Immanuel Kant\'s Contribution to Epistemology

1


A SEMINAR PAPER

ON

IMMANUEL KANT'S CONTRIBUTION TO EPISTEMOLOGY

PRESENTED BY: AKOMOLAFE OLUWATOBA M.

MATRIC NO: 187189

COURSE CODE: PHI 709

COURSE TITLE: EPISTEMOLOGY

LECTURERS- IN- CHARGE: DR. OFFOR
DR. NWAUGO

IMMANUEL KANT'S CONTRIBUTION TO EPISTEMOLOGY

OVERVIEW OF EPISTEMOLOGY
Epistemology is the study of the nature, source, and limits of knowledge. It analyzes the nature of knowledge and how it relates to similar notions such as truth, belief and justification. It also deals with the means of production of knowledge, as well as skepticism about different knowledge claims. It is essentially about issues having to do with the creation and dissemination of knowledge in particular areas of inquiry 1.Epistemology asks questions like: ''what is knowledge?'', ''How is knowledge acquired?'', ''what do people know?'', ''what are the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge?'', ''what is its structure, and what is its limits?'', ''what makes justified beliefs justified?'', ''is justification internal or external to one's own mind?''. Then what is knowledge itself?
Knowledge is a familiarity, awareness or understanding of someone or something such as facts, information, descriptions or skills, which is acquired through experience or education by perceiving, discovery or learning 2. Knowledge has been fragmented into three types: acquaintance knowledge (i know Prof. Upokolo well), ability knowledge (i know how to operate the computer), and propositional knowledge (i know that eagles are birds). The first two types of knowledge are very interesting but philosophy is concerned only with the third, what it is to know some proposition, ''p'' 3. The traditional approach to proposition knowledge requires three necessary and sufficient conditions, which are:
Truth: Since false propositions cannot be known, for something to count as knowledge it must actually be true. As Aristotle famously expressed it: ''To say of something which is that is not, or to say of something which is not that it is, is false. However, to say of something which is that it is or of something which is not that is not, is true''
Belief: One cannot know something that doesn't even belief in, the statement ''i know x, but i don't belief that x is true, is contradictory
Justification: For a claim to be knowledge the agent must have a justification of believing that something is true 4.
The next issue will now be how do we arrive or acquire knowledge that satisfies these criterions?

HOW DO WE ACQUIRE RELIABLE KNOWLEDGE?
Philosophers have given considerable attention to the question about the source of knowledge. One popular way of approaching the subject, though by no means the only way, is to begin by examining two very important views about the source of knowledge: rationalism and empiricism. The former is of the view that knowledge (justified true belief) can be obtained by relying on reason without the aid of the senses, while the latter argues that knowledge can be attained only through sense experience. These can be elaborated as follows:
RATIONALISM
By rationalism, we mean the belief that reason, without the aid of sensory perception, is capable of arriving at some knowledge, some undeniable truths. A knowledge that is prior to experience. When rationalists claim that knowledge is based on reason rather than perception, they mean that we do not rely on sensory experience for some of the fundamental knowledge we have. In effect, rationalism contends that some of our knowledge is not a product of experience but depends solely on our mental processes. They hold that we can acquire accurate knowledge about the world around us by simply looking into our minds and without observing the world 5. At the vanguard of the rationalist movement is Plato with his theory of the Forms. He argues that human knowledge is contingent on the knowledge of forms the human soul has been acquainted with in its pre-embodied state thought which have been forgotten. This knowledge Plato calls innate ideas. Human knowledge therefore flows from the vague knowledge of the forms in our mind through the process of meditation.
EMPIRICISM
Beginning in the sixteenth century, a school of epistemology emerged that contrasted sharply with that of rationalism. Empiricism is the belief that all knowledge about the world comes from or is based on the senses. Reacting to the rationalistic claims, empiricists hold that the human mind contains nothing except what experience has put there. Thus, all ideas originate in sense experience. Consequently, empiricism teaches that true knowledge is a posteriori. That is, it depends on experience; it is knowledge stated in empirically verifiable statements 6. At the helm of the empiricist tradition is John Locke, an English philosopher. Locke was the first to launch a systematic attack on the belief that reason alone could provide us with knowledge. He compared the mind to a blank slate, tabula rasa, on which experience makes its mark. Another empiricist worthy of mentioning is David Hume. Humian empiricism is a thorough going kind. Compare to that of John Locke and Bishop Berkeley. He really radicalized empiricism and pushed it to its logical conclusion. As thorough going empiricist, Hume hold that our knowledge of the world is solely comes from experience. Any knowledge not gained through experience is false and must ignore it. It is on this note Hume criticized the notion of causality or necessary connections because we do not experience causality, and, therefore, we cannot infer or predict any future event from our experience of the present. What we call causality, said Hume, is simply our habit of associating two events because we experience them together, but this does not justify the conclusion that these events have a necessary connection 7. On this note he argued that the cause-and-effect laws of science go beyond the evidence that scientist have for them. Scientist observes a few times that certain causes are followed by certain effects. They see several times, for example, that when a moving object hits another, the second object moves. They conclude that those kinds of causes will always followed by the same effects in the future. Hume then stress that how do scientist know that the future will always be like the past? And how do scientists know that the phenomenon they see a few times will always happen every time? Hume argued that scientist have no evidence for jumping from what they observe some times in the past to conclusions about what will happen every time in the future 8.The logical outcome of Hume's empiricism was that there cannot be any scientific knowledge, and this leads to philosophical skepticism. After Immanuel Kant read Hume's rejection of the principle of causality, he (Kant) claimed he woke up from his dogmatic slumber. Kant says:
I openly confess that my recollection of David Hume was very thing which many years ago first awoke me from my dogmatic slumber and gave my investigations in the field of speculative philosophy a quite new direction. But i was far from following him in the conclusions at which he arrived 9.
Subsequently the paper will examine what Kant did after waking up from his slumber.
IMMANUEL KANT'S INTERVENTION
Immanuel Kant is considered by many philosophers to be the most important philosopher since Plato and Aristotle. Having been awoken from his dogmatic slumber by Hume, Kant sought to respond to the skepticism revealed in Hume's analysis of causality by providing a different account of how knowledge is possible at all. In doing so, Kant rejected both rationalism and empiricism as providing an adequate account of knowledge. He rejected rationalism for being too dogmatic in metaphysics and empiricism for being too skeptical in epistemology and he wanted to find a way between ''too much'' and ''too little'' 10. Kant referred to his attempt to provide a different account of knowledge as ''Copernican Revolution'' in philosophy. He holds that philosophy has reached a pivotal point where revolution is needed. In this revolution Kant attempt to reconcile the conflict between the traditions of rationalism and empiricism in holding that both reason and the senses are necessary for knowledge 11. In his most influential work, Critique of Pure Reason, Kant accepts Hume's proposition that experience is the only basis for true knowledge of reality. Unwilling to end the debate there, however, Kant suggested that reason also contributes something to our knowledge. Kant stated his proposal:
But though all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it all arise out of experience. For it may be that even our empirical knowledge is made up of what we receive through (sense) impressions and of what our faculty of knowledge...supplies for itself 12.
Kant is of the view that, though experience contributes a large role in human acquisition of knowledge, but the marginal role of reason cannot be totally circumscribed. Kant sought to demonstrate that the rationalists had an invaluable insight, which had been lost in their speculation, that there is an a priori structure to the mind that causes us to know what we know. In a bid to mediate between the empiricist's view that knowledge comes solely from the sense impressions with the rationalists contention that knowledge comes solely from reason and more properly to reverse the prevalent belief held that the mind is a mere passive wax culminated into the his (Kant) Copernican revolution in philosophy. This will be discussed subsequently.
IMMANUEL KANT COPERNICAN REVOLUTION
Kant goes down in the history of thought as a giant. Kant declared himself neither empiricist nor rationalist but achieved a synthesis of the two in his greatest work The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), which marked the end of the period of the Enlightenment and began a new period of philosophy, German idealism. Kant claimed that knowledge was impossible without accepting truths from both rationalist and empiricist schools of thought. Kant magnanimous effort in philosophy is labeled a Copernican revolution because it is an act similar to what Copernicus did in astronomy. Before Copernicus (1475-1543), it was generally believed that the earth was at the center of the universal and that the sun and all other planets revolved round the sun 13. Kant did a similar thing in epistemology. What motivated his revolutionary move were the obvious success and the constant advance of scientific knowledge. What the success of Newtonian physics did for Kant was to raise some serious question about the adequacy of the philosophy of his day. The two major traditions of his day were Continental rationalism and British empiricism, and Newtonian physics enjoyed an independence from both of these philosophical systems 14. Before Kant, it was generally believed that in the process of acquiring knowledge the human mind was passive while objects of perception imposed themselves on the mind. Kant's Copernican Revolution involves rejecting the metaphor of the mind as a mirror of nature and along with the assumption, since Plato, that knowledge is merely passive. This previous conception of the mind had led to the epistemological problem of determining how any of the ideas in the mind could accurately copy or correspond to a reality outside the mind for any objective reality which our ideas somehow reflect. The Copernican Revolution in philosophy rejects this attempt and instead turns inwards, to the structure of the human mind, to find the basis for knowledge 15. According to Kant, the mind is not passive but rather is actively involved in constituting or setting up the world we experience .Kant argues that materials things in the world does not impress themselves on the mind, it is the mind that imposes itself, its own structure, on things, forcing the things we perceived to conform to its own structure. The mind, in other words, imposes its own categories on objects of sense perception, forcing them to conform to these categories 16. The categories of human understanding represent the structure of the human mind. They are the way in which the mind looks at things and understands them. They are like the "windows" through which the mind looks at things and sees or knows them. Before the mind can understand anything, it must apply the categories to it and at it through the categories .Kant stress further than the human mind is continually at work, putting order into the chaotic stream of endless changing sensations. It introduces order by arranging these sensations into stable objects by connecting then according to categories. The most important of the categories is the basic law of science: that all perceived event must have a cause. The mind, according to Kant, takes earlier sensations of an object and connects them to later sensations by making the earlier one the causes of the latter ones. In this way, the mind inserts cause and effect relations into the world we perceive 17. Hume had objected that we do not actually see causality. Causality is not one of the sensations that our senses give us. So, we cannot be sure that causality is there in the world. Kant partly agrees; we do not see causality because it is a relationship between objects and is not an object itself. But we still know that causality is there in the world. It is there because the mind put it there. Causality is a relationship that the mind uses to connect earlier sensations to later ones. For example, the booming sound you attribute to a truck driving pass, the ringing you attribute to the telephone etc., each sensation of sound, sight, touch, and smell seems to be the sound, sight, touch or smell of an object somewhere in the space around you. It is therefore the causal power of the mind to categorize these sensations with objects in space. Thus, Kant holds that the source of our knowledge of the relationship among object is reason. Hence both apriori and aposteriori elements are essential. Without sensation, no object would be perceptible and without understanding, no object could be conceived 18. As Kant put it in his Critique of Pure Reason, "thought without contents are empty, perceptions without conceptions are blind…understanding can perceive nothing, the sense can think nothing. Knowledge arises only from their united action" 19.
Sequel to these, Kant holds that the world we see around is a world that our own mind constructs and not of the actual nature of the world. Hence he made a distinction between phenomena and noumena. Noumena are ''things-in-themselves'', the reality that exist independent of our mind, whereas phenomena are appearances, reality as our mind makes sense of it. According to Kant, we can never know with certainty what is ''out there''. Since all our knowledge of the external world is filtered through our metal faculties, we can know only the world that our mind presents to us. That is, all our knowledge is only knowledge of phenomena, and we must accept that noumena are fundamentally unknowable 20. After synthesizing the two warring schools (rationalism and empiricism), Kant advance the third form of knowledge which he calls synthetic a priori knowledge.
SYNTHETIC A PRIORI KNOWLEDGE
Synthetic a priori knowledge is knowledge that is both a priori and synthetic. This is one of Kant's contributions to epistemology. Before Kant it was generally believed by philosopher that only analytic propositions could be a priori, that a synthetic proposition was always a posteriori. Analytic propositions is a one in which what is affirmed in the predicate is already contained in the subject. In that case the predicate adds nothing to what is already contained in the subject, and so our knowledge is not increased by what is affirmed in the predicated. For example, a 'frozen water is ice', the ideas of ice is already contained in the idea of frozen water, thus nothing new has been said. It is a mere tautological statement that is necessarily true and cannot be denied without self-contradiction 21.
A synthetic proposition, on the other hand is a proposition in which the predicate adds something new to the subject. What the predicate affirms, in other words, is not contained in the subject, so it adds something new to it and gives information. For example statement like ''University of Ibadan library is painted white'', here what the predicates affirms is not contain in the notion of the subject. The statement gave information and the predicate add something new to the subject since the idea of 'white paint' doesn't imply University of Ibadan Library. Unlike analytic proposition, a synthetic proposition is not necessarily true and it can be denied without self-contradictions. It may be true, it may be false.
Before Kant, it was generally believed by philosophers that only analytic propositions could be a priori, that any proposition that was synthetic had to be a posteriori. In other words it was believed that propositions could not be both a priori and synthetic but Kant disagreed with this position. He maintains that there are some propositions that are both a priori and synthetic and they are known as synthetic a priori propositions. Kant maintained that there were such propositions in Mathematics, in Physics and in Ethics. For example, ''7+5=12'' is a priori because it is a necessary and universal truth we know independent to experience, and it is synthetic because the concept of ''12'' is not contained in the concept of ''7+5''. The same is true for scientific principles such as, ''for every action there is an equal reaction'' because is it not derived from experience and cannot be contradicted by experience 22. By and large, Kant has made a commendable contribution to the epistemological enterprise and to philosophy in general with his Copernican Revolution which introduced the human mind as an active originator of experience rather than just a passive recipient of perception. However, Kant's theory has serious implications in epistemology and these have generated responses to this epistemological theory. This will be look into consequently.
APPRAISAL OF KANT'S EPISTEMOLOGY
There is no doubt that Immanuel Kant contributed immensely to the epistemological doctrine and philosophy generally with his Copernican Revolution and synthetic a priori knowledge. However, his theory has its shortcomings. It can be said that Kant had logically fallen into what he was trying to refute, that is, skepticism from Hume. Instead of solving the problem of knowledge he created another problem of knowledge by postulating another world of reality in itself, which he called the world of noumena. This world of noumena for Kant, we cannot know because it is beyond the understanding of human mind 23. Another problem identified in Kant's theory is on how he was able to arrive at the notion of ''noumena'' if as he claims the knowledge at our disposal is only of ''phenomena''. Since no man can transcend the phenomena, then Kant needs to explain how he got to know that the noumena exist since he (Kant) is not an exception. This simply amount to a contradiction.
Also, to an extent, it can be argued that Kant's theory presupposes epistemological relativism. If as Kant claims, what man can know is all that his mind structures for him, and since the mind configuration differs, it follows therefore that our interpretation of matters of fact will be relative; it will be contingent on the bases of how it appears to us or how our individual mind structures it for us. Hence the best man can have about the external world is mere subjective opinion as contrasted to knowledge.
Finally, after reading through the epistemological postulations of Kant, i commend him as much as i condemn him. Though Kant did not exhaust the entire problem in epistemology but he made a great attempt with this synthesis that the intellect and senses are both essential for our knowledge. The intellect and senses work hand in hand for acquisition of knowledge. I am of the same mind with Kant that our knowledge begins with sense experience and continues with reason. I will liken knowledge to ''cloth''; a cloth cannot be possibly made without the complimentary effort of the cotton and the machine. Cotton alone cannot give us cloth nor can machine also do. We need the employment of the two to have a cloth. Therefore, sense experience in cooperation with reason gives us knowledge.






ENDNOTE
1 Culled from www.philosophybasic.com/branch_epistemology.html)

2 Culled from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=knowledge&oldid=666741527)

3 Michael Lacewing, The Tripartite Definition of Knowledge, (UK, Rutledge: 1998), p. 2

4 ibid: 3

5 Manuel Velasquez, Philosophy: A Text with reading (Belmont, CA, Wadsworth: 1996), p.354

6 ibid, 365

7 Samuel Enoch Stumpf, Socrates to Sartre, A History of Philosophy (New York, McGraw-Hill:
1966), p. 280


8 Joseph Omoregbe, A Simplified History of Western Philosophy, Vol. ii (Lagos, Joja educational
Research and Publisher: 2003), p. 75

9 Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, trans. Lewis White Beck (New York,
Bobbs-Merrill: 1950) p. 8

10 Stumpf, Op. Cit: 281

11 Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, by Immanuel Kant, trans. Peter Gray Lucas in the
Longman standard history of philosophy

12 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 2d. Ed., trans. Norman Kemp Smith, London:
Macmillan 1929; original work published 1781, page 1-2

13 Joseph Omoregbe, Epistemology: A Systematic and Historical Study (Lagos: Joja Education
and Publisher Limited), p. 93

14 Stumpf, Op. Cit: 280

15 Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, by Immanuel Kant, trans, by Peter Gray Lucas in
The Longman Standard History of Philosophy, Daniel Kolak and Garrett Thomason eds, New
York: Pearson Education, Inc. 2006

16 Joseph Omoregbe, Epistemology: A Systematic and Historical Study (Lagos: Joja Education
and Publisher Limited), p. 93


17 Velasquez, Op. Cit, 382

18 Kenneth Shouler, Immanuel Kant: Combining Empiricism and Rationalism (New York,
Wordsworth: 1992), p.29

19 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 2d. Ed., trans. Norman Kemp Smith, London:
Macmillan 1929; original work published 1781, page

20 Culled from www.sparksnote.com/philosophy/kant/themes.html

21 Joseph Omoregbe, Epistemology: A Systematic and Historical Study (Lagos: Joja Education
and Publisher Limited), p. 93

22 Culled from www.sparksnote.com/philosophy/kant/themes.html

23 Frank N. Magill ed. 'Immanuel Kant'', Master Pieces of World Philosophy (New York: Harper and Row Publishers: 1961), p. 536


















REFERENCES

www.philosophybasic.com/branch_epistemology.html)

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=knowledge&oldid=666741527

Michael Lacewing, The Tripartite Definition of Knowledge, (UK, Rutledge: 1998)

Manuel Velasquez, Philosophy: A Text with reading (Belmont, CA, Wadsworth: 1996)

Samuel Enoch Stumpf, Socrates to Sartre, A History of Philosophy (New York, McGraw-Hill: 1966)

Joseph Omoregbe, A Simplified History of Western Philosophy, Vol. ii (Lagos, Joja educational
Research and Publisher: 2003)

Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, trans. Lewis White Beck (New York,
Bobbs-Merrill: 1950)

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 2d. Ed., trans. Norman Kemp Smith, London: Macmillan 1929; original work published 1781

Joseph Omoregbe, Epistemology: A Systematic and Historical Study (Lagos: Joja Education
and Publisher Limited)

Manuel Velasquez, Philosophy: A Text with reading (Belmont, CA, Wadsworth: 1996)

Kenneth Shouler, Immanuel Kant: Combining Empiricism and Rationalism (New York,
Wordsworth: 1992)

www.sparksnote.com/philosophy/kant/themes.html

Frank N. Magill ed. 'Immanuel Kant'', Master Pieces of World Philosophy (New York: Harper and Row Publishers: 1961)