In my last posting, I brought up the effect that post
modernism has had on critical theorists; that is, the strain of thought that has
promoted the idea that we cannot be about the business of stating anything
definitively about the world around us. In
their eyes, there seems to be a disconnect between what we see and what we
know. From where did this sort of
thinking come? Well, there is a line of
thinkers stretching all the way back to the 1700s that laid the groundwork for
this view. It probably starts with David
Hume, but this posting is going to share the thoughts of Immanuel Kant and his epistemology.
To establish the context a bit, there was an ongoing
philosophical debate between philosophers who saw the way to seek truth was
through the use of reason and those who counted on our ability to understand reality
through perceptions. Those who counted
on reason saw our main tool in figuring out the nature of reality was our minds
and the internal mechanizations we perform in our efforts to understand what
is, be it the physical world or the supernatural world. The second group, the empiricists, relied on
their senses, what they saw, smelled, and/or tactilely felt. This debate, in one form or another, has a
long lineage. One can consider the
differences between Plato and Aristotle to be one version. Anyway, it is into this backdrop that Kant
contributed his thoughts.
With a nod to Hume, Kant accepted the former thinker’s claim
that we cannot experience cause and effect relations. From there, Kant’s argument begins by
accepting and rejecting portions of both the reason based argument and the
empiricists based argument. He felt that
in both these camps, there were understatement and overstatement.
Let us start with the empiricist side. Kant claimed that we rely on our senses to “see”
the world; it is through our senses that we acquire the material of our
knowledge. But immediately, our mind
comes into play in that it provides the form in which the perceptions are
received. It is like water in a pitcher;
the water conforms to the shape of the container. So does the information our senses pick up;
the mind shapes that information. Some
might use other analogies, such as the mind provides the “glasses” by which we
view reality. What is understood or
registered in the mind is shaped by the mind in certain ways. These ways do not, according to Kant, exist
in reality, but are how we adopt the information.
So what does the mind add to this process? Well, the mind is programmed to see the world
through certain lenses (the glasses metaphor).
For one, we see things in terms of a certain context of space and
time. This framework he called “forms of
intuition.” We, according to Kant,
cannot escape this disposition. The
framework imprints what is perceived and, if you will, translates the
information into this language of time and space. Kant likened this insight to the disruption
Copernicus caused when he pointed out that the sun does not revolve around the
earth, but that the earth revolves around the sun. That bit of discovery had an enormous effect
on how we saw reality. Likewise, Kant
felt understanding the mind’s function in defining how we saw reality equal to
a Copernican Revolution.
But the effect of the mind does not end there. There is another inescapable
disposition. We see something happen and
we automatically ask why it happened; in other words, we are disposed to look
for cause and effect. This claim is more
in line with Hume’s contribution. The
important lesson is that there is a distinction between things as they are and
things as they are to the person perceiving them. Empiricists – that is scientists – today
readily succumb to this claim. They, in
their research, do not contend that they discover cause and effect relations;
they merely report correlation. That is,
they issue “X happens, Y happens” sort of statements – it is their theorizing
that makes cause and effect contentions and even there, they are hypothesized. They are never proffered as facts or truth
and, ala Karl Popper, their job is to disprove assertions, not to prove them.
Are there any readily observable phenomena that indicate this
disconnect to be true? The cat example
has been offered.[1] Say there is a cat lying on the floor of a
room and a ball rolls in her general direction.
What does the cat do? Chances
are, she will jump at it and begin to paw it around. Now say an adult is sitting in that room and a
ball rolls out; he or she is bound to question why this ball is rolling out
here; who rolled it? The mind of the cat
shaped the information one way; the adult’s mind shaped it another way – same view,
different mental operation. A young child,
on the other hand, will probably not do either.
He or she might just look at it, not knowing what to do. Why?
Because the history of the child’s perceptions has not experienced this occurrence
or anything like it before and hence, the information is novel. There are no references to define what is
happening. His/her mind does not contain
the material and, therefore, the information cannot be shaped.
An average person’s reason does not allow this lack of
material to stymie its reasoning. And
with that, we enter another realm of this concern. It seems that when confronted with novel or
unperceivable aspects of our existence, assuming we have mostly worked out
answers to most of our daily events, we still look for cause and effect. Our reason might ask: where does reality come
from; is it infinite; what is the fate of humankind? Such questions ask about things we cannot
perceive, but our reason – our mind – seeks cause and effect answers to such
questions anyway. The one question that
drew a lot of concern from Kant was, is there a god? Confronting this question, one is immediately
aware that that question relates to a bit of potential reality we have not and
cannot perceive. Therefore, without
being able to perceive the subject matter, we cannot “know” an answer. We can believe in the existence of God only
by faith. And from all indications, Kant
had a good dose of that.
I believe that what spurred a great deal of this line of
questioning among philosophers during the years after the Enlightenment had to
do with the Protestant Reformation.
Before this time, there was a good deal of uniform belief as to what
constituted the real and a lot of that belief was defined by Catholic
theology. But once that was undercut,
not by just one set of opposing religious views, but by a slew of them, the
threshold was past. Truth no longer was
the inspired message from above, but to be “constructed” through our individual
effort, via a good conscience, to determine the answers to the questions posed
by our existence. In that pursuit, we
have our own, individual attempts to make sense of it all. To do that, we had to work with the tools we
had/have and, according to Kant, that was/is our ability to perceive and to
reason. Each has its role. But these roles take place at the individual’s
level and are apt to not only be inconsistent to the results of others, but also
to be inconsistent for the individual over time. People change their minds about what they believe
to be true all the time.
This quest to figure out how we formulate what we “know” or
believe is still an active area of concern.
Recently, among psychologists and other social scientists, they have
gained, for example, a newfound respect for emotions and their role in our
reasoning processes. It is this type of
questioning we still are actively asking and investigating. For practical and intellectual reasons, many
find this questioning fascinating.
[1]
Gaarder, J. (1996). Sophie’s world: A novel about the history of philosophy. New York, NY:
Berkley Books. This is a
delightful review of western philosophers.
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