Kantian Constructivism

1. Kantian Constructivism

2. So Far Skepticism Rationalism Empiricism Locke & Berkeley. Knowledge about the world comes primarily as a posteriori knowledge. Primary & secondary qualities, esseestpercipi, etc. • Hume. • We don’t have knowledge about the world, only knowledge about our experiences. • Analytic statements are trivial, synthetic statements are impossible to verify, cause and effect is unjustifiable, self is illusory, etc. Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz. Knowledge about the world comes primarily as a priori knowledge. Thingness (substance), identity, self, sameness, etc.

3. Kant “Though all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that is all arises out of experiences.” Knowledge does not conform to its objects. Objects conform to our knowledge. The mind constructs objects out of the materials provided by the senses.

4. The cat is on the mat. Can we observe space/time? Can we observe anything without the concepts of space/time?

7. Cause-Effect. Time. Space.

8. What would the experience of this room be if we lost the ability organize sensations into distinct objects? What would our experience of the world be like if we lost the ability to ascribe cause/effect relationships to events? For the categories of the mind to work in concert with the sense data, doesn’t there have to be some kind of similarity between the categories and the nature of reality? If so, doesn’t this mean that our minds are structured like reality? If so, doesn’t this mean that we can know reality? Anthropologists have discovered that people in different cultures perceive spatial and temporal relationships differently. Does this contradict Kant’s ideas of universal structures in the human mind?