Earlier in this work, Kant discusses what knowledge one can know definitely and he comes up with a type of knowledge that is a priori, or not dependent on experience. An earlier example used is the statement that a bachelor is an unmarried man. One does not need experience to know that a bachelor is an unmarried man but that through the definition of the word bachelor we understand that this means an unmarried man. However in this second portion of his text, Kant tries to resolve his earlier hinting that in trying to understand what pure knowledge is you can only rely on knowledge that is a priori, and how it is that one can study science in terms of laws and necessary facts.
In trying to resolve these two types of knowledge he states that there are two types of information that need to be defined first. Kant states that perception and experience are different in that we cannot argue against perception, however we can argue against experience. For example if I think that I see a UFO emitting a greenish light and I were to say to you, "Hey, look at that UFO, it seems to me that it is emitting a greenish light". You could not argue that point. By this I mean that it may seem yellow to you but you cannot have any knowledge of how I perceive things. In turn you can argue if I had said that the UFO is emitting green light, because I could be wrong about experience but not about perception.
After this point I became very fuzzy about what Kant means. At this point he is attempting to turn perception into experience, and to do this he uses concepts. there are several concepts that are used in correlation with different types of knowledge. I believe that he uses the concepts to transfer the perception of one's state or future states or the perception of other's states into a truth that is withing the subject and not withing ourselves. The use of the table of concepts evades me at this point. But it seems to me that he uses the table to understand a sentence and uses the a corresponding concept to transform the statement from being reliant on the perceiving to the subject of the statement itself.
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ReplyDeleteGoing from the experience and perception to knowledge is the crux of this part, I believe. Kant focuses on how natural sciences are possible and how they are developed in order to be able to use this foundation as a starting point for building the same basis for Metaphysics. The point that I think you get fuzzy on is that anything we experience is true of that instance, but it is contingent on that instance. Science, however, is and needs to be universal and necessary, unlike experience. Becoming universally and necessarily true is a priori because when we make the connection between something we experience and something that has to be true about that experience separately from the experience itself. This is where the sun/rock example comes in: no matter how many times we experience the rock warm up after exposure to the sun, from mere experience, we cannot say that it is universally or necessarily so. But when we make the further connection that sunlight emits heat, this, not only explains our experience, but also makes it into knowledge (valid and universally necessary) that is know considered a priori.
ReplyDeleteThat is how I understood the concept. Hope it helps with the fuzziness.