Kant’s Disposal of Humean Doubt
Kant’s Disposal of Humean Doubt
In this essay I will distinguish Kant’s position from that of Hume, more specifically the reconstruction of his position in which Kant disposes of Humean Doubt that was introduced by David Hume. The advantage of this view is that it allows us to fully know the structure of cognition, and allowing Metaphysics and mathematics to return to the category of being A Priori proposition, specifically a synthetic one, which Hume had not accounted for. This led to him to only recognizing two categories. First I will give a background of Kant's beliefs, concepts, and ideas, then how Kant disposes of Humean doubt; lastly, I will evaluate and critique Kant’s claims.
I.
Kant stands on the shoulders of Hume but completely reverses Hume's idea, and thus actually is a contrarian to Hume’s ultimate findings, even though he respected his work. Though what he finds is different than Hume, it wouldn't have been possible without the foundation and ideas that were laid before him (AT 4:281). This is important as it provides Kant’s departure point for his discourse which was founded on Hume’s claim that all beliefs or mental content can be divided into two camps; relations of ideas and matters of fact (AT 17). Notice he says, “Hume’s challenge awoke him from his dogmatic slumber (AT 10)”. Kant's problem with Hume's claim is that it failed to describe our faculties well enough. Hume neglected to factor in the interaction of human reason and experience. For Kant, there is an additional source of knowledge inside the interaction and this is where metaphysical knowledge comes from. He has two categories of propositions; analytic, and synthetic, with either of them being A priori or posteriori. Analytic a posteriori is currently not known to exist. Contrary to Hume who claimed propositions can only be categorized as either relations of ideas, or matters of fact. Kant says, "One therefore truly amplifies one's concept through this proposition 7+5=12 and adds to the first concept a new one that was not though in it (AT 18)." This is Kant's argument for mathematics and metaphysics and where Hume has miscategorized mathematics as being a relation of idea and believes mathematics is something else, that being, a synthetic a priori. To Kant, mathematics requires something additional, something synthetic but this is also something that is a priori. Kant is saying is that to arrive at the conclusion that five and seven equals twelve requires an intuition or a doing thing. There is an operation that is done in time, called intuition, that allows you to come to the conclusion that the combination of five and seven equals twelve, namely, the predicate adds something new to the subject.
II.
“Here is now the place to dispose throughly of the Humean doubt (27),” as Kant starts his critique. Here, Kant is specifying exactly where his view agrees with Hume’s view. First, Kant agrees with Hume that reason alone is not a source of knowledge about causality. That is, “through reason,” you cannot relate the “existence of one thing to the existence of another thing that is posited through the first thing” (27). What Kant means is this: reason alone doesn’t tell us that, just because the sun is hot, doesn’t mean that it will warm the stone. Kant is agreeing with Hume that rationalists like Descartes have falsely claimed that reason alone can give us insight into the causal relationships between things. Kant claims since we have no insight about how a consequence or conclusions from things that have their own separate existence relying upon each other we cannot frame any concept of possibility, through reason alone (AT 27).
While he agrees with Hume about reason as a source of knowledge about causality, he also agrees with Hume about experience as a source of knowledge about causality, as follows:
Nonetheless, I am very far from taking these concepts to be merely borrowed from experience, and from taking the necessity represented in them to be falsely imputed and a mere illusion through which long habit deludes us; rather, I have sufficiently shown that they and the principles taken from them stand firm a priori prior to all experience, and have their undoubted objective correctness, though of course only with respect to experience. (4:311)
What Kant means here is this: while reason alone cannot be a source of knowledge about “concepts” of cause; so too is mere “experience” insufficient for knowledge of those concepts. Neither, on Kant’s view, are sufficient for knowledge of those concepts by themselves. Hume accuses some philosophers of trying to derive knowledge of those concepts of causality through experience--empiricists such as Aristotle. Hume differs from those empiricists by acknowledging that you cannot get knowledge of causal concepts through experience. Kant agrees with Hume on this point.
But Kant also disagrees with Hume regarding an important point: whether the “necessity” represented in those concepts is “falsely imputed” and “mere illusion.” Instead, Kant claims, the concepts of causality “stand firm a priori.” That is, we know them before experience. Moreover, the concepts of causality, on his view, have “objective correctness,” but only with respect to experience. That is, we only know the truth of concepts of causality through experience.
This is how Kant is developing our understanding for the synthetic a priori and how he is distinguishing himself from other philosophers regarding causation. Traditionally, you fell among two camps, rationalist or empiricist, on this point. Rationalists like Descartes claim that knowledge of causal concepts comes from reason alone. That is, I can conceptualize the sun pushing something onto the stone. By contrast, an empiricist might say that I get knowledge of causal concepts from sensory experience. Hume denies as much, noting the “secret natures” of things and the limits of sensory experience of the world. what is unique with Kant's view is the convergence of the two ideals (Anna Cremaldi 2018). Kant says experience is not pertaining particularly about certain “things in themselves” but about the cognition of things in experience being determined with respect to moments of judgement (AT 28). Through this Kant finds he has insight into both possibility and necessity by subsuming all appearances under the concepts. Without both concepts and intuition the union is lost and thus no cognition can arise (Anna Cremaldi 2018). A potential flaw addressed by Kant is the issue of a rule of relation being found in perception (AT 30). Kant is primarily focused on the connection, what he calls the intuition. These are representations of objects that are immediately related to objects from the noumenal world, which is the world as it really is (Anna Cremaldi 2018). To depict this he provides an example, “If a body is illuminated by the sun for long enough, then it becomes warm. Here there is of course not yet a necessity of connection, hence not yet the concept of cause (AT 29)”. If we were to derive the light of the sun caused the warmth we would be wrong as do not truly know the cause as it isn't attached to a thing in itself but only the appearances or experience (AT 29).
This leaves Kant in an unfortunate predicament, if this is true then “the pure concepts of the understanding have no significance at all”, but only to “serve our understanding for use in experience only (AT 30)”.
Jordan Palmer
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