See the axis · Source of knowledge

Argument

Concepts and intuitions

The senses give the matter, the mind the forms that order it: without concepts perceptions are blind, without perceptions concepts are empty.

Supports Criticism

Kant ·

  1. Empiricism is right on one point: without data received from the senses, the mind has nothing to work on. Concepts that no intuition comes to fill remain empty, mere words that know nothing.
  2. Rationalism is right on the other: these raw data, without form, would be but a flux without order. It is the mind that supplies space, time, causality, the frames under which alone anything can appear to us. Intuitions that no concept orders remain blind.
  3. Knowledge is therefore neither received ready-made from without, nor drawn from reason alone: it arises from the meeting of the two, the matter from the senses, the form from the mind that orders it.

Therefore So neither experience alone nor reason alone grounds knowledge: to know is to give form, through the mind's frames, to what experience gives us.

How far does this reasoning convince you?

Not at all
Entirely