← See the axis · Source of knowledge
ArgumentConcepts 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 ·
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?
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