| | Robert,
Kant said nothing about validating propositions, he was only interested in clarifying the logical form of propositions not in validating them. Right. Kant was not interested in discovering the validity (read: truth) of propositions (read: things). Another way to say this is that he had an ulterior motive from the get-go. What kinds of things can be said about someone who is not interested in the truth, but who has an ulterior motive?
His motive was to take Hume's error (that the relations of "ideas" are all that we really know) and to twist it -- rather than to outright reject it -- in order to keep the idea of God (and therefore, of deontological morality) and the idea of Free Will alive in order to get men, with the subsequent guilt and doubt, to freely subject their wills to God.
He didn't like what could be concluded from Hume's writings: vulgar empiricism, metaphysical skepticism, logical positivism, scientism, and determinism. Instead, he wanted a free will for man, and a robust faith in the intrinsically unknowable (for the slave-making reason just mentioned above). He put chains on man's mind in order to "ready" it for subserviency to something (or to anything).
Okay, okay. Let me back-track a little. That might have been a little too much speculation on my part -- to presume that Kant was thoroughly evil, right down to the bone (a philosophical "Anti-Christ", if you will). A more nuanced version or take on this is found in Mortimer Adler's book: Ten Philosophical Mistakes (p 90-100). In it, he comes to much of the same conclusion about the work of Kant:
The authors of the two philosophical mistakes with which we are concerned here are David Hume and Immanuel Kant. ...
Looked at one way, the two mistakes represent opposite extremes. Looked at another way, they represent opposite faces of the same error. ...
Hume's mistake had its roots or origin in earlier mistakes, ... especially ... with regard to ideas as objects we directly apprehend. On the other hand, Kant's mistake had its origin in the mistake made by Hume. He might have avoided his own mistake by pointing out that the conclusions Hume reached, which he found so repugnant, were based on false premises.
... Instead, he invented and erected a subtle and intricate philosophical structure in an effort to reach and support conclusions the very opposite of Hume's, and just as incorrect. ...
The a priori, according to Kant, includes whatever is in the mind prior to any sense-experience and also whatever judgments it can make that are not based upon sense-experience. The a posteriori is, of course, the opposite in both respects.
The analytic consists of judgments the truth of which depends entirely upon definitions. ...
Philosophers since Kant have misconceived what an earlier tradition in philosophy had understood to be self-evident truths or axioms. They have mistakenly accepted Kant's restriction of such truths to verbal tautologies, to trifling and uninstructive statements. ...
To maintain that there are synthetic judgments a priori, as Kant does, is, perhaps, the single most revolutionary step that he took to overcome the conclusions reached by Hume that he found so repugnant. ...
To do this, Kant endowed the human mind with transcendental forms of sense-apprehension or intuition (the forms of space and time), and also with the transcendental categories of the understanding. ... The mind brings these transcendental forms and categories to experience, thereby constituting the shape and character of the experience we have.
According to Kant, the mind is not ... a tabula rasa--a total blank--until it acquires ideas initially from sense-experience. Locke rightly subscribed to the mediaeval maxim that there is nothing in the mind that does not somehow derive from sense experience. It was this maxim that Kant rejected. ...
How anyone in the twentieth century can take Kant's transcendental philosophy seriously is baffling, even though it may always remain admirable in certain respects as an extraordinarily elaborate and ingenious intellectual invention. ...
Kant argues for the exclusion of traditional metaphysics from the realm of genuine knowledge on the grounds that it must employ concepts derived from experience to make assertions that go beyond experience--the experience that is constituted by the a priori structure of the human mind. Where Hume dismissed traditional metaphysics as sophistry and illusion, Kant dismissed it as trans-empirical.
However, all the ideas used in metaphysics are not empirical concepts. The idea of God, for example, and the idea of the cosmos as a whole are not concepts derived from sense-experience. They are instead theoretical constructs. ... unlike an empirical concept, a theoretical construct does not and cannot have any perceived particular instances. ...
Kant had no awareness of the distinction between empirical concepts and theoretical constructs. His reasons for dismissing traditional metaphysics as devoid of the validity appropriate to genuine knowledge would apply equally to much of twentieth-century physics. ...
Finally, we come to what is, perhaps, the most serious mistake that modern philosophy inherited from Kant--the mistake of substituting idealism for realism. Even though Locke and his successor Hume made the mistake of thinking that the ideas in our minds are the only objects we directly apprehend, they somehow (albeit not without contradicting themselves) regarded us as having knowledge of a reality that is independent of our minds. Not so with Kant.
The valid knowledge that we have is always and only knowledge of a world we experience. But precisely because it is a world as experienced by us, it is not, according to Kant, a world independent of our minds. It is not independent, as we have already seen, because experience is constituted by the transcendental or a priori structure of our minds--its forms of intuition or apprehension and its categories of understanding.
For Kant the only things that are independent of the human mind are, in his words, "Dinge an sich"--things in themselves that are intrinsically unknowable. This is tantamount to saying that the real is the unknowable and the knowable is ideal in the sense that it is invested with the ideas that our minds bring to it to make it what it is.
The positivism or scientism that has its roots in Hume's philosophical mistakes, and the idealism and critical constraints that have their roots in Kant's philosophical mistakes, generate many embarrassing consequences that have plagued modern thought since their day. In almost every case, the trouble has consisted in the fact that later thinkers tried to avoid the consequences without correcting the errors or mistakes that generated them.
Ed
(Edited by Ed Thompson on 1/16, 10:47am)
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