Kant is a good starting point for studying epistemology -- and epistemology being the study of knowledge, we can say also that epistemology is the search for 'truth'.
Starting with Kant, we need to determine what he did wrong in order to go back to doing things 'right' relative to the moving forward of the art and science of epistemology.
Kant created an epistemological dualism but one without solid foundation and without 'moving parts'. Kant did a 'Platonic thing' -- he made the same epistemological mistake that Plato made. He took epistemology into the realm of metaphysics -- into the 'outer stratosphere' -- where it quickly became completely incomprehensible, ungrounded, and had academics shaking their collective heads, and becoming more anxious -- much more anxious, some of them to the point of despair == as it seemed through Kant's view of epistemology that epistemology had no future, no place to go, because it had no foundation.
For me and my presentation of DGB Epistemology, there was, and is, no problem with the dualistic part of his epistemology -- i.e. his distinction between the 'phenomenal world' of our senses vs. the 'noumenal world' of objective reality apart from our senses. This was essentially simply a re-wording of the age-old philosophical 'subjective-objective split'. However, Kant ended up in the same philosophical place -- only perhaps stated things more clearly, succinctly, bluntly than any philosopher before him including David Hume who inspired him to write his masterpiece -- 'The Critique of Pure Reason'.
What Kant said, in effect, is that man could never 'know' his objective-noumenal world because this world was a completely metaphysical world that lay outside the boundaries of his senses.
Now I have no trouble accepting this statement as being 'true' if by 'true' we mean truth in its most perfect, academic, technical, 'anal-retentive' sense. This was the world that Kant was writing from and about.
However, we have to make a distinction between epistemology in its most technical, academic (Kantian) sense and epistemology in the pragmatic, common-sense way that all of us have to go about this business each and every day.
In this latter sense of the word 'epistemology', 'fact', and 'truth, if ten people see a 'chair' in a room and agree that it is indeed there, and nowhere else, has a physical, empirical presence that we can see and touch, and all agree that if they walk out of the room, the chair will still be there when they come back, assuming that no one is there to move it, and all agree that the chair has an 'objective existence' in its own right, apart from human perception -- this is what i would call a 'low level human inference' -- then we can say that our senses at least partly cross the border and dialectically bridge the gap between our subjective and objective worlds.
Now this is not to say that gross mistakes can't be made in terms of the 'probable truth-value' of our subjective perception and/or our interpretation of the evidence before us relative to our objective-noumenal world. It happens all the time. Indeed, sometimes ten or a hundred or even a million people can be wrong on the same perception-interpretation. Often this is either of historical relevance or cultural relevance or economic relevance or narcissistic relevance. For example, people once believed that the world was flat, and theta the sun revolved around the earth. Men also believed at one time that men should have superior rights to women -- in fact, some individuals and cultures still do believe this. Similarly, at one time, some individuals and cultures believed that whites should have more rights than blacks. Similarly too, both judges and juries have often been fooled into believing in a defendant's guilt or innocence, and then been found later to have been grossly wrong.
Yes, mistakes are always being made relative to the objective truth value of some our subjective perceptions and/or interpretations. There is a dialectic that always needs to be going on between our subjective and objective worlds. We need to remain at all times partly skeptical relative to the truth-value of our perceptions and interpretations. However, if we are well trained in the dynamics and probabilities of our subjective, epistemological conclusions relative to the objective world around us, combining good sensory observations with highly credible social reports, good internal logic, and moving up and down the abstraction ladder in the General Semantic sense of this process -- never shutting ourselves off of new arriving information from the world outside us -- then we generally have a right to feel pretty confident relative to these epistemological processes and conclusions.
Some people practice better language and meaning skills, and epistemological skills, much better than others do. We have a right to talk about 'epistemological pathology' and at least the partial connection between epistemological pathology and psychopathology. This is one of the areas where philosophy and psychology overlap and touch each other in the same dialectical way that I have writing about everything else here. Our philosophical foundations influence our psychological foundations and visa versa. There is a process of 'dialectical (two-way) causality'. Actually, there are 'multiple dialectical causalities' at work here as economics, culture, politics, and other factors all have their respective influences on each other.
If we view epistemology in the strictly technical, academic Kantian sense, then epistemology hits a dead-end roadblock. It has no place to go. Worse than that, it destroys the 'observational-empirical-logical' base of epistemology as built up through the philosophical lineage of men like Aristotle, Bacon, Occam, Newton, Hobbes, Locke, and the philosophers of The Enlightenment. These were academic men but they were also men of profoundly wise epistemological pragmatism and common sense.
If I say that 'there is a chair in the room' and ten other people concur with me that there is, indeed, a chair in the room -- it is a far less 'metaphysical-assumptive leap of faith' to therefore conclude that 'the chair exists and it exists and is situated in the room' than it is to try to back up the metaphysical-assumptive claim for example that 'God exists'. Observation, touch, hearing, and empiricism in general have a very big role to play in what we can call the probability of the 'truth value claims' that each of us make each and every day.
In other words, epistemology, in order to have any truth value and pragmatic relevance needs to be 'empirically based' -- it needs to be based on the empirical relevance and 'truth-value' of what our senses tell us is 'true'. Rationalism -- inferences, logic, generalizations, associations, distinctions, and value judgments -- all play a big role in this epistemological process but only when solidly combined with an observational, sensory, empirical base. From the dialectical dualism between 'rationalism' and 'empiricism' is born the creative epistemological integration of 'rational-empiricism'.
Correcting Kant's technical, anal-retentive epistemological problem then where he claims that we cannot 'know' our objective-noumenal world -- is a two fold process: 1. bring common sense and pragmatism back into epistemology; and 2. bring epistemology back down to earth again so that there is both a dialectical process continually going on between our rational and empirical processes, and in so doing this, we also develop a better ongoing dialectical assumptive or inferential connection between our subjective-phenomenal and objective-noumenal worlds.
There will always be a metaphysical component of reality -- that part which is cognitively beyond our grasp. But with inside this 'metaphysical realm of uncertainty' -- which is the foundation for the philosophical grounds of 'epistemological skepticism' -- we have to do the best we can do with the sensory-interpretive tools that God/Nature gave us.
This is where we have to re-ground epistemology and base it on the best sensory-cognitive-interpretive tools that we have available to us. We can do no better because no man or woman amongst us is an epistemological God (i.e., infallible to error).
As Wittgenstein or Korzybski have each said in their own similar but slightly different way, when things start to get too abstract and too metaphysical it is time to start 'pointing at things you can see again' and 'touching things you can feel again'.
Now as Berkley and Hume have shown us, empiricism by itself can be taken too far --into a world of absurdity. In this regard, empiricism -- in its common-sense, pragmatic dimension needs a polar dialectical soul-mate that can balance the groundedness of empiricism with the logical creativity and imagination of man's -- rational mind. What was needed back in Kant's time -- and still is -- is a dialectical epistemology of rational-empiricism.
Let us take a short break -- or until the next leapfrog -- and then move on to a discussion of rational-empiricism.
dgb, Jan. 29th, 2007, updated Jan. 8th, 2008.
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