Theme 1 - Comments

Links to my comments on other students blog:

1. butlikewhyisit
2. suchapriori
3. vadfinnsegentligen
4. elindm2572
5. dm2572lisa
6. cloudsong223
7. theandme15
8. blog4course99
9. theoatmeth
10. duckyduckyducky

Post Theme 1: Theory of knowledge and theory of science

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend any of the seminars for Theme 1. Therefore this blogpost will be longer than the normal word criteria. I will reflect about how I have contributed to this week’s theme, basically what I’ve learned and how I’ve learned it.

So, the last time I had an philosophical assignment like this one was probably in high school. I’m 23 years old and as you might have guessed it, it’s been awhile since high school. I had to go through a lot of hours of procrastination until I was finally able to start this assignment. Looking at the amount of pages I was supposed to read in a short amount of time was a bit fearsome since I’m not a frequent reader. I decided to start with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. I found this text to be very hard and complex to understand. The sentences were built on difficult words and if an example was made to clarify something it only made it more confusing. I only read it once and quickly came to understand that reading the whole thing again wasn’t going to help at all. And also I didn’t have the time to do so. Kant basically destroyed my already low confident of my ability to read. I know now that I should have started with Plato’s, comparing to Kant his choice of words and writing was much easier to understand. I felt that following the dialogue between Socrates and Theaetetus was more reasonable than just having someone explaining everything directly.

While I was reading both of the text, I was also looking at the questions that were supposed to be answered for the first assignment. I experienced it to be difficult answering the questions on Kant’s text. Therefore I decided to turn to the cyberbank of knowledge which we refer to as the Internet.

There are a lot of detailed summaries of the Critique of Pure Reason with an easier language which cleared up many questions that I had. I also watched videos on YouTube where they explain Kant’s point of view regarding the questions given to us with really good explanations visually that I could relate to and understand. By doing this I managed to answer the questions without really having fully understood the meaning of any of texts. I would strongly recommend this to other students.

Something I have learned during this theme is this quote that was mentioned by the lecturer made by Kant, who says:

“Perception without conception, is blind.

Conception without perception is empty.”

This quote is really a great summary of  what Plato also was saying by that, we only see and hear through our senses and not with them. I understood what Plato meant when answering the question for the Pre blog posting. But I also found Kant’s quote to make it clear for me that it is only when we put the senses in a concept that it gets a meaning.

During the later part of the class were the lecturer talked about Kant and some important terminology it started getting really confusing. I understood the difference of a priori and a posteriori very well before the class, but it made even more sense after the class. I especially found that the difference between synthetic and analytic judgements was well explained with this example by the lecturer:

If I say there are students in a classroom it is a priori analytic knowledge. But if I were to say there are 39 students in a classroom that would suddenly become a posteriori synthetic judgement since there is no way I could have had the precise knowledge of how many students there are in the classroom without having first experienced the situation and counted the students. So the analytic sentences are just something we know without some further investigation of it being true or not.

Through the rest of the class I felt that we moved too fast from one terminology to another, therefore I never managed to make much sense of what the meaning of each words were. An example are Kant’s categories. I perceived it being categories, as faculties of knowledge, which objects needs to conform to. But I’m not quite sure how something could be split up into those categories. And what each of the categories meant. The lecturer made the example of seeing a tree. And then circled the categories which were the ones making the object a tree to us. It all went a little bit too fast for me, and got me a bit confused during the class. This was a question I wanted to bring up during the seminar, but since I couldn’t attend I looked it up myself and found this very good example making it more understandable. Since it is hard for me to understand things when I am not given an example I can relate to I found this image to be very easy to understand. On the image below you see how our thinking process during a shot when playing pool looks like split up into Kant’s categories.

Kant's thinking cap illustrated by Ralph Edney for the book Philosophy for Beginners, 1992, by Richard Osborne, p. 104.

Another question I wanted to bring up during the seminar was that as I perceived it, Kant does not acknowledge the existence of a God but he doesn’t either ignore it. The lecturer mentioned this during the class, but it didn’t really come through to me what Kant’s reasoning is on this matter. My thoughts have been that it has to be seen as that if you can prove an existence of something then the thing is real, and if you can not prove the non-existence of it then you can not say it does not exist. I’m also, since before, familiar with Kant’s quote:

“The starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”

I never quite understood the meaning entirely but I presume now that Kant means that what is above him (or his knowledge) he can not do or say anything truthful of, but of the things that are in his head, his knowledge, of that he can make a truthful perception. It would have been fun to know if this question was discussed during the seminar and what other students opinion were on this subject.

After having talked to some classmates that attended the seminar, I think I would have gained some clarity by being there. Many felt that the seminar were the best part of this theme.

I felt that this theme was pretty good for starting to think about how and why we perceive the world as we do and also what ways are there are to think regarding the issues.

Pre Theme 1: Theory of knowledge and theory of science

In the preface to the second edition of "Critique of Pure Reason" (page B xvi) Kant says: "Thus far it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to objects. On that presupposition, however, all our attempts to establish something about them a priori, by means of concepts through which our cognition would be expanded, have come to nothing. Let us, therefore, try to find out by experiment whether we shall not make better progress in the problems of metaphysics if we assume that objects must conform to our cognition." How are we to understand this?

First we need to understand that there are two different kinds of knowledge, a posteriori and a priori. A posteriori knowledge is obtained through experience, that is, it is empirical. While a priori knowledge means that knowledge is obtained independently of experience. Therefor you do not need to confirm something to know it’s true, for example a simple mathematical equation as 2+2=4.

Kant thinks that having being thought that our cognition must conform to objects has not given any results. Because to able to do that we must have gained the knowledge of the object through experience. I understand it as Kant saying that we can never truly experience anything directly. There are other perspectives to be taken into consideration other than the perspective of oneself, such as e.g. time and space. Therefor for us to make better progress within the field of metaphysics he proposes that objects must conform to our cognition. In other words, by instead using our knowledge we can understand an object. Kant explains this by comparing to Copernicus understanding of the celestial motions. The point of that comparison is that Copernicus had to change his point of view in order to understand the celestial motions, instead of having the sun revolve around us he put the sun in the center and made us revolve around. I think that it’s an interesting point of view that our minds, through a filter built on different perspectives, influence the way we understand and observe an object. 

At the end of the discussion of the definition "Knowledge is perception", Socrates argues that we do not see and hear "with" the eyes and the ears, but "through" the eyes and the ears. How are we to understand this? And in what way is it correct to say that Socrates argument is directed towards what we in modern terms call "empiricism"?

My understanding towards this question is that Socrates argues that our eyes and ears are tools used to see and hear “through” so that our mind can then collect the information and perceive what is being seen or heard. We don’t see and hear “with” our eyes and ears because we need our mind to create an perspective and opinion. Socrates says that all people have their own unique perception. Basically in order for us to understand an object we must use our senses and combine them with the help of our mind. I think that this makes Socrates argument directed towards the modern empiricism. The modern empiricism is based on knowledge being obtained through experience, a posteriori knowledge, primarily deriving from our five senses¹. Which Socrates also argues for by saying that knowledge is obtained from the experience of using our senses combined with our mind in order to perceive an understanding of an object.

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1. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/#1.2