Post reflection - Theme 1: Theory of knowledge and science

This week’s theme was “Theory of knowledge and theory of science”. The focus of the lecture was Kant and his book “Critique of pure reason”. There was some concept that was in focus of the lecture that I thought I would try to define. A priori knowledge is knowledge before experience and is what analytic judgements are build on. Analytical judgement is kind of a concept about an object and you know that it’s true because of the meaning of the subject. A posteriori knowledge is knowledge after experience and connected to synthetic judgements. It is the opposite to analytical judgement and something you can formulate after investigating the object. Kant works in the field of metaphysics which tries to generate synthetic a priori judgements about the world, something that might sound impossible. Kant looked at how our knowledge is structured. For example we can’t perceive anything outside space and time. We organize our knowledge in a sorts of categories that he called “Forms of intuition”.

During the seminar we talked a lot about what the truth is. How can we know what is real and what is created by our mind? And I think that the conclusion was that we will never know what the truth is because we can’t see the world as it is in itself. We talked about models and how we use them to try to understand the world and to describe it in a way that we can comprehend. Then we talked about if mathematics is a description of the real world and I meant that it can never be even though the nature fits in with our concepts and models. These models is created by us and is our way of understanding the world but that doesn’t make it the “truth” about the world. But within these models we have some kind of truth that we have agreed on. After these discussions you start to question if there really is a reality or if everything is something that is made up in my mind and that nothing is real, but something has to exist so we can perceive it. I think that a priori knowledge is hard concept to understand. I don’t believe that you can have knowledge without experience. All words is made by man and it is created based on experience. I think that it gets very abstract to think of the object without its name and concept, and how we should really know that what we have decided is what really is. When we are newborn we know nothing about the world and as we grow older we learn about the world through our own and others experiences.

A finishing quote: “Perception without conception is blind” - Immanuel Kant