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Kant & Modern Physics
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4 responses to “Kant & Modern Physics”
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As I understand Kant, he says that, if certain features of our perception of spatio-temporal objects are to be intersubjective, then certain causal relations must hold to coordinate our knowledge (just like with clock synchronization etc.). Then, Einstein and QM came and changed our ideas about what these features of space and time are (for Newton there is absolute simultaneity, for Einstein there isn’t). I think Kant never persuasively argues that Newtonian space-time is irrefutable (he perhaps argues for it somewhere, but I doubt he had any *good* arguments, because I don’t remember any). But it seems to me to be a central feature of Kant’s view that granularity of these laws is dependent on what spatio-temporally measurable quantities are there, so I don’t see it as discontinuous with his theory that certain phenomena are to be modelled probabilistically.
Also, this assertion seems incorrect to me: “in the theory of special relativity the concept of time loses its absolute character and it therefore becomes impossible to say which events precede which events”. As far as I know, special relativity is a local theory (?), and therefore all causes of A have to come before A in time.
Thanks for this post.
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hello
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‘The philosopher/physicist Hans Reichenbach (early 20th century) diagnosed a deficit in Kant’s philosophy: Kant’s idea is relevant not for knowledge per se, but for *scientific* knowledge.’
As a criticism of Kant, this strikes me as being rather superficial. I think of Reichenback as a proponent of logical empiricism, which is one of the areas in which he was influential, and which was part of a movement that flourished in the 1920s and 1930s in several European centers. Maybe it’s interesting, but actually, I’m more interested in Kant himself. A few off the cuff remarks pointing towards Kant, then..
In Kant there is transcendental knowledge, which is not empirical knowledge, or in other words there is pure knowledge and impure knowledge. We could also get into how, in Kant, there is a kind of knowledge which is both synthetic and a posteriori, versus most of the knowledge we gain through ordinary experience, or through science. Which, is empirical. ‘This table is brown’ is a typical empirical statement. But I’ll return to the point that is so important in Kant, that we may consider aiming to establish a kind of knowledge which is both synthetic and a priori. It is a special type of philosophical knowledge. I want to wind up briefly, so I’ll just toss out that in Kant, ‘Every event has a cause’ is a typical transcendental statement. But we can pause, here, to consider the boundary that transcendental knowledge defines. I mean, between empirical knowledge and speculation about the transcendent realm. As it were.
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Interesting.
For knowledge to be possible, not only reality must be in certain ways,
but above all WE must have certain ways: Kant’s “Copernican Revolution” (his term) is to put the knower central.
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