ABSTRACT
This study makes Kant’s Critical epistemology intelligible, attractive and useful to epistemologists, and to philosophers and cognitive scientists more generally. part 1 examines prominent themes in recent epistemology to identify important intersections between Kant’s Critical epistemology and contemporary, post-Gettier epistemology. One central reason that epistemology must consider judgment first, and one central example of why Kant is correct that understanding human knowledge and experience requires a profoundly ‘changed method of thinking’ (Bxviii, cf. a270, 676/b326, 704), is highlighted (in this Introduction) by re-examining the debate between Travis (2009) and Williamson (2009). One central finding is Kant’s thesis of Singular Cognitive Reference. This decisive thesis achieves the key aim of verification empiricism, without invoking any theory of (linguistic) meaning or conceptual content (intension). part 3 augments those findings by examining how, and how fundamentally, Kant’s Thesis supports Newton’s Rule Four of scientific method. Kant’s Thesis supports Newton’s causal realism about gravitational force, in part by exposing a crucial, widely neglected infallibilist fallacy in Bas van Fraassen’s ‘Constructive Empiricism’. Kant’s Critical epistemology also suffices to justify freedom of human action and moral responsibility, without transcendental idealism. Kant demonstrated that human perception is perceptual-motor activity, that perceptual discrimination and identification of any sensed particulars is episodic (temporally extended), fallible yet often sufficiently accurate and justified, that perceptual discrimination is counter-factually structured because anticipates and discriminates causally relevant alternatives to what one presently perceives, and that we can only perceive particulars with sufficient causal integrity to be distinguishable from our perceiving of them as we are perceiving them, because perception involves and requires discriminating those changes within our sensory intake which are due to our surroundings from those which are due to our own bodily comportment. Kant identified on philosophical grounds the significance of sensory re-afference! Kant’s view accords with J.J. Gibson’s account of perceptual affordances, and Kant’s philosophy of perception is far closer to that developed by Merleau-Ponty than the latter recognised. My reconstruction of Kant’s account of cognitive judgment provides sophisticated account of information extraction of the kinds required though not supplied by Dretske’s information theoretic epistemology.
