Relation to truth· Belief and knowledgenamed middle

Criticism

Axis: Source of knowledge — Where does our knowledge come from: sensory experience or reason?

Knowledge comes neither from experience alone nor from reason alone, but from their collaboration. The senses supply the matter, the mind the forms that order it. Without concepts, perceptions would be blind; without perceptions, concepts would be empty.

Who holds this position

Movements 1

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Phenomenologyinferable

Phenomenology refuses the empiricism / rationalism alternative: against the sensualism that reduces the mind to impressions, and against deductive rationalism, it returns to the intuition of what gives itself. The brings out the essential structures of experience, grasped in an intuition of essences (Wesensschau) that is both a priori and grounded in lived experience. Hence a third-way position, close to criticism.

Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, I · Husserl, Logical Investigations

Philosophers 2

Kantexplicit

The dispute between and is insoluble so long as one term is asked to carry everything: experience alone never yields necessity ('s objection about causation), reason alone runs idle. Kant's answer is the synthetic a priori judgment: there are a priori forms of sensibility and understanding that structure any possible experience, so that knowledge begins with experience without deriving wholly from it. This is the Copernican turn applied to knowledge, and the reason the axis settles at the centre.

Critique of Pure Reason, Introduction · Critique of Pure Reason, A51/B75

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Husserlinferable

Husserl's position espouses neither , which reduces all knowledge to sensation, nor the that deduces the real from reason alone: this is its distinctiveness. His "principle of principles" is that every originarily giving intuition is a source of right for knowledge, but intuition is not only sensory. Alongside the perception of fact there is an , an immediate giving of the general with its own evidence. Knowledge is thus governed not by a privileged faculty but by the given itself, as it presents itself: a third, intuitionist term that passes between the two classic poles rather than arbitrating them.

Ideas I, §24 (the "principle of principles") · Logical Investigations, VI

Arguments and objections

ArgumentConcepts and intuitions — Empiricism is right that sense data are needed, rationalism that forms of the mind are needed; knowledge arises from their meeting, the matter from the senses, the form, space, time, causality, from the mind.

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.

ObjectionAttacks the positionPrisoners of our own forms? — Criticism makes space, time and causality forms imposed by the mind; but then everything passes through that filter, and we reach the appearance, never the thing in itself. The rigor is paid for by a confinement.

Criticism grants that space, time and causality are not in things but are forms the mind imposes on every possible experience.
But then everything we know has already passed through that filter: we reach the phenomenon, the thing as it appears to us, never the thing in itself, as it would be independently of our forms.
Knowledge gains in rigor what it loses in reach: it holds for the world of our experience, but locks us within our own frames, without ever giving us the real as it is.

Therefore So the synthesis has a price: either one accepts knowing only appearances, or one seeks to reach the real otherwise, on the side of what the senses give or of what reason grasps.

Problems

Descriptive
Emotions, a source of knowledge?
Beyond the senses and reason, do our emotions let us know something of the world and of ourselves, or do they only cloud judgment?
an emotion
Descriptive
Do the senses deceive us?
If the senses can deceive us to the very root, as in dreams, can solid knowledge still be made to rest on them?
sense perception