Introduction to Philosophy

Achieve Test Prep: Philosophy

interpretation provided by rational categories of the mind. The reason empiricists were unable to see the contributions of the human mind to constructing knowledge and why the rationalists were unable to fully credit the contributions of sensory experience was that the world and our understanding of it is presented as an integral package in which sensory experience and the faculties of the mind have already created their epistemological synthesis. Kant wants to claim another kind of priori knowledge: a synthetic priori knowledge which is a knowledge that is necessary and universally true, a priori (can be discovered independently of experience), and synthetic in the sense that it provides us with genuine information regarding our experience in the world. Kant says, “We know things about the world that are necessary and universal, such as the principles of cause and effect and induction that do not depend on empirical knowledge.” Kant developed the Copernican revolution in which he proposed that our minds actually constitute the word in accordance with certain fundamental categories of understanding that are an essential part of every human’s thinking process the core questions was not “How does the human mind come to know an essentially unknowable world?” but rather “How does the human mind construct a knowable world?” Kant believed that we come to an understanding of the world through an interaction between the data of sense and experience. Kant believed there are twelve such basic categories of the mind and that one of the goals of metaphysics is to become familiar with these categories so that we can understand how they shape, organize, and constitute our orderly and intelligible world and with other categories including induction, objects, space, and time. From Kant’s perspective, it makes no sense to question the existence of an external world because it is the human mind itself that gives shape and form to it. Research in developmental psychology in the twentieth century has provided an empirical framework for Kant’s philosophical analysis. The most influential thinker in this area is Jean Piaget. Piaget was a Swiss psychologist who used painstakingly careful observations of infants and interviews with young children to trace the cognitive process by which humans constitute their world. He details the gradual process by which an infant’s mind gradually develops the concepts of object, space, time, cause and effects, and other foundational ways of organizing experience. Noam Chomsky was a philosopher of language who maintains that humans possess a type on innate grammar and a language faculty that is involved in the acquiring and use of language. Research in a variety of disciplines supports the view that although thinking and language begin as distinct processes, they begin to intertwine very early in their evolution and they quickly become so integrated that it is nearly impossible to disentangle them. Most thinking necessarily involves language, and conversely, most language involved thinking. The fundamental cognitive categories with which we construct our world cannot be fully understood without simultaneously integrating the role of language into the mix.

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