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Kant’s Revolution
The Past

Kant divided his predecessors up into the Rationalists and the Empiricists.

The Rationalists claimed that we could gain knowledge of the world around us through the
application of reason alone. Experience is unnecessary and indeed downright misleading. The
source of this knowledge is our innate knowledge and ideas. Some thought all knowledge and ideas
and were innate; others, only some. The latter thought that we generate new knowledge, not innate,
by deducing it from what we know innately, just as we derive theorems from axioms.

The Empiricists claimed that there was no innate knowledge. We enter the world as blank slates.
Everything we learn about the world we learn fundamentally through sensory experience.
Experience provides ideas which our active minds can manipulate and combine into ever more
complex and abstract ideas.

Kant argued that both Rationalism and Empiricism were unsatisfactory. Let us see why.

What’s Wrong With Empiricism

Empiricism embodies the view that knowledge about reality is to be gained through the senses. It
captures the scientific spirit. Science had made so many advances in the recent two centuries that
no sensible person could deny that observation experimentation was the way forward. Pure reason
may reflect nothing more than our intuitions – such as that the Earth is not moving – which science
overturns, typically to our surprise.

Yet Empiricism had gone too far. Kant’s point was simple. If we are genuinely blank slates, then we
will remain blank slates. The ‘raw data’ from the world that enters us via our senses is unorganised.
A mind needs to organise it so that experience is possible. Here’s an analogy. Suppose you buy a
new computer. It has no pre-installed software and no firmware. All the circuits are clean, so to
speak. You plug in the keyboard and mouse and turn it on. You start typing. What will happen?
Nothing. Your fingers will cause electrical signals to be sent into the computer but the computer will
have no idea what to do with them. And it will remain forever in this state.

Furthermore, Hume had opened up such a gap between our ideas (appearance) and reality that we
could not really say we were doing science at all. For science is the study of reality. But if we are
trapped in our worlds of ideas, we are essentially studying the contents of our own minds. Perhaps
our minds do reflect reality but we can never know.

Kant found this unacceptable. Surely there is a world out there in which one thing causes another.
This is just what scientists investigate. If philosophers can't even prove that there is such a world
and are limited to the contents of their own minds, then they have failed. Hume's philosophy is
clever but desperate.

What’s Wrong With Rationalism

Kant started his philosophical life as a rationalist but famously said that Hume shook him out of his
comfortable rationalist assumptions. The problem with Rationalism was that it went too far in the
other direction by ignoring experience. Rationalists essentially think that reason can leap over the
world of experience and get straight to reality directly. But Kant argued that we cannot do such a
thing – the only world we can know is the one we experience.

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Kant argued that when we try to jump over experience, we get tangled up in philosophical knots. For
example, consider the issue of whether space is finite or infinite. A Rationalist might reason thus:

• Space is infinite. For suppose it is not. Suppose that space has edges. Suppose you travel
to the edge. Well, what would stop you from putting your foot ‘through’ the edge and
travelling that bit further? It would have to be something like a wall. But a wall is something
that divides the inside from the outside. So, there would have to be another side – and
hence more space. So, the idea that space is finite leads to a contradiction!

But another Rationalist might argue thus:

• Space is finite. Infinity is an incoherent concept. Consider Achilles and the tortoise. They are
both to run a race of 100m. The tortoise bets Achilles that he won’t beat him. Achilles
accepts the bet. The tortoise reasons thus. “To cross any distance d, you must, logically,
cross half of it first: d/2. So, let Achilles run 50m. To cross the remaining distance, he must
cross 25m. To cross that remaining distance, he must run 12.5m. And so on. The remaining
distance can be divided into infinitely many ever finer slices. So, Achilles has infinitely many
distances to run: 50m + 25m + 12.5m + …Since it takes a certain amount of time to cross
any distance, then it will take an infinite amount of time for Achilles to reach the finish line –
enough time for me to catch up!” But this is of course absurd! Achilles will reach the finish
line – and do so before me! So how did I reason otherwise? By exploiting the incoherent
concept of infinity. Nothing can be infinite.

Pure reason can lead us astray. We need to apply our powers of reason to the world we
experience. Reason and experience must work together.

Kant's Copernican Revolution

Kant observed that both parties shared the assumption that our minds are wholly receptive to
reality. Reality is "out there", already built in a certain way, and it is up to the philosopher-scientist to
discover what it is like, be it through reason or experience. Kant said that this assumption had to go.
He promised a revolution in philosophy like that which Copernicus wrought in astronomy. Our minds
are active in shaping experience. The world we can know about is as it is because our minds make
it appear that way. It is the mind that shapes the world, not the world that shapes the mind.

Here is a well-known analogy. Imagine that all your life you have been wearing a special set of
tinted lenses implanted in your eyes. You have not realised this up to now. The tints in the glasses
are responsible for the colours you experience. Up to now, you thought, naively if understandably,
that you saw the world as it really was. No. The way you see the world is a combination of the real
nature of the world plus the lens that filter it and make it appear a certain way.

Now imagine these lenses in the mind. They filter experience and make the world appear one in
which there is a three-dimensional space, in which there are objects and in which there is causality.
(Kant calls these filters categories.) So, the world is as it is for us because our minds make it so.

Should we try to take our mental glasses off? We can't, says Kant. Experience – structured,
coherent experience – is only possible with glasses in place. You need something to structure the
"raw data" of experience that enters your eyes, ears, skin, and so on. The world does not imprint its
structure upon us. We cannot simply passively "pick up" on the structure in the way that the
Empiricists and Rationalists supposed.

No Tabula Rasa

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We are therefore not tabulae rasae. If we were, we simply could not get started. For if the world
doesn’t tell us how it is structured, we have no reason to process or interpret the data one way or
another. Even if we did hit upon a way of making sense of it, it would be a miracle if we all hit upon
the same way. And yet we do. That we fundamentally see the world the same way is a precondition
of our communicating and interacting in it together.

Phenomenal and Noumenal

The world that we can be aware of Kant calls the phenomenal world. It is this world that empirical
truths are about. It is this world that science investigates. It is the world that we experience through
our minds making it appear a certain way. The world as it simply is, that lies beyond experience,
that we mistakenly think we could see if only we could take off our glasses is the noumenal world.
We cannot know anything about it. We can know it exists and is responsible for the phenomenal
world, in conjunction of course with our structuring minds, but that is it.

It is very important to understand that Kant did not think the phenomenal world is Hume’s inner
world of sensation. He was at pains to stress that it is the real world. Kant denied that there is an
unbridgeable gap between experience and reality. There is an unbridgeable gap between the world-
as-experienced and the world-as-it-is. This is a subtle but vital distinction.

Empiricism leaves us with an image of the mind as representing reality via distinct ideas of it. It is as
if our access to reality is via inner photographs of it. 1 Crucially, a photograph is a distinct thing from
what it is a photograph of. One can exist without the other. Hence, one can wonder if there is indeed
anything out there that the photographs are supposed to be copies of.

By contrast, Kant wants to say that (in effect) that we simply see reality but in so doing we ‘make it
our own’. Our visual sensations are simply the way that our eyes tell us about reality. Do they come
between us and the world? Yes and no. In order for the world to ‘get into my mind’, it has to be
represented some way or other. But this doesn’t entail that the representations are things that leave
us cut off from reality.

Here is one way of making the point. My eyesight is not perfect. I wear glasses. Thanks to them, I
experience a focused world. Now, the world I see now is not some kind of second world magically
created by my glasses. It is, simply, the world focused. Now, whether we wear glasses or not, we all
have natural lenses in our eyes. They focus the world for us; without them, we would be aware of
fuzzy coloured patches of light and dark. But we don’t think that these lenses create something new;
they make experience of reality possible. Going still further in, we need lenses in our mind –
concepts – to make the same thing happen.

Here is another way of making the point. To talk to about reality I must use a language. I can tell
you that there is a badger in the garden using just those worlds; equally, I could say, “Il y a un
blaireau dans le jardin” or “Jest borsuk w ogrodzie” or “meles est in horto”. Now, do the words get
between me and you and reality. Yes and no. Yes: they are a middle layer. But no: they don’t cut
me off from reality; they make talking about reality possible.

A final way to think about Kant’s idea is this. Suppose science reveals something new about the
basic particles of the universe, such as electrons: they aren’t basic. We know that they have an
inside but we also know that we shall be unable ever to peer inside. We humans simply cannot
1
*if we’re being careful here, a better image would be this: it is as if our knowledge of reality comes from
reading letters about it. For Empiricists did not think that their ideas were simple copies of things in reality.
Reality doesn’t contain anything really red but rather structures disposed to induce red sensations in us under
the right sort of conditions. Our ideas represent but do not resemble reality, as we previously put it. Yet
photographs do resemble. Letters represent without resembling, hence their greater appropriateness. The
crucial point remains: that the letter is a distinct type of mental item whose existence is not logically dependent
on anything in reality.

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create the technology to open them up. We know that what is inside makes these particles behave
as they do. Reality is essentially what it is because of the hidden natures of these particles. Yet our
knowledge of reality can only go so deep. We see the surfaces of things, not their innards. Yet it is
still reality we are seeing. In the same way, thanks to our senses and our minds, we see something
like the surfaces of things, not what lies behind. But there is just one reality, ultimately; there are
simply two levels of knowledge we can have it: ours and God’s.

Knowledge

The Rationalists tell us we have a priori knowledge of reality. The Empiricists tell us that we have a
priori knowledge of ‘relations of ideas’ only; all substantial knowledge of reality is a posteriori. Kant
invents the terms analytic and synthetic to capture Hume’s distinction:

• Analytic: true in virtue of the concepts themselves or ‘by definition’ (=relation of ideas)
• Synthetic: true in virtue of the world beyond. (=matter of fact).

For Hume, a priori knowledge is analytic truths and a posteriori knowledge is of synthetic truths.
Kant argued that there is also synthetic a priori knowledge. There are truths we know that are not
derived from experience but which are not trivial matters of definition either. For example: 7+5=12.
As we know, this is a necessary a priori truth. Hume argued it was analytic: it is (somehow) part of
the concept 12 that it is the sum of 7 an d5.

Kant pointed out that this was false. It is not a posteriori that 7+5=12. But nor is it a matter of
meaning. Bachelor means unmarried man. So, it is an analytic truth that all bachelors are unmarried
men. By "decomposing" the concept bachelor to bring out its parts – unmarried and man – I can see
the analytic truth. This is an analytic a priori truth. But I can't "decompose" 12 into 7 and 5. They are
not its constituents. 12 can be mathematically decomposed into 7 and 5, of course. But it can be
mathematically decomposed into infinitely many sums: 6+6, -56+68, 1+2+3+4+2, and so on. They
can't all be "in" 12. Otherwise, I'd (a) grasp an infinite mount of information when I grasp 12 and (b),
I could "see" instantly whether any pair of numbers added to 12 (or, indeed, subtracted to 12,
multiplied to 12, and so on.)

What else do we know a priori? We know the truths of geometry a priori. We also know the truths of
metaphysics. For in doing metaphysics, we are considering the structure of our mind that makes our
distinctive experience of reality – one with objects and causal relations – possible.

How We Have A Priori Knowledge

There are, Kant tells us, synthetic a priori truths. These are the subject matter of philosophy. They
concern metaphysics, mathematics, geometry – all the things the Rationalists like. We gain
synthetic a priori knowledge by examining the structure of our minds that makes experience
possible. So, when I do metaphysics, I am discovering how my mind fundamentally structures
phenomenal reality. When I do mathematics, I am studying concepts that we get, ultimately, from
our sense of time, which is, again, a lens provided by the mind. (So, Kant is not arguing that we
have a mathematical part of the brain that makes the world appear as it does. It is more indirect
than that. Mathematical concepts are by-products of something else.)

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Raw data of experience =
unconceptualised content
The raw data comes from the world-
independent mind: the noumenal world.
We cannot know this world as it is but
only as it is experienced.
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+ Conceptual
Scheme
Our conceptual scheme is the mental
software or mental glasses that
structures the raw data. The a priori
concepts or categories are the innate
ones, such as substance (object) and
cause and effect. Kant also includes
space and time as bits of our software:
that is, we experience a world extended
in space and time because our minds
make it so but technically, space and
time are a priori intuitions not concepts.
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Structured experience =
→ the contents of experience are
conceptualised.
Our experience is structured or conceptualised. I do not
experience a world of sensations but a world of objects.
But objects do not arrive at my senses: (e.g.) light
arrives at my eyes. My concept of an object (or
substance) is like a lens that shapes the raw data into
the experience of a three-dimensionally extended thing
that persists over time.
I experience – I live in – the phenomenal world. This is
not the world of sensation but the world of real things
‘dressed’ by my senses.
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Hume’s ‘Fork’:

‘Relations of ideas’ ‘Matters of fact’

=analytic truths =synthetic truths
Necessary truths that Contingent truths that
are knowable a priori. are knowable a
posteriori.

All bachelors are unmarried The sun is shining

2+2 = 4 Copper conducts electricity
Area of a circle = π r2 Every event has a cause

Kant’s ‘Trident’:

Synthetic a priori truths

Analytic a priori truths Synthetic a posteriori
(necessary truths)
(necessary truths) truths (contingent truths)
2+2 = 4
The sun is shining
All bachelors are unmarried Area of a circle = π r2 Copper conducts electricity
Every event has a cause

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