Philosophy Honors Ethics

In The Critique of Pure Reason the brilliant 18th century German Philosopher Immanuel Kant proposed that the world we know and which science explains is a world already ordered by the mind’s own cognitive apparatus. The human mind is such that it does not passively receive sense data; it is not a blank slate (tabula rasa) at birth, upon which sensory data is written and from which knowledge is accumulated.

Rather, the mind actively digests and structures data received from the five senses, and man therefore knows objective reality precisely to the extent that that reality “out there” in the world conforms to the fundamental structures of the mind.

The world is organized in accordance with the mind’s own processes, the mind’s inherent interpretive structures and cognitive apparatus, which process, digest, categorize, collate, file, and relate sensory information. All human cognition of the world is channeled through the human mind’s structures and categories.

Thus, our perception and understanding of the world do not derive from nature independent of the mind and the world itself can never be known, since man cannot get outside of his own mind to discover the true nature of the world. What man experiences is not the world in itself but man’s interpretation of that world. What man knows is a world permeated by his a priori interpretive structures, and the necessary laws of science such as cause and effect which are built into the framework of his cognition. Observations of the laws of nature reflect the laws of man’s mental organization, not necessarily any laws “out there” outside of and independent from the mind. In cognition, the mind does not conform to things; things conform to the mind. The mind does not perceive an ordered world; the mind orders the world.

Kant noted that any event experienced by the senses is located automatically in a context or framework of spatial and temporal relations. Space and time are a priori mental structures, into the very context of which sensory experience is placed and interpreted, hence, space and time form human sensibility, conditioning whatever is perceived through the senses. Since sensory data are placed in the context of space and time, space and time form the basis of all sensory experience, conditioning and structuring any empirical observation. Therefore, space and time are not drawn from experience, but are presupposed by experience itself. They are never observed as such, but they constitute that context within which all events are observed. They cannot be known to exist in nature independently of the mind, but the world cannot be known by the mind without them.

Space and time cannot be said to be characteristic of the world in itself, for they are contributed in the act of human observation. They are grounded in the nature of the mind, not in the nature of things. Because mathematical propositions are based on direct intuitions of spatial relations, they are “a priori”- constructed by the mind and not derived from experience - and yet they are also valid for experience, which will by necessity conform to the a priori forms of space and time. Space and time are intrinsic components of all human experience of the world, frames of reference mandatory for human cognition.

Moreover, the character and structure of the mind are such that the events it perceives in space and time are subject to other a priori principles – such as quantity, quality, substance, relation, cause and effect, etc. Whether all events are causally related in the world outside the mind cannot be ascertained, but because the world that man experiences is necessarily determined by his mind’s predispositions, it can be said with certainty that events in the phenomenal world are causally related, and science can so proceed from that premise. The mind does not derive cause and effect from observations, but already experiences its observations in a context in which cause and effect are presupposed realities: causality in human cognition is not derived from experience but is brought to experience.

Like cause and effect, other categories of the understanding such as substance, quantity, and relation are not derived from observations but are contexts that process sensory experience. Without such fundamental frames of reference, such a priori interpretive principles, the human mind would be incapable of comprehending its world. Human experience would be an impossible chaos, an utterly formless and miscellaneous manifold, except that the human sensibility and understanding by their very nature transfigure that manifold into a unified perception, place it in a framework of time and space, and subject it to the ordering principles of causality, substance, and the other categories. Experience is a construction of the mind imposed on sensation.

The a priori forms and categories are not read out of experience, but read into it. The only world that man knows is the empirical world of phenomena, of “appearances,” and that other world exists only to the extent that man participates in its construction. The mind never experiences what is “out there” apart from the mind. Rather, “reality” for man is necessarily one of his own making, and the world in itself must remain something one can only think about, and never know.

The order man perceives in his world is thus an order grounded not in that world but in his mind: the mind forces the world to obey its own organization. All sensory experience has been channeled through the filter of human a priori structures. Man can attain certain knowledge of the world, not because he has the power to penetrate and grasp the world in itself, but because the world he perceives and understands is a world already saturated with the principles of his own mental organization. The world in itself ultimately remains beyond human cognition. But because man’s mental organization is absolute, Kant assumed, man can know with genuine certainty the phenomenal world.

For Kant, one cannot know something about the world simply by thinking; nor can one do so simply by sensing, or even by sensing and then thinking about the sensations. The two modes must be interpenetrating and simultaneous. Man’s knowledge, then, does not conform to objects, but objects conform to man’s knowledge. The human mind bestows to the universe its own absolute order. Kant explained the perceived order of the world by the actual order of the observer.

Kant demonstrated that human observations of the world were never neutral, never free of prior imposed conceptual judgments. No empirical observation and no human experience was pure, neutral, without unconscious assumptions or a priori orderings. The world that man perceived was formed in the very act of his perception and judgment. Mind was not passive but creative, actively structuring. Particulars required prior categorization of some kind to be identified at all. To make knowledge possible, the mind necessarily imposed its own cognitive nature on the sensory data of experience, and thus man’s knowledge was not a description of external reality as such, but was the product of the subject’s cognitive apparatus. The laws of natural processes were the product of the observer’s internal organization in interaction with external events that could never be known directly in and of themselves. Neither pure empiricism (without a priori structures) nor pure rationalism (without sensory evidence) constituted a viable epistemological strategy.

Man knows because he judges things through the medium of a priori principles; but man cannot know whether these internal principles possess any ultimate relevance to the real world, or to any absolute truth or being outside the human mind. Man could know things only as they appear to him, not as they were in themselves.

Man could no longer assume any direct contact between the human mind and the universe’s intrinsic order. Kant removed science from any certain foundation independent of the human mind. Human knowledge was subjectively constructed. Man knows his universe, not the universe.

By demonstrating the necessity of the mind’s a priori forms and categories, Kant sought to confirm the validity of science. By demonstrating that man can know only phenomena (something perceived by the senses), not things in themselves, he sought to make room for the truths of religious belief and moral doctrine.

In 1962 Thomas Kuhn wrote The Structures of Scientific Revolutions in which he asserted that all scientific knowledge required interpretive structures based on fundamental paradigms (conceptual models) that allowed researchers to isolate data, elaborate theories, and solve problems.

Kuhn pointed out that science typically proceeded by seeking confirmations of the prevailing paradigm – gathering facts in the light of that theory, performing experiments on its basis, extending its range of applicability, further articulating its structure, attempting to clarify residual problems. Far from subjecting the paradigm itself to constant testing, normal science avoided contradicting the paradigm by routinely reinterpreting conflicting data in ways that would support the paradigm, or by neglecting such awkward data altogether. To an extant never consciously recognized by scientists, the nature of scientific practice makes its governing paradigm self-validating. The paradigm acts like a lens through which every observation is filtered. Thus, as with Kant, Kuhn would say that every observed fact presupposes an interpretive focus.

Think of a paradigm as a conceptual model or web of interpenetrating beliefs and concepts through which all observations and experiences pass through and hence take on the very nature of the paradigm, much like clothes that take on the color of the dye they are soaked in. The paradigm shapes and colors your perception, your beliefs, and your understanding.

So, according to Immanuel Kant your mind naturally and automatically orders your sensory experience of the world in accordance with its inherent nature, and according to Thomas Kuhn your paradigm or network of beliefs and concepts provides the color your mind dyes into your sensory experience of the world. Your paradigm colors your experience, acting as a colored lens through which you understand everything. Your experience is embroidered into your paradigm.

Your paradigm or web of beliefs and concepts is formed by a number of factors, including but not limited to your socioeconomic level (lower, middle or upper class), your religion ( Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, etc.,) your ethnicity (Italian, Irish, Greek, Hispanic, Asian, etc.,), your level of education (none, elementary, high school, college, graduate school, trade school), family environment (married or divorced parents, only child or siblings, happy and harmonious or upsetting and challenging, etc.,), and especially your early childhood years which are quite formative.

In considering Kant and Kuhn it becomes apparent that we are like the scientists Kuhn speaks of. We filter and interpret our experiences and perceptions through our paradigm, through our web of beliefs and concepts, which are layered into our mind’s cognitive apparatus as part of its a priori interpretive structures. Everyone necessarily experiences and orders their own reality subjectively according to the paradigm imprinted upon and indoctrinated into them by the aforementioned factors: socioeconomic, religious, ethnic, educational, familial, etc., experiences of which crystallize or distill into the beliefs and concepts that form your paradigm.

So, how do you resolve issues between persons of differing paradigms? Whose paradigm is correct, or, relatively speaking, more correct? How does one determine that? How is the gap between paradigms bridged? How does one resolve differences when a rigid adherence to any one paradigm can lead to excessive self-validating behavior, that is, confirmation bias, in which one seeks out and/or only allows the filtering in of data which conforms to and validates the paradigm while ignoring and/or blocking out data which goes against and invalidates the paradigm?

Almost all of the above material is taken directly from the Philosophy Honors II textbook The Passion of the Western Mind written by Richard Tarnas, or paraphrased there from by educator Ralph Cannizzaro, and is to lesser extent the original thoughts and writing of Mr. Cannizzaro in an attempt to render these profound and challenging concepts more understandable.