Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant has postulated that there are three ways or categories where knowledge of the relationship between subject and predicate is obtained the analytic a priori, the synthetic a posteriori, and his controversial synthetic a priori.
Kants analytic a priori it means that the predicate B is connected with the subject A by virtue of the fact that the former is covertly contained in the latter and thus does not any more require the use of intuition (Durant, 1961, p. 265). In this case, knowledge is directly known as it is stated in the given proposition. And since it is a priori, then it does not require experience or empirical evidence to prove it. My example of the analytic a priori is All dead people are people that have died. By virtue of this statements being analytic, it means that when I think of people that have died, I also cannot avoid thinking of and that they are dead people. By virtue of this statements being a priori, as all analytic statements are, it means that I do not have to check whether everyone that has died are also dead or whether the statement is true. The statement simply means that I just know that it is true that All dead people are those that have died.
Kants synthetic a posteriori, on the other hand, simply means that predicate B is connected with the subject A though they are both separate in such a way that when I think of B, it does not necessarily lead to my thinking of A, thus they are synthetic. And as a posteriori, it means that empirical evidence or experience is the means to prove the connection (between predicate B and subject A) (Durant, 1961, p. 265). An example of which is, Most dead people are visited by their relatives. To prove that this is synthetic, we have to think of the predicate B (visited by their relatives) and when we think of it, we cannot immediately say that we automatically think of the subject A (dead people) because visited by their relatives may be a quality ascribed not only to the dead but also to the living. And to prove the connection between subject A and predicate B we therefore employ the use of empirical evidence by counting how many people visit the cemeteries everyday. Synthetic judgments, without considering Kantian metaphysics, are normally a posteriori.
The controversial synthetic a priori of Kant states that although judgment is synthetic (separate and distinct), the connection can be established a priori (without the need of empirical evidence) (Durant, 1961, p. 266). An example would be Some dead people are remembered by their relatives. This statement is synthetic in that the predicate does not necessarily presuppose the subject. However, we do not need evidence to prove this that is, we somehow know by virtue of intuition. Furthermore, we cannot directly prove this by empirical evidence. We can count the number of people visiting their dead relatives in the cemetery but we cannot conclude for sure that this act is done to remember them. But we just simply know.
Though logically the synthetic a priori is not possible due to the fact that the connection is not logically proven, Kant maintains that some concepts such as mathematics, Newtonian physics and metaphysics are based on obviously true statements, he concludes that these connections between subjects and predicates which are not proven by empirical evidence must have arisen from Pure Reason. The only way, therefore, to prove the truth of these synthetic a priori judgments is none other than reason itself. This is Kants Critique of Pure Reason.
For Kant, substance is a category of understanding that is related only to sense data and that it is consequently useless in the discovery of knowledge. For Kant, any sense data that is organized and held by the mind in permanence is called substance. It is the work of the mind or intellect to further synthesize substances making them related to causality. The necessary ingredient here or the one that makes this synthesis possible (from sense data to substance and from substance to causally-related substance) is intuition (Durant, 1961, p. 271). If, for example, we are thinking of a duck, it is merely sense data. Intuition, in a way, converts this sense data (duck) in our minds into a substance represented by an animal with feathers and lays eggs. Furthermore, intuition is needed to synthesize from the original sense data duck an idea that a duck came from an egg, thus making the original sense data duck into a causally-related substance, or a substance that is governed by the law of causality.
Kant states that substance is a category of understanding that we impose upon that which appears or is sensed. Sense data, according to Kant, is unorganized stimulus and is therefore chaotic (Durant, 1961, p. 272). For example, duck as a sense data, would mean any of the various breeds of duck or maybe a dead duck or a duck cartoon character or maybe the roasted duck you ate last night. Therefore, with the help of our intuition, this sense data duck is synthesized into substance and thus we can now think of what is common among our various unorganized versions of sense data of duck above. We therefore come up with an animal with white feathers and two legs and can swim and can be eaten. This category of substance is what we impose not only on our sense data duck but also on EVERY OTHER sense data we encounter. It is likened to an organizing factor that makes sense out of senseless sense data.
According to Kant, the pure intuitions of our mind are those of space and time. According to him, we do not have objective and real representations of space and time. What we instead have is immediate representations that do not exclude sensation, thus both space and time are pure intuitions (Durant, 1961, p. 275).
But what is the proof that space and time are necessary conditions for all possible experience According to Kant, sense data is merely the awareness of the stimulus and is unorganized and chaotic. This sense data therefore needs to be organized into more meaningful substance before it can be considered as knowledge. This process of organizing requires a sort of templates in the form of sense of space and sense of time two simple methods for the classification (and organization) of chaotic sense material. The mind, therefore, allocates its sense data in space and time, attributes (or connects) it to this object here and that object there and to this present time or past (Durant, 1961, p. 275). Space and time are therefore likened to modes of perception that put sense and meaning into sense data. Space and time are a priori and without them, the unorganized sense data can never grow into perceptions and knowledge.
An example to illustrate this would be to consider our original example of the duck sense data. This sense data must have first arrived to us through a word we heard from a friend of yours who said, Hey I saw a duck outside. With such a lack of information in the sentence, the sense data duck to us is therefore meaningless and disorganized, in that we do not exactly know what the speaker meant by it. Without the next step involving space and time organization, you might end up thinking that it was a giant duck or Donald Duck that your friend saw. However, in a matter of a split second or even shorter than that, our minds pure intuition of space immediately, or automatically, relates this sense data duck into an animal with white feathers and two webbed feet, a bird capable of swimming, or of being eaten. Similarly, the minds sense of time relates this duck to all the events that preceded its sensation that it cannot be a cartoon character because your friend was not watching TV when he said that he had seen a duck. Moreover the speaker is made to think that this duck must have come from an egg and is likely to lay more eggs if it were female perceptions brought about by the pure intuition of time. Thus, the sense data duck becomes perception and therefore knowledge. Such is the proof of the necessity of space and time for all possible sense experience.
Categories:
0 comments:
Post a Comment