Immanuel Kant
On Regulative Principles in Science Response to Hume
Immanuel Kant Response to Hume
• He professed to be greatly disturbed by Hume’s analysis of causation. ☺Kant’s
said that he was “awakened from my dogmatic slumber”.
Immanuel Kant Response to Hume
• He was unwilling to grant Hume’s premise.
Although all empirical knowledge “arises from” sense impressions, it is not the case that all such knowledge is “given in” these impressions.
• Matter and Form of cognitive experience: sense
impressions provide the raw material of empirical knowledge
Intellect
of the knowing subject (it is
responsible for the structural-relational organization of this raw material)
Immanuel Kant Response to Hume
He believed that Hume oversimplified the knowing process. He formulated His own theory of knowledge which was more complex and specified thr ee stages for it. Judgement of experience
perceptions Sensations
Stages of in the cognitive organization of knowledge Immanuel Kant Response to Hume
Judgement of experience Regulative Principles of Reason
perceptions
Sensations Forms of sensibility • Time • Space
Categories of understanding • Substance • Causality • Contingency
Immanuel Kant Response to Hume
•
He believed that Hume was preoccupied with inductive generalization.
•
He regarded the systematic organization of experience as a goal to be sought by the knowing subject.
•
In his theory of knowledge, the faculty of reason prescribes to the understanding certain rules for the ordering of empirical judgments.
Immanuel Kant Response to Hume
• With respect to individual empirical laws, he downplayed instance-confirmation, in which deductive consequences of laws are seen to be in agreement with observations. • with respect to theories, He cited as criteria of acceptability predictive power and testability.
Kant’s Judgements • A priori vs A posteriori judgment The first distinction separates a priori from a posteriori judgments by reference to the origin of our knowledge of them. A priori judgments are based upon reason alone, independently of all sensory experience, and therefore apply with strict universality. A posteri ori judgments, on the other hand, must be grounded upon experience and are consequently limited and uncertain in their application to specific cases. Thus, this distinction also marks the difference traditionally noted in logic between necessary and contingent truths.
Kant’s Judgements • Analytic vs Synthetic Judgment But Kant also made a less familiar distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments, according to the information conveyed as their content. Analytic judgments are those whose predicates are wholly contained in their subjects; since they add nothing to our concept of the subject, such judgments are purely explicative and can be deduced from the principle of non-contradiction. 'All bachelors are unmarried.' 'All sisters are female.' 'All triangles have three sides'. 'The internal angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees.'
Kant’s Judgements • Analytic vs Synthetic Judgment But Kant also made a less familiar distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments, according to the information conveyed as their content. Synthetic judgments, on the other hand, are those whose predicates are wholly distinct from their subjects, to which they must be shown to relate because of some real connection external to the concepts themselves. Hence, synthetic judgments are genuinely informative but require justification by reference to some outside principle. 'The earth revolves around the sun.' 'Either it is raining or it is snowing.' 'All bachelors live in messy apartments.' 'Every human being will die someday.' 'If you throw a brick at a window, the window will break'.
In fact, Kant held, the two distinctions are not entirely coextensive; we need at least to consider all four of their logically possible combinations: • An alytic a posteriori judgments cannot arise, since there is never any need to appeal to experience in support of a purely explicative assertion. • Synthetic a posteriori judgments are the relatively uncontroversial matters of fact we come to know by means of our sensory experience (though Wolff had tried to derive even these from the principle of contradiction). • Analytic a pri ori judgments , everyone agrees, include all merely logical truths and straightforward matters of definition; they are necessarily true. • Synthetic a priori judgments are the crucial case, since only they could provide new information that is necessarily true. But neither Leibniz nor Hume considered the possibility of any such case.
