Or so says this guy.
What do you think?
[quote=“The first line of “The Critique of Pure Reason” by Immanuel Kant”]
There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.
[/quote]
The great part about reason (which the guy clearly advocates as being of the utmost importance) is that it can be employed in another entirely “empirical”, in the truest and most ancient sense of the word and one in which modern followers of scientism-empiricism refuse to admit. This is that we’ve recognized that Man qua rational animal and his free-willing requires another approach of study (the axiomatic-deductive) versus what applies to the lifeless forms of the natural sciences (the hypothetico-deductive “scientific method”).
2+2=4 by virtue of the definitions of those symbols. Its a priori.
That’s the definition I am most familiar with, and makes the most sense to me.
The basic q is over my head, but I’d like to address the last paragraph of that article.
"The consequences to accepting the claim that knowledge can be a priori is that it leads to faith.
Nope. It may lead some uncritical people to faith. This is like saying learning to read is bad, because it leads to reading evil books.
When it is suppose that some knowledge exists and is valid without our need of deriving it from reality, it opens the door to pretending all knowledge can be like this.
This is a silly argument. Something is either true or it’s not. It’s truth is not determined by whether it can open a door to pretending something.
By denying the use of reason to form these abstract ideas, it claims there are alternative methods of gaining knowledge.
If there are alternate methods, then there are. And of course there are. Reasoning is only one tool of many that our great minds have.
A simple example. Here is Gary Kasparov’s comment on a move he made in his Immortal Game:
“Moreover, I felt that there was a possibility to continue the game, to play without the Rook, though I could not imagine what it would lead to. However, the image of the black King on a5 comforted my heart and intuition given to every man from birth, intuition of an “attacker” (let’s call it that way), told me that there would be decision and a mate net around the black King would be spun in spite of the huge material advantage of the adversary.”
By severing the tie to reality, it allows any idea to be accepted"
Yes, knowledge is a dangerous thing.
If you go out in the woods today
You’re sure of a big surprise.
If you go out in the woods today
You’d better go in disguise.
For every bear that ever there was
Will gather there for certain, because
Today’s the day the teddy bears have their picnic.
Some (lunatics) would claim that terms like “2+2=4” or “all grandmothers have/had children” are meaningless. They will say that language does not create truth, and is merely a social construct/convention (subject to revisability). Of course, this nonsense is just disguised nihilism, a symptom of today’s defunct philosophy.
I would say they are tautological… To superhuman intelligences they might contain no new information.
In the context of 2+2=4, it being true just says that you’re using the symbols properly. It doesn’t correspond to anything outside of language. I don’t know if this means its not a “truth”, but if it is, that means truth is just a mental flag to signal that we accept a certain preposition.
I’m still new to philosophy but lets say we find a group of people who uses the base 3 instead of 10, then 2+2=13. If we were to use stones to represent the addition we would still have the same amount regardless of which base we use. That means that language can’t create truth because we got more then one language, and how do we prove what is true?
I see it as it’s the idea in our head that matters and not the symbols or mechanics we use to express it with. That would make me a lunatic in your eyes.
(tried to quote but the server would not let me post it, got a copy of the error report I can post to who?)
But that’s faith! Don’t you know that 2 + 2 can equal 5 if Big Brother says so?
[/quote]
Exactly. It’s called synthetic a priori. P.S. Who here learned 1000*1000 a posteriori? I’d like to know someone who can claim that they took one thousand 1,000s and added them up in order to get 1,000,000.
I would guess there are two kinds of kids.
One kind is taught the rule [add up the zeroes and put them after a one] and just goes with it, meaning he believes the teacher. LOL, hard to say there’s some apriori knowledge lurking there.
Another hears the rule, fiddles around with it a bit, yeah it works for 10 times 10 [which he has convinced himself of already], and uses a mixture of inductive reasoning [the kind used in the sciences, not mathematical induction, which most people never heard of] and faith in the teacher [or the calcualtor] to reach his conclusion.
I doubt anyone sat there and worked out a mathematical proof of the rule before he trusted it.
Lazy strawman of those who might disagree. It’s not impossible to foresee that a different universe and/or dimension might have different physics, let alone different mathematics. It also ignores the mental ill that may be unable to comprehend so called “a priori” knowledge, & may actually believe 2 + 2 = 5 (even if it’s demonstrably wrong). Not all schizophrenics can do equilibrium theory in their spare time.