APA Committee on the
Teaching of Philosophy
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Introducing Kant's Epistemology

Topic:	Introducting Difficult Concepts
Name:	Richard Field
Institution:	Northwest Missouri State University
E-mail:	rfield@mail.nwmissouri.edu
Date Submitted:	2/20/01

Article:

In my introduction course I teach rationalism (Descartes), empiricism (Locke), and then Kant. I talk about the problem the rationalists encountered in attempting to "match up" innate ideas with reality, and then discuss the problem of induction arising out of empiricism. Then we talk about Kant's Forms of Intuition and Categories of the Understanding. I've been using two analogies that seem to work well in explaining how Kant's epistemology responds to the problems of rationalism and empiricism. (1) The response to rationalism. Imagine that you find a picture in your grandmother's attic of a building with the title "The Sears Tower." You've never heard of the Sears Tower. Does the picture provide sufficient evidence to prove that the Sears Tower exists? Clearly not. It might be a figment of the artist's imagination. The picture is like one of Descartes' innate ideas. Just because we have a "picture" in our minds of what reality is like does not mean that reality must conform to the picture. Now, if you knew that the artist always paints from life, and is a good painter, then you might have sufficient evidence. This is like Descartes' claim that God is the author of our ideas, and can be trusted. But as we saw, his argument was not terribly good. But now, let's say you go to Chicago (but don't look up, so you don't see the Sears Tower), and go to an archive of blueprints that have been used to build actual buildings in Chicago. You find a blueprint titled "Sears Tower." Now your in a much better position to claim the tower actually exists. Why? Because a blueprint is basically a set of rules for constructing a building, and so long as you know the rules have been used, you know the tower was built. This is analogous to Kant's view. The mind has a set of rules for how experience must be constructed, and since reality is the sum total of what we can experience, we know the rules must always apply to reality. (2) The response to rationalism. Imagine you take a friend who is utterly ignorant of sports to a football game, but do not tell him/her that it is a football game. Your friend watches the first quarter of play, and no doubt will notice that the same types of things happen over and over again. There is also no doubt that based on his/her experience he or she will come to expect that in the second quarter the same sorts of things will continue to happen. But now, does your friend know that they will? Obviously not--for all he/she knows the players will come out and do a dance on the field. This is like Hume's problem of induction. We build up expectations based on recurrent experiences that the world in the future will be like that of the past, but we do not know this. But now, let's say you tell your friend that he/she has been watching a game of football. Now your friend is in a much better epistemic position, because he/she knows that games have rules, and that the recurrences of the same sorts of events he/she has been observing are a product of the rules, and thus he/she knows that whenever and wherever the same game is played, the same sorts of events, following from the rules, will occur. This is like Kant's understanding of the mind. The mind again uses rules to put experience together. We can know, therefore, that some of the regularities and recurrences are a product of these rules, and since experience will always play by the same rules, the same regularities and recurrences will always be observed in reality.

APA Committee on the Teaching of Philosophy Online Resource Center

Introducing Kant's Epistemology

Article:

APA Committee on the
Teaching of Philosophy
Online Resource Center