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by Mortimer Adler, Ph.D.
Let us begin with David Hume and then go on to Immanuel Kant. The place to begin is with the conclusion that Hume reached in the very closing pages of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. It is here that Hume proposes to adopt what he calls "a more mitigated skepticism" than the extreme form that denies that we can have any knowledge at all -- that there is anything either true or false. Accordingly, he concedes that we do have knowledge of two sorts. One is the kind of knowledge to be found in mathematics. He refers to this as "abstract science" because it involves no assertions or judgments about matters of fact or real existence. It deals only with the relation between our own ideas -- our ideas of quantity and number. Here it is possible to have demonstration and a measure of certitude. But, he goes on to say, "all attempts to extend this more perfect species of knowledge beyond these bounds are mere sophistry and illusion." Our definitions of certain terms give us some propositions or judgments that also have a measure of certitude. Thus if we define injustice as a violation of property, then we can be certain that where there is no property, there can be no injustice. But this is just a matter of definition. Injustice can be defined differently, and so it is not intrinsically impossible to think that there can be injustice where there is no property. Hume then tells us that, apart from mathematics, "all other enquiries of men regard only matters of fact and existence; and these are evidently incapable of demonstration." The opposite of any judgment that something exists or that it is such and such is always possible. Judgments about matters of fact and real existence can be supported by evidence and reasons. When they are, they constitute knowledge, not mere opinion; but they are always knowledge that lacks certitude and falls within the sphere of doubt -- the sphere of the corrigible and the mutable. Such knowledge depends upon our sense-experience. "It is only experience," Hume writes, "which teaches us the nature and bounds of cause and effect, and enables us to infer the existence of one object from that of another." According to these criteria, Hume admits into the sphere of empirical knowledge (as contrasted with abstract science) such things as history, geography, and astronomy, and also the sciences "which treat of general facts…politics, natural philosophy, physics, chemistry, etc." This brings him to his thundering conclusion in the last paragraph of the Enquiry:
The line that divides what deserves to be honored and respected as genuine knowledge from what should be dismissed as mere opinion (or worse, as sophistry and illusion) is determined by two criteria. (1) It is knowledge and can be called science if it deals solely with abstractions and involves no judgments about matters of fact or real existence. Here we have mathematics and, together with it, the science of logic. (2) It is knowledge, if it deals with particular facts, as history and geography do, or with general facts, as physics and chemistry do. In both cases, it is knowledge only to the extent that it is based upon experimental reasoning, involving empirical investigations of the kind that occur in laboratories and observatories, or methodical investigations of the kind conducted by historians and geographers. What did Hume exclude from the realm of knowledge? Even though he refers to what he calls "natural philosophy," which in his century was identical with what we have come to call physical science, his intention was to reject as sophistry and illusion, or at least as mere opinion, what in antiquity and in the Middle Ages was traditional philosophy, including here a philosophy of nature, or physics that is not experimental and does not rely on empirical investigations, as well as metaphysics and philosophical theology. This view of knowledge and opinion comes down to us in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the form of a doctrine that has been variously called positivism or scientism. The word "positivism" derives its meaning from the fact that the experimental or investigative sciences, and other bodies of knowledge, such as history, that rely upon investigation and research, came to be called positive sciences. Positivism, then, is the view that the only genuine knowledge of reality or of the world of observable phenomena (i.e., matters of fact and existence) is to be found in the positive sciences. Mathematics and logic are also genuine knowledge, but they are not knowledge of the world of observable phenomena, or of matters of fact and real existence. The twentieth-century form of scientism or positivism thus came to be called "logical positivism." Here we have one facet of the mistake about knowledge and opinion, the other facet of which is to be found in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. The latter is by far the more serious and the more far-reaching in its consequences. Kant tells us that David Hume awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers. His prior dogmatism, as well as Hume's skepticism, which Kant also found repugnant, was replaced by the critical philosophy that he developed. It is also sometimes called a transcendental philosophy because of its transcendence with regard to experience. In order to understand this, it is necessary, first, to pay attention to two distinctions that are operative in Kant's thinking. One is the distinction between the a priori and the a posteriori. The other is the distinction between the analytic and the synthetic. 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. Thus, if lead is defined as a nonconducting metal, then the judgment that lead does not conduct electricity is an analytically true judgment. So, too, if man is defined as a rational animal, the judgment that men have reason is analytically true. In each example, the term that is predicated of the subject being considered ("does not conduct electricity" and "have reason") is already contained within the definition of the subject being considered ("lead" and "men"). Clearly, such analytical judgments can be, in fact must be, a priori. Their truth depends solely upon a definition of terms, not upon sense-experience. Hume would have regarded such analytical judgments as truths that deal with the relation of our own ideas, not with matters of fact and existence. John Locke, before him, regarded them as mere verbal tautologies; in his words, judgments that are "trifling and uninstructive." Locke, in my judgment, is correct in dismissing them as unworthy of serious consideration. Earlier in this essay, I explained the character of self-evident truths, truths that have certitude and incorrigibility because it is impossible for us to think their opposites. Such a truth as a finite whole is greater than any of its parts is not analytical in Kant's sense: its focal terms -- whole and part -- are indefinable. Nor is it a priori in Kant's sense: its truth depends upon our understanding of the terms whole and part, an understanding that is derived from a single experience, such as tearing a piece of paper into pieces, thus dividing a whole into parts. 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. But this is not the worst of Kant's mistakes. Much worse is his view about synthetic judgments a priori. A synthetic judgment is not trifling or uninstructive. It does not depend upon an arbitrary definition of terms. It is the kind of judgment that Hume regarded as a truth about matters of fact or real existence. In every such case, the opposite of what is asserted is possible -- thinkable, conceivable. But for Hume, the very fact that a judgment is synthetic involves its dependence on experience of one sort or another. It cannot, therefore, be a priori -- independent of sense experience. 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 repugnant. What was his driving purpose in doing so? It was to establish Euclidean geometry and traditional arithmetic as sciences that not only have certitude, but also contain truths that are applicable to the world of our experience. It was also to give the same status to Newtonian physics. 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. These are not to be confused with Descartes' "innate ideas." 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 (as John Locke rightly insisted it was in his refutation of Cartesian innate ideas) 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. The transcendental forms of sense-apprehension and the transcendental categories of the understanding are inherent in the mind and constitute its structure prior to any sense-experience. The common experience that all of us share has the character it does have because it has been given that character by the transcendental structure of the human mind. It has been formed and constituted by it. This elaborate machinery invented by Kant enabled him to think that he had succeeded in establishing and explaining the certitude and incorrigibility of Euclidean geometry, simple arithmetic, and Newtonian physics. Three historic events suffice to show how illusory was the view that he had succeeded in doing that. The discovery and development of the non-Euclidean geometries and of modern number theory should suffice to show how utterly factitious was Kant's invention of the transcendental forms of space and time as controlling our sense-apprehensions and giving certitude and reality to Euclidean geometry and simple arithmetic. Similarly, the replacement of Newtonian physics by modern relativistic physics, the addition of probabilistic or statistical laws to causal laws, the development of elementary particle physics and of quantum mechanics, should also suffice to show how utterly factitious was Kant's invention of the transcendental categories of the understanding to give Newtonian physics certitude and incorrigibility. 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. So much for the illusory character of what Kant claimed for his transcendental philosophy as an attempt to give mathematics and natural science a certitude and incorrigibility that they do not possess. What about the critical character that Kant claimed for his philosophy -- critical in the sense that it would save us from the dogmatism of traditional metaphysics, especially its cosmology and natural theology? 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 or 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. There is, therefore, nothing invalid about employing such an idea even if it goes beyond all the sense-experience available to us. Let me add here that, unlike an empirical concept, a theoretical construct does not and cannot have any perceived particular instances. What I have just said about such metaphysical concepts as God and the cosmos as a whole applies equally to some of the most important ideas in twentieth-century theoretical physics, such ideas as the idea of quark, of certain elementary particles, such as mesons, or of black holes. All of these are theoretical constructs, not empirical concepts. 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. Here, once more, we have grounds for not taking much stock in Kant's claims for the critical character of his philosophy. 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. Not being independent of our minds, it can hardly be regarded as reality, for the essential characteristic of the real is independence of the human mind. 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. In this short essay, it is impossible to deal with the shortcomings, embarrassments, and additional errors in nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought. I will confine myself to a brief treatment of knowledge and opinion that corrects and avoids the philosophical mistakes made by Hume and Kant.
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