Theme #1 Pre

Immanuel Kant was a philosopher who was active during the period of enlightenment.

Before him there had been two different camps of epistemology. One camp, the empiricists were arguing that all of our knowledge is to be learned by experience through sensing and perceiving. For example, how is a blind man supposed to have know any concept of color without experiencing it? Most people would probably assume that this is indeed the case, that the man won’t be able to have knowledge of this, and it therefore makes sense that knowledge is learned through experience. But is all knowledge really learned from experience? This is where the other camp of philosophers comes in, also known as rationalists. They argued that knowledge is also learned without experiencing objects but through logic instead. Mathematics is an example of what they would argue is learned through logical reasoning and inference instead of experience. “ 2 + 2 = 4 “ is an example of a knowledge obtained this way.

What Kant proposed was in a way a middle ground between the two. According to him we have some a priori knowledge of concepts which we then use for determining what certain things are. These are our innate a priori knowledge. But we also learn through experience and change our concepts from that. With the quote from the preface Kant is contemplating alternatives to the empiricist epistemology. “The cognition must conform to objects” means that our knowledge needs to have a basis in nature, something which is experienced, even abstract things can be experienced. As mentioned this is the empiricist view. In philosophy it’s not uncommon to assume that some things are true in order to investigate a train of thought or just flip things around in order to see if there’s a plausible explanation to be found. This is what Kant is doing when he says “assume that objects must conform to our cognition”. Basically let us assume that we have some innate knowledge about things, some a priori knowledge which the objects are then subsequently known by.This innate knowledge could differ between people and thus serve as an explanation to why people might experience things differently.

Socrates is arguing that we do perceive things through our senses such as the eyes and the ears, rather than by the eyes and the ears. What he means is that it would be weird if we had all our different senses disconnected from each other. One could instead think that these are connected by something like a soul that is responsible for processing the inputs from these different senses. As we know today these sensory organs are connected to different parts of the brain, such as the visual cortex which is responsible for processing the input from our eyes and produce images. So Socrates wasn’t necessarily wrong with that statement.

As touched upon earlier empiricists believe that all knowledge comes from experience. Certainly Socrates’ argument is strengthening this theory but does it at the same time really refute other theories? An experience is perceived by the senses and knowledge is therefore acquired.That doesn’t necessarily mean that some concepts aren’t already programmed into our brains upon inception which Kant meant was the case. There’s still a lot of mystery left on how the brain works. But I do strongly believe that with all it’s complexity should be able to learn from reasoning. I would hold mathematics and other sorts of logic as examples here. They do show that it’s possible to acquire new knowledge without experiencing it but rather through reasoning.

Actually I do think that the empiricist theory on epistemology isn’t easy to dismiss as being the only source of knowledge. When you think about it experience plays a big role for knowledge. As I’m writing this I can’t think of a single knowledge that I can’t ascribe to experience. Even mathematics could probably be argued as being experienced. First in a very simple way when starting to count, 1 person + another person are two people. From this the concept of counting is born and it’s easy to extend this knowledge. But as rationalists mean, if you know the concept from the previous example you don’t have to actually experience 5 people + 5 people in reality to understand that it should be 10 people. This is reasoned by use of the concept which was acquired at an earlier stage. However, knowing that 5 + 5 equals 10 should maybe be considered a new knowledge. A knowledge that actually wasn’t experienced.

When discussing this topic it would be handy to have a good definition of what knowledge is, which means that we would have to return to the question which philosophers have tried to answer for ages. What is knowledge?