I’ve recently become interested in German Idealism, and specifically the epistemological system of Immanuel Kant. Although I am not at all very well read on his work and epistemology, I feel I understand it enough to explain something I found very interesting especially in regards to critiquing pure “scientism” (the idea that all truth is only discernible through empiricism).

Without diving into Kant’s whole deal with analytic vs synthetic claims and how they relate to a priori and a posteriori claims, I want to just focus on this one aspect of Kant’s insights, which is outlined in an article about his metaphysics on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

“”Every event must have a cause” cannot be proven by experience, but experience is impossible without it because it describes the way the mind must necessarily order its representations. We can understand Kant’s argument again by considering his predecessors. According to the Rationalist and Empiricist traditions, the mind is passive either because it finds itself possessing innate, well-formed ideas ready for analysis, or because it receives ideas of objects into a kind of empty theater, or blank slate. Kant’s crucial insight here is to argue that experience of a world as we have it is only possible if the mind provides a systematic structuring of its representations. This structuring is below the level of, or logically prior to, the mental representations that the Empiricists and Rationalists analyzed.”

Essentially what this is saying is that Kant recognized that the pure deduction that adherents to strict empiricism cling to is impossible, simply due to the fact that before we can make sense of the world, we must already have certain representations of reality in our minds. If we don’t have these representations prior to experience, then any experience we have is futile because we cannot make sense of it, thus it is logically necessary for us to represent the world in a certain way before empirically investigating it. David Bentley Hart expounds upon this further in his book “The Experience of God” by saying:

“One does not have to embrace Kantian epistemology as a whole (as I certainly do not) to recognize the truth that it is only as organized under a set of a priori categories that experience becomes intelligible; and those categories are not impressed upon the mind by physical reality but must always precede empirical experience. This is a point closely related to the issue of abstract concepts, as described above, though it is slightly more radical; the issue here is not just how the mind understands reality but how the mind has any continuous experience of anything at all. We can see easily enough how certain transcendental categories (that is to say, categories not bound to particular things, but abstractly applicable to all particular things) are necessary for the formation of rational judgments about things. For instance, a series of mere sense impressions of consecutive events, like smoke rising from a fire, can be synthesized into the judgment that the relation between the two events is one of causality only because the mind already possesses the concept of cause. Hence what the senses perceive as only a sequence the mind understands as a real consequence. And the category of cause could not be abstracted from nature were it not already present in the mind’s perception of nature.” (p. 190)

Hart takes this further to go into the issues surrounding teleology and the nature of intentionality and so on, however that’s outside the scope of this post. What’s important here is that, as described above, pure deduction from empirical investigation is simply not possible, and thus people who claim that “science is the only way we can arrive at truth” are making a self defeating claim, for science itself (as a method of empirical investigation) relies upon prior truths being established that are themselves non-empirical.