Epistemology — Day 3
The following is from my daily newsletter, The Pocket Philosopher. Each week we explore a theme, looking at that theme through the lens of a different philosophy each day.
Good morning friends,
I hope you’re having a great week, I’m glad you’re here this morning, really. I’m excited to peel back the next layer in our journey of understanding how we know what we know.
Today we’ll be pivoting from Descartes in France to Immanuel Kant in Germany in the 18th century. Unlike Descartes who joined the army, traveled the world, studied physics, and started philosophizing in his early twenties, Immanuel Kant wouldn’t pick up the mantle until well in his fifties.
His reason for joining the game so late? He read a philosophical piece by another philosopher named David Hume about epistemology that made him so internally disturbed and unsettled he had to spend the rest of his life seeking resolution.
Incidentally, this reminds me of the physicists Erwin Shrodinger, who had the opposite experience as Kant. One day, upon accidentally stumbling across the mathematical reality of quantum gravity, he threw away his paper and decided to devote his life to biology! The math that the universe is somehow many places at the same time scared him enough to put it away forever.
Kant on the other hand, in feeling deeply internally disturbed was more like a bull in a ring and charged into the uncertainty head on. His question: how do we know what we know?
We’re all grateful that he was so restless, because left he behind some incredible, foundational, and extremely helpful concepts for future thinkers as we continue to do science and wonder about our limitations of knowledge and even consciousness.
The problem that Hume leaves for Kant which unravels his self-described sleepy life, is that of knowledge -more specifically how we gain and access our human knowledge?
Hume spent quite a bit of time challenging the origin of human thinking. These men both lived through the European Enlightenment which saw a major shift from defensive, survivalist, often superstitious thought patters into objective, verifiable, and scientific thought processes.
Hume was a loud voice in his time challenging that human thoughts are not correct simply because they are accepted widely, people die for them, or people believe them passionately.
This is especially true as we move up Plato’s ladder (if you remember from last week’s letter) into less real objects and more abstract thought-think beauty, god, morality etc. These are things that are not concrete objects we can experience or study, but rather obscure forms (as Plato would say) we cannot directly access.
Hume suggests that these forms cannot be known by experience, and we should challenge our relationship to them because we overestimate the certainty we have about them.
To put it plainly, many folks are certain about their perception of right and wrong assuming their version is a universally accepted concept. Obviously many people of many times and cultures have varied widely on what is right is wrong-some communities not even having this concept to begin with.
Without being armed with tons of knowledge from outside Europe or on sociology, Hume just knew there was no way we all just “knew” right from wrong, for example. And he was frustrated by the dogmatic conviction that many people carried that we were simply endowed with certain knowledge. And Kant was fascinated.
He picks up Hume’s work by grounding his epistemology in judgements. Let’s loosely define judgements as the framework, or window, that people build for themselves to see the world. Kant wants to know more about this “window”-is it innate, how does it get there, why do we have it?
Ultimately, much of Kant’s study on judgements will have to do with experience.
He believes that these judgements have an epistemological component and a semantic component. This to say, he believes that a judgement is either a priori or a posteriori, and either analytic or synthetic. Good to go right, see you tomorrow!
Seriously, this where we get into the thick of it, and it’s the last major idea we’ll look at this morning.
Essentially, a priori knowledge is that which we can gain without experience, we can simply think of it-5+5=10 for example. A Posteriori on the other hand, is knowledge we must gain through experience and be able to determine if it is true or false-my daughter was born in April, for example.
Furthermore, he parses out judgements as being either analytic-a thought is analytic if its “denial yields a contradiction” 1 -or synthetic-a thought is synthetic if does more than analyze a concept.
It would be really easy to get lost in these definitions, but let’s use this basic framework to understand the fundamental change that Kant caused in the way future philosophers would think.
This division around forms of thought would forever change the way that people in European philosophy would conduct their study. It would create Continental Philosophy on one hand which focused on speculation, metaphysics, and possibilities of things largely outside our ability to experience and verify.
It likewise produced Analytic Philosophy which would continue to build the rational ways in which science and the scientific method would discover its knowledge.
In short, this split that Kant makes produces two major forms of epistemology-knowledge we gain by talking and thinking, and knowledge we gain by experiment, experience, and verification. The vast majority of all academic and professional knowledge in the modern world today is a direct descendant of this Analytic Philosophy.
Kant is essentially interested in understanding, based off of this framework, how we come to know things about mathematics, natural science, metaphysics, and morality. Because each of these topics are spaces in which we are capable of understanding without direct experience.
For example, even if we don’t all agree on what good is, we can understand each others’ perception of good. And we can do this not by experiencing something good or bad, but simply by talking and reasoning about it.
Another way of referring to this type of a priori knowledge, is to call it pure knowledge-how do we come to know things without experiencing them?
The vast majority of Kant’s work is exploring this question, and we’ll dive deeper into that tomorrow!
For now, have a great rest of the day, keep thinking, and take a moment of gratitude for that incredible brain of yours.
-TPP
The Great Conversation, Norman Melchert, pp. 429–434
Originally published at https://pocketphilosopher.substack.com.
