is with the idea of truth itself. Perhaps we should give up the pursuit of Truth (with a capital T) and begin thinking that truth is really a way we have of speaking of what we agree on and what we find persuasive. In this way we should focus on truths (with a small t).

B. Kant's Epistemology
Kant's attempt to satisfy both of his motivations centers around the distinctive view he termed "transcendental idealism." To understand Kant's transcendental idealism it is useful to begin by returning to his description of our mental faculties. (In this paragraph and the next four I am drawing on Lewis White Beck, "Kant's Strategy," in his Essays on Kant and Hume.) Kant made a remarkable attempt to synthesize the epistemological views of the rationalists and the empiricists, empiricism being represented for him primarily by Hume and rationalism primarily by Leibniz and his German disciple Christian Wolff. As Kant saw it, each tradition recognized only one source of knowledge, and correspondingly each thought of all mental contents on a single model. We have already seen the empiricist tendency to think of all mental contents on the model of visual impressions; as Hume put it, ideas were just faint copies of sense-impressions. And we have already seen how this view contributes to skepticism: if all our evidence about the way things are comes from our perception of senseimpressions, then it seems that all we can know about with any certainty are the senseimpressions themselves. And we have seen in particular Hume's skepticism about the possibility of ever knowing that one thing has caused another. For the idea of one thing causing another is the idea that there is some sort of necessary connection between the two events; but we never see the necessary connection, we just see the first event and then the second. On the other hand, as Kant saw it, Leibniz and the rationalists generally held that all knowledge

comes ultimately from reason. For Leibniz, as for Hume, there was a continuum between sensations and ideas ("ideas of sense" and "ideas of reason"), but for Leibniz what was fundamental was the role of reason rather than the role of sense. The ideas of sense were for Leibniz just confused ideas of reason. This is not quite fair, but roughly the way to find out about the way things were was not to look but to sit back and think for a while. On this view we could have all sorts of knowledge about the world just by thinking about things clearly enough and not getting too confused by our sense impressions, and the knowledge we arrived at would be a priori or independent of experience. (For example, we could arrive at knowledge about God in this way.) This led to what Kant called "dogmatism," the view that reason by itself can tell us things about the world and also about things we can never have sense impressions of, like God. Kant thought it vital to recognize, in contrast to both rationalism and empiricism, that there were two independent factors which contributed to knowledge and each of which played an essential role: a receptive faculty of sensibility, which is our faculty of receiving sense impressions, or what Kant called "intuitions," and an active faculty of understanding, which forms concepts and makes judgments about things. (Kant's remark that "intuitions without concepts are blind, concepts without intuitions are empty" is often quoted.) Kant tried to employ this distinction in showing, against Hume, that we could have a priori knowledge about the empirical world and in particular about causality; and against Leibniz that we could not have a priori knowledge, or any other kind, about anything except possible objects of experience. For example, we could not have knowledge about God, or about the immortality of the soul, or, most importantly for our purposes, about whether or not we are genuinely free. (But this denial is not quite as extreme as it sounds: although Kant denies that we can know anything about God, freedom, or immortality, he also holds that for practical purposes we must presuppose, or "postulate," the existence of all three.) These two claims are both crucial to Kant's epistemology; the first is a kind of response to skepticism, while the second seems almost to be itself a kind of skepticism. 1. Kant's positive claim: we can have synthetic a priori knowledge Let us examine first, then, Kant's claim that we can know things about the empirical world without basing this knowledge on experience. How can we know anything about the empirical world in this way? Very roughly, Kant's answer is: "Because we made the empirical world according to certain rules; we can know a priori those features of the world that we put there in the first place." Kant called this view his "Copernican revolution" in philosophy. This may seem odd, since in one respect Kant's view is counter-Copernican: Copernicus displaced man from his supposed place in the center of the universe, while Kant makes man in an epistemological sense more central to the universe than he had been thought to be. But the analogy Kant has in mind is with Copernicus' explanation of the observed motions of the stars in terms not of their actually moving but in terms of our moving. Similarly, Kant thinks that many of the most general features of the world we observe are present not because they are in the things themselves, but because we put them there. The explanation of space, time, causality, and other pervasive features of the universe is not to be found in the world itself, but in our own mental makeup. This is not the place to examine in detail Kant's arguments for various sorts of a priori knowledge. But it may be helpful to look briefly at two purported examples of synthetic a priori

knowledge. First, Kant thinks that our knowledge of geometry is synthetic a priori. Kant thinks of geometry as a collection of truths about space, and hence about the empirical world. (Many would disagree with him, but let's pretend he is right.) Kant thinks we could not get the kind of knowledge we have of geometry by making inferences from our experience. (Why not? Because we are absolutely certain of mathematical truths, while the most we could glean from experience would be the view that they were highly probable.) How then can we discover these truths about space? Because, Kant says, space is not a feature of the world as it is in itself, but something we impose on the world in ordering our experiences. We are simply constructed in such a way that information about the world has to come organized spatially (and temporally, but that's another story). Without examining Kant's arguments in detail, it may be helpful to consider a metaphor he uses. Space and time, he argues, are forms of intuition. There is a distinction between the "matter" or content of our experience, on the one hand, and its form or organization, on the other, and space is part of the form rather than of the content. Compare the notion of a poetic form. Poems may come in many different forms: sonnets, sestinas, villanelles, and so on. Within a given form, we know that all poems will share certain features: all sonnets, for example, will have 14 lines, will be written in iambic pentameter, and will have a certain rhyme scheme (one of several, actually, depending on the kind of sonnet). These features are all part of the sonnet form, guidelines one must conform to in order to be writing a sonnet at all. Does the form of the sonnet, then, consist simply in all those features that all sonnets share? Not quite. Suppose all sonnets were written in English: that would not make being written in English a part of the sonnet form, since one could write a sonnet in German. The form of a sonnet consists of those features which any sonnet must share, or, as we might say: of those features shared by any possible sonnet. Now, Kant thinks that intuitions too may come in various forms; in particular he thinks some beings may have intellectual rather than sensible intuition (know things by creating them rather than by being affected by them). But he thinks that all human intuitions share, and must share, certain features, namely that they are of spatiotemporal objects. (Well, actually, in the case of intuitions of mental phenomena, just temporal ones. "Outer sense," from which we get intuitions of external objects, is organized spatiotemporally; "inner sense," which gives us intuitions of "inner" or mental phenomena, is just organized temporally.) Since all human intuitions must be spatial and temporal, space and time constitute the form of human intuition. Just as we know independently of the matter of a sonnet that it will have certain features, so we know a priori or independently of the matter of experience that all intuitions are of spatiotemporal things; this is why we can have a priori knowledge of geometry. This analogy points up a further interesting point. Although we can give a general characterization of a poem's form without saying anything about its content, and a general characterization of its content without saying anything about its form, we cannot identify specific parts of a poem as formal features or matters of content. Any particular word or phrase will contribute to both the poem's form and its content; the division of the poem into form and content is not a division into parts. The same thing is true, for Kant, of experience. We cannot point to some parts of our experience as formal and some parts as material; all are matter organized by form.

But this very analogy suggests a possible disanalogy. In the case of a poem, though form and content are closely connected, we can at least roughly distinguish the formal features of the poem from its content: the fact that it is in iambic pentameter is a formal feature; the fact that it paints a pessimistic picture of love is a matter of its content. We can specify the formal features of a poem without saying anything about its content, and we can give a paraphrase of its content without saying anything about its form. (I have some misgivings about how far this latter is possible; thus my weak claim that there may be a disanalogy.) In Kant's case, however, although we can say something about the form of human intuition in isolation from its content, we seem to be able to say nothing about its content independent of its form. For example, while an object's shape and size are obviously spatial properties (and hence part of its form?), it would be a mistake to identify its color, e.g., as a part of its content, i.e. as a feature of the object itself rather than something imposed by the form of our experience. Why should this be? A partial answer might be the following. The only way we can talk about the content of a poem independent of its form is to describe its content in a different form, e.g. by giving a prose paraphrase. But precisely this is impossible in the case of experience, since Kant thinks the only form of human experience is spatiotemporal: there is no question of discussing the content of our experience in a different form, hence no way to get a handle on the matter of experience as what is shared by various experiences of different forms. I promised two examples of purported synthetic a priori knowledge, and so far have delivered only one. The second one I want to mention is our knowledge of the law of causality, that is, of the proposition that every event has a cause. Kant thinks we can know this for something like the same reason that he thinks we can know the truths of geometry. Causality is one of twelve "Categories" Kant argues we impose on our experience. But the categories are imposed by the understanding rather than by intuition; we might think of them as "forms of thought" (to my knowledge Kant does not use quite this expression, though he does regard them as derived from the "forms of judgment"). The idea is that, just as we cannot perceive objects without perceiving them as spatiotemporal, we cannot think about them except as conforming to the Categories. Thought presupposes the categories in something like the same way perception presupposes space and time. But experience requires both concepts and intuitions, both sensibility and understanding; so experience requires both space and time and the categories. A very quick version of Kant's argument that we must be able to apply the Categories, including the notion of causality, to our experiences might be the following. (I hope it is not seriously misleading, though it omits mention of many niceties. Kant's argument is found in the "Transcendental Deduction of the Categories" in the Critique of Pure Reason; a simpler version is in his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, sections 14-23.) Kant begins by observing that our experience is coherent and unified. But, he argues with considerable plausibility, this is only possible if we take our experiences, our mental representations, to be representations of objects external to us. Our experiences would be a mere meaningless jumble, a "blooming buzzing confusion" to use James's expression, if we were unable to take them to be experiences of an external world. But, Kant argues, we can only take our experiences to be representative of an external world if we have a general concept of an object, the notion of an "object in general." We need, that is, to have some idea what it would be for our representations to be related to something outside us. It is hard to imagine that we could acquire the relevant concept by merely attending to the play of our consciousness. Or rather, it is hard to see how we could extract this idea from our experience if we had not already placed it there, had not already used it in

interpreting our experience (thereby changing the subjective quality of that experience). Nothing about the phenomenological quality of our experience makes it necessary that it be about external things; it could be just an endless meaningless play of colored shapes and noises and sensations of hot and cold, solidity and resilience. To interpret our experience as experience of an external world, we need to supply the notion of an external world, and especially of an external object. Kant suggests that the twelve Categories constitute the concept of an object in general, and thus are what we add to our experience (so to speak) in order to transform it into experience of an external, objective world. Of these twelve Categories, the two most important are causality and substance; thus, the idea of an object in general is the notion of a substance that stands in causal relations with other substances. (We remember that Locke admitted that we could not acquire an adequate conception of substance from experience, and that Berkeley insisted we could acquire no such notion at all from experience. Kant agrees with them about this much, but does not accept their assumption that experience is the only possible source of ideas. Kant agrees with the rationalists, as against the empiricists, in supposing that we possess some ideas which we do not derive from experience but which are simply supplied by our reason.) It will be noticed that if this argument establishes something about causality, it is only that we need to be able to apply the idea to our experiences, not the general thesis that every event must have a cause. Kant does have an argument for the more specific claim, to be found in the infamous "Second Analogy of Experience," but I will not discuss it here. This concludes my discussion of the positive side of Kant's epistemology, of his argument that we can have a priori knowledge of synthetic truths. We have seen that Kant thinks we can have such knowledge because the empirical world is partly our construction, and we construct it so as to be spatiotemporal and to consist of substances standing in causal relations. By looking inward rather than outward, we can discover those features we impose on the world. It is time to turn to the negative part of Kant's view, his rejection of any sort of knowledge of things in themselves. 2. Kant's negative claim: we can know nothing about things in themselves. Kant's positive epistemological doctrine is explicitly designed to be a response to skepticism. Yet at the same time Kant's view includes some very skeptical-sounding claims. Indeed, although Kant argues against both Humean skepticism and Berkeleian idealism, his view often appears to me to be a rather odd combination of both. Kant insists that all our knowledge is knowledge of what he calls appearances. Appearance is usually contrasted with reality, and so this sounds rather like a denial that we know anything about reality. It is also reminiscent of Locke's claim that all our knowledge is of the relations of ideas. But these apparent connections are at least somewhat misleading, since Kant regards the entire empirical world as a collection of appearances. Kant does not for a moment doubt that we know a great many things about objects external to ourselves; both mathematics and natural science, he believes, give us such knowledge. The conventional distinction between appearance and reality, between the way things look to us (sometimes mistakenly) and the way they really are, is for Kant a distinction within the realm of appearances.

And yet there is something ultimately subjective about appearances, and thus about the whole empirical world, for Kant. The world of appearances is partly our own creation, yet Kant thinks that standing behind this world of appearances is a really real world that we have nothing to do with, which is utterly independent of our knowledge. Our world, the empirical world, the world of appearances, is objective in the sense that it is the same for all of us: it is intersubjective. But it is subjective in that it is a uniquely human world. Kant thinks that there could be creatures with other sorts of intuition than ours. (Does he think there could be creatures with other sorts of understanding? I do not know.) Such creatures would not share our world. But something, the external source of our experience, would be the same for us and them. This, one is tempted to say, is the really real world. At any rate, this external source comprises what Kant calls the "things in themselves." A thing in itself is a thing as it is independent of any human conceptualization. And Kant argues that we can know nothing at all about things in themselves. This suggests the following characterization of Kant's position. Think of the problem of skepticism as the problem of how, given knowledge of the way things appear to us to be, we can acquire knowledge of how they really are (and remember Descartes' linking of the appearancereality and mental-physical distinctions, so that appearances are thought of as mental and reality as physical). Then two main responses to the problem are Berkeley's reductive response of insisting that reality is really just a subdivision of the appearances so that a properly sophisticated knowledge of the appearances is automatically also knowledge of reality, and Hume's skeptical response of accepting that reality is separate from appearance and denying that we can know anything about reality. (Well, probably this isn't quite the right characterization of Hume. Never mind.) Now, Kant seems to combine both responses! He insists with Berkeley that (empirical) reality is just a matter of appearance, so that knowledge of empirical reality is as straightforward as knowledge of appearances. This is the positive part of his doctrine. But he insists with the skeptic that we can know nothing of the really real world, the world of things in themselves. And this negative part of his doctrine, while admittedly it does not threaten any of our practices (as Humean skepticism also did not), seems as skeptical as the hardest-core skeptic could wish. It is useful to distinguish three related doctrines of Kant's. There is, first, the doctrine that we cannot have knowledge of anything we cannot experience. Anything beyond the reach of experience is unknowable. (But we must be careful to construe the reach of experience broadly enough; we may not be able to directly experience dinosaurs or quarks, but they are systematically related to things we do directly experience, and that is good enough.) In this Kant is the heir of the empiricists and the precursor of the positivists. The second doctrine is that we can have no experience of things in themselves. Of course it follows from the first and second doctrines together that we can know nothing about things in themselves, but many who accept the first doctrine will want to reject the second. Finally, Kant's third doctrine is that God, freedom and immortality all belong to the realm of things in themselves, and thus to the realm of things about which we can know nothing. About this third doctrine I would like to assert dogmatically that I think it entirely unjustified. It seems to me that our knowledge of these matters is no less direct than our knowledge of the more theoretical parts of physics or the more remote parts of history. In my view, if there really is a distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal, between appearances and things in themselves, then God and related matters are thoroughly phenomenal, a part of the world of appearances. --Though of course if they exist then like everything else they have noumenal underpinnings. But given that much of Kant's

motivation for insisting on the unknowability of things in themselves has to do with protecting God from the failure of arguments for his existence, and with protecting freedom from the law of causality, accepting my assertion might leave him with little reason for insisting on his sharp distinction between knowable phenomena and unknowable noumena. We have been discussing Kant's epistemology for some time. We have seen that Kant's epistemological motivation for idealism is to thwart skepticism, and we have seen that while his philosophy is in one sense antiskeptical, in another equally valid sense it seems to be very skeptical indeed. It is time now to turn to Kant's practical motivation for idealism.