Kant's Copernican Revolution: Arguments Against Rationalism

Kant argues against both rationalism and empiricism, citing dogmatism and skepticism as their respective downfalls, and instead creates his own Copernican revolution by proposing a synthesis of rationalism and empiricism, the synthetic a priori.
Colloquial usage of the term dogmatism refers to an absolutist mentality that doesn’t allow for the revision or inclusion of new knowledge. Dogmatism in a philosophical context is somewhat similar, as it refers to the often unjustified acceptance of knowledge without adequate support or examination. Although true rationalism doesn’t involve dogmatism as there is nothing rational about being dogmatic, rationalism tends to lead to dogmatism as it is very difficult to be a pure rationalist. Rationalists
believe in the existence of a priori knowledge that can be deduced through reason. An added bonus of deduction is that a deductive argument that is valid with true premises is a sound argument.
The certain nature of rationalism lends itself to a kind of arrogance that can go dreadfully wrong when paired with the unwillingness to acknowledge individual experience as often happens as rationalists prioritize reason over sense experience. Considering rationalism’s emphasis on a priori knowledge, knowledge acquired independent of sense experience, rationalists could just sit and think the world into existence and still claim that they used reason to form knowledge about the external world and things that are clearly outside of experience’s realm, such as the existence of God. Rationalists, like Descartes, often think that they are being perfectly rational in their philosophies, when actually they are dogmatic in their attempts to use logic to justify their preferred
presuppositions. Descartes’s First Meditation is subtitled, “In which the existence of God and the distinction between the mind and body are demonstrated”, clearly illustrating his religious agenda to prove the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. Kant believes that empiricism naturally tends to lead to skepticism because despite Hume’s belief that he left us in a better place than he found us, it can be argued that he left us with skepticism as he follows Locke’s philosophy to its logical conclusion, which is skepticism. Empiricists believe that knowledge is derived from sense perception and consequently contrive to form general inferences through the experimentation, otherwise known as induction. Induction itself is at best probable, which is far from the certainty provided by rationalism. Even worse, Hume isolates the problem of induction after analyzing the impossibility of experiencing causation as a necessary connection between cause and effect and subsequently deeming induction problematic as it inherently relies upon the concept of causation being a real observable phenomenon. My brief study of Locke and Hume leads me to believe that Kant is, in fact, correct in his assessment of empiricism, it does tend to lead to skepticism. Locke is not the best empiricist there ever was – he has a tendency to include things that cannot be directly experienced through sense perception alone in his philosophy out of sheer attachment to them, such as personal identity and God. Locke’s empirical weakness is highlighted by the clash between empiricism and rationalism in his ideas, a clash that he fails to adequately reconcile. The only reason that skepticism does not immediately follow within Locke’s writing is because of his active effort to ignore it. He claims to be an empiricist but is not willing to fully commit to the full implications of empiricism. Locke’s wishy-washy nature is evidenced by his employment of terms that are traditionally used by rationalists as a priori concepts, such as mode, substance, and relation in his discussion of complex ideas. Locke forcibly inserts God into his empirical conception of the world, despite the lack of empirical support for God’s existence which makes the inclusion of God clearly incompatible with the rest of Locke’s a posteriori ideas as it is of an undeniable a priori nature.
Unlike Berkeley, Hume doesn’t go the route of idealism to avoid skepticism; instead he embraces skepticism as the inevitable outcome of following Locke’s ideas to their logical conclusion. Hume makes the argument against the exist of causation as he is an empiricist and in true empiricist fashion, after failing to observe causation in the empirical world through sense perception, he concludes that there is no impression corresponding to the idea of causation in nature. Thus he concludes that the idea of causation as a necessary connection between objects cannot be acquired from experience. Hume is not advocating for the elimination of the term “causation”, but rather for it to be redefined as our human tendency to mistake constant conjunction - events happening in conjunction with each other constantly - for the necessity of one event following another. According to Hume, something outside of reason or even experience is responsible for our imagination filling in the gaps and making a necessary connection where there shouldn’t be one. He blames habit or custom for our tendency to think of ourselves as one continuous entity, as all we have through experience are impressions of individual moments and we have no real reason to bundle them up together and form one untied self from that, but we do anyways. Hume notes that this habit to associate ideas that aren’t necessarily connected is not unique to humans and that animals have a similar habit of constant conjunction.
Hume’s fork is the basis for radical skepticism. Hume forms his fork by making a distinction between relations of ideas and matters of fact. The former refers to knowledge formed through abstract reasoning or deduction, while the latter refers to experimental reasoning or induction. He boldly decides that unless something is in one of the aforementioned categories, it should be put in flames. Matters of fact are a posteriori, have to be experienced, and cannot be discovered any other way. His insistence on the inclusion of matters of fact as an essential prong of his fork contradicts Rationalist beliefs that rationalism alone is the source of true knowledge. Relations of ideas are a priori and pertain to analytic statements. The consequences of such a radical proposal would be the eradication of philosophy as the topics that philosophers grapple with tend to be metaphysical issues of personal identity, the existence of God, the existence of the external world, etc. Hume argues that there is no way to experience through impressions things like our souls, and that therefore the notion of a soul or other things - such as God - that are not directly available to us in the form of impressions are merely illusions, and we have no reason to believe in them. Despite the extreme nature of what he is suggesting, Hume seems to be of the belief that it is possible to live as practical skeptics, only questioning what is immediately relevant – changing questions from unresolvable ones about whether bodies exist and instead focusing on what would induce us to believe in the existence of the body. Kant defeats both empiricism and rationalism by arguing for the codependent coexistence of both. He argues that without concepts, intuitions would be blind, and that without intuitions, concepts would be empty. Kant defines concepts as a rule of understanding that is necessary for experience to be possible, an active categorizing tool of sorts. Intuitions are experiences of objects in the external world made possible through interaction between the mind and objects through experience. So basically, Kant is straightforwardly arguing that without sense experience, ideas would be empty as there would be no corresponding experience and that without concepts to organize thoughts, sense experiences would be an overwhelming plethora of details, instead of one coherent idea or experience. Kant uses the combination of rational and empirical sources of knowledge to avoid dogmatism through a check and balance system because one of his primary aims is to defeat dogmatic Rationalism using a non-Empiricist method to avoid being accused of Empiricist bias. Kant view dogmatism as the result of Rationalists using reason to deduce into existence things outside of the empirical world, such as God. By conjoining concepts and intuitions as equally valid and interdependent sources of knowledge, Kant makes a convincing argument against the possibility of having a priori knowledge of anything beyond the realm of experience, thus proving the Rationalist inclination to think God into existence irrational and dogmatic. Kant is a firm advocate that existence is not a predicate and that logic alone doesn’t get you anywhere.
Kant uses transcendental idealism and creates a new third prong that exposes Hume’s fork as a false dichotomy, the synthetic a priori, to avoid skepticism. Transcendental idealism consists of empirical reality where objects really exist independently of us, while simultaneously conforming to our “a priori conditions of experience” and therefore are transcendentally ideal, without an “absolute existence”, and are called phenomena as opposed to noumena (391-2). Additionally, Kant justifies the possibility of a synthetic a priori by relying heavily on transcendental idealism. It is possible for us to have synthetic knowledge, i.e. ampliative knowledge about the external world independent of experience because the world conforms to our perception of it. Instead of us perceiving the world as it is, the noumena, we only have access to the world of appearances, or the phenomena, where objects are relative to necessary conditions of human existence, such as space and time, which ground experience.
I don’t think that Kant is as successful in thwarting skepticism as he seems to believe.
He does a fine job up to a point – his ideas are consistent and follow from each other, but then he includes the antinomies to leave room for faith and everything becomes murky. In his discussion of the noumena vs phenomena or the real world as opposed to the world of appearances, Kant seems to negate his earlier progress in combatting the skeptical and emerges as a pseudo-rationalist. He previously maintained that nothing could be known about the noumena as it was a limiting principle, without content. I understand that the concept of noumena is necessary for the purpose of introducing and providing a basis for the antimonies, but it seems unjustified to claim that there exists no concept of space and time within the noumena. If the noumenon is supposedly beyond human understanding, it doesn’t seem consistent to decide to undermine the unknowable nature by negation. The motivation of the inclusion the noumenal world is revealed in Kant’s antimonies, which are sets of arguments that are perfectly balanced arguments equivalent in logical strength with no
resolution.
Although Kant seems to believe that the addition of the synthetic a priori has saved math, science, and metaphysics from the flames, it really has just succeeded in casting greater doubt over them as now there is even more to question about now that the seemingly paradoxical concept of synthetic a priori has been established. According to Kant, metaphysics cannot be explained through synthetic a priori knowledge as we only have knowledge independent of experience that pertains to the empirical world and thus metaphysical issues are beyond the scope. Despite denying the possibility of knowing the metaphysical, Kant is unwilling to completely deny it as evidenced by the inclusion of the antimonies. There are four antinomies each arguing for and against the first cause, substances composed of simple elements or not, whether we are free or determined, and the existence of God. His presentation of classic philosophical debates without bias indicates his acknowledgment that dogmatism and skepticism are impossible to eradicate as the antinomies can be identified as a dialogue between Rationalists and Empiricists, or dogmatists and skeptics.