© michael lacewing hume and kant michael lacewing enquiries@alevelphilosophy. co.uk
TRANSCRIPT
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© Michael Lacewing
Hume and Kant
Michael Lacewingenquiries@alevelphilosop
hy.co.uk
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Analytic and synthetic propositions
• An analytic proposition is true or false in virtue of the meanings of the words.
• A synthetic proposition is one that is not analytic, i.e. it is true not in virtue of the meanings of the words, but in virtue of the way the world is.
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A priori knowledge
• A priori: knowledge that does not require (sense) experience to be known to be true (v. a posteriori)
• It is not a claim that no experience was necessary to arrive at the claim, but that none is needed to prove it.
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Rationalism v. empiricism
• Rationalism: we can have substantive a priori knowledge of how things stand outside the mind.– Substantive knowledge is knowledge
of a synthetic proposition. Trivial knowledge is knowledge of an analytic proposition.
• Empiricism: we cannot.
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Hume’s fork
• We can only have knowledge of – Relations of ideas– Matters of fact
• Relations of ideas are a priori and analytic
• Matters of fact are a posteriori and synthetic
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Knowledge of matters of fact
• We gain it by using observation and employing induction and reasoning about probability.
• The foundation of this knowledge is what we experience here and now, or can remember.
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Kant on ‘experience’
• What would it be like to have sensory experience but with no ability to think about it?
• It would not be experience of anything - the idea of an object is the idea of something that is unified, existing in space and time
• What makes intelligible experience, of objects, possible?
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Categories
• Kant’s answer: certain basic concepts, under which sensory input falls, provide experience; Kant calls these concepts ‘categories’
• This conceptual scheme is necessary for any intelligible experience at all, i.e. necessary for experience of objects
• How does Kant show this?
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Causality
• To experience a (physical) world of objects, we must be able to distinguish the temporal order of our experiences from the temporal order of events.
• Compare two easily made judgments:– Look around the room - your perceptual
experience changes, but the room itself has not changed
– Imagine watching a ship sail downstream - your perceptual experience changes, and you say that the scene itself has changed (the ship has moved)
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Causality
• How can we make this judgment?• The room: we could have had the
perceptions in a different order, without the room being different
• The ship: we could not have had the perceptions in a different order, unless the ship was moving in a different way
• With the ship, the order of perceptual experience is fixed by the order of events; the order must occur as it does.
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Causality
• This is the idea of a ‘necessary temporal order’, which is captured by the concept CAUSALITY.
• Effects must follow causes - where one event does not repeatedly follow another, there is no causal link between the events.
• CAUSALITY is the concept that events happen in a necessary order.
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Causality
• Without this concept, I cannot distinguish between the order of my perceptions (my perceptions changing) and the order of events (objects changing).
• But this distinction is needed to experience objects at all. So CAUSALITY is necessary for experience.
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Conceptual scheme
• Kant provides other argues for necessity, unity, substance…
• They are each aspects of ‘the pure thought of an object’
• They are not derived from experience, but logically precede experience - hence they are a priori and innate, part of the structure of the mind.
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Conceptual scheme
• We do not apply these concepts to experience - there is no experience without these concepts. At best, there is a ‘confused buzz’ - but do you experience a confused buzz?? Does it even truly occur, at some moment before applying the concepts?
• All conceptual schemes must include the categories - this is not given by empirical argument, but a priori argument. There is therefore a limit on conceptual relativism.
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Mind and world
• What is the world like independent of these concepts? We cannot say, we cannot even imagine. All thought about the world presupposes these concepts.
• This casts no doubt on the physical world as we experience it - this we can know contains physical objects etc. - anything that takes the form of an ‘object’ is something to which our concepts have already been applied.
• There is nothing we could know here, but don’t. What would it be to know anything without using concepts? What is experience that is not experience of objects?