Kant, the Paradox of Knowability, and the Meaning of ‘Experience’

Stephenson, Andrew

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Kant, the Paradox of Knowability, and the Meaning of ‘Experience’

Andrew Stephenson

October 2015, Volume 15, No. 27, pp. 1-19

Permalink: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3521354.0015.027

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Abstract

It is often claimed that anti-realism is a form of transcendental idealism or that Kant is an anti-realist. It is also often claimed that anti-realists are committed to some form of knowability principle and that such principles have problematic consequences. It is therefore natural to ask whether Kant is so committed, and if he is, whether this leads him into difficulties. I argue that a standard reading of Kant does indeed have him committed to the claim that all empirical truths are knowable and that this claim entails that there is no empirical truth that is never known. I extend the result to a priori truths and draw some general philosophical lessons from this extension. However, I then propose a re-examination of Kant’s notion of experience according to which he carefully eschews any commitment to empirical knowability. Finally I respond to a remaining problem that stems from a weaker, justified believability principle.

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Now, if this is the sort of thing in terms of which Kant defines truth, then there is no knowability principle here. For there to be inhabitants of the moon, for example, just is for final science to entail that there are inhabitants of the moon, which is in turn for the totality of human perceptions to maximally justify a representation of the world (of appearances) according to which such inhabitants are part of it. But final science is not itself an object of possible knowledge. Thus, the view in no way entails that all truths are knowable. In particular, it entails neither that all empirical truths are knowable, nor that all purely empirical truths are knowable. Indeed, since Experience* contains much particular empirical content alongside the kinds of structural a priori content mentioned above, and so would itself presumably qualify as an empirical truth (albeit not a purely empirical truth), the view is positively incompatible with empirical knowability. Does it still qualify as a form of anti-realism? The answer to this question is not yet clear and I return to it in the next section. In a strictly limited sense, the view is one in which truth not only potentially but essentially transcends our cognitive capacities; in another sense, however, truth retains an essential connection to these capacities. In any case, the view is certainly a form of idealism. Truth, it says, is a function of human perception.

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