4/19/2013 Kant's Dangerous Idea

by Benny Mattis

`The search for objective truth, including the scientific enterprise, works on the assumption that nature is ultimately intelligible.  We seem to be justified in our beliefs that the world must be explainable in terms of our own logical categories (i.e., the logical form of our thought), but how can we be justified in making these assumptions?  Science can help us discover which events cause which, but how do we know that all events even have a cause to be discovered?  

In his new book, Mind and Cosmos, Thomas Nagel notes that the intelligibility of the universe is not adequately explained by either theism's claim that God made us and the world in such a way that it would be intelligible to us, or evolutionary psychology's claim that such a priori knowledge is an expected result of natural selection.  Nagel himself raises the suggestion that there are more physical laws of which we are not aware, i.e. naturally teleological laws which bias the world towards the development of rational creatures.

Immanuel Kant, in his 1787 classic Critique of Pure Reason, addresses the same problem of intelligibility, but comes to a different conclusion, and would likely not be satisfied by Nagel's answer any more than theism's or evolutionary psychology's.  Kant explains that our synthetic (non-trivial) a priori knowledge of experience is not knowledge of how objects are as considered in themselves, but only of how they are as they appear to us.  Kant explains how the a priori laws of nature, such as the forms of our logical thought and the principle of sufficient reason, must ultimately be laws prescribed to nature by our own minds insofar as it is experienced by us.