Starless

I'd like to thank Csareo for accepting the debate. I hope to have a stimulating and challenging exchange.

To review the scope of this debate:

Knowledge was defined as justified true belief

A priori was defined as independent of experience with the added stipulation “For someone to be a priori justified in believing some proposition is for her to be justified absent experiences beyond those required for her to acquire the relevant concepts employed in the statement of that proposition.”

I will be drawing heavily from Immanuel Kant during this debate, though some particular facets are my own.

Staying true to Kantian epistemology, I will not deny sense experience as necessary for knowledge. Rather I will be focusing on the transcendental modes of the understanding. I will argue that humans bring to experience something which enables us to form judgments on experience. Though we are discussing the existence of a priori epistemic justification, I will mainly talk about knowledge of the empirical world. I wish to discuss what humans bring to bear on experience and demonstrate that an a priori manifold is necessary for there to even be any intelligible experience.

The external world provides us with the content of our understanding, but our a priori faculties determine how we know it and the form with which we understand it. This also means that our perception of reality does not match reality as it truly is. Our minds shape reality to make it understandable to us, meaning there is no guarantee of an exact account of the external world.

Experiences must fall into patterns to be recognizable. All experiences are conceived of in spatial and temporal terms. The question arises how we may come by these spatial and temporal concepts; either as given to us in experience or as foundations within us, which we bring to experience. The latter is the only account capable of giving us plausible picture of our acquirement of knowledge. Time and space cannot be given from experience since experience is antecedently dependent on our knowing them. If space were an a posteriori concept, we could conceive of it as a pure thing instead of a characteristic of objects. The inherent and universal nature of time and space make it obvious that they are features inherent, not learned a posteriori. Space and time are thus pure intuitions of the understanding which we bring to experience. There must be forms of intuition which we impose upon objects of experience. It is what we bring to experience that makes experience intelligible. Prior to any experience we know that it will take temporal and geometrical forms and that mathematics will apply to it. Furthermore, there must be a priori concepts by which we organize the content of experience into a unified coherent whole. Otherwise, the vast array of phenomena that enters through our senses could not contain any meaning. They must be synthesized into a coherent whole. It is remarkable that the elaborate manifold of sense data may be synthesized into something coherent that we can make sense of. Our empirical faculties give us the contents of the external world but this is absolutely not enough to give us a meaningful picture of the external world. For a meaningful picture, the pure--as in non-empirical--faculties of our mind must render experience intelligible. One demonstration of this is that we can conceive of a chiliagon and have no doubt of its geometrical validity, but we cannot possibly perceive it since the variations of its sides would have to be so slight so as to be undetectable.

We can go even further than this. By virtue of our ability to attain intelligible understanding about the external world, we know that a conceptual organizing framework must exist within us which structures and interprets sense data. Our mental apparatus synthesizes the contents of experience into qualitative and quantitative categories i.e. qualitatively applying “all”, “some”, “none” to objects or quantitatively “positive” or “negative”. Moreover a conceptual framework must organize the items in our awareness e.g. causality, substance, possibility etc.

A good analogy is that we experience reality wearing a complex set of colored glasses. Without the glasses, we could not go from merely seeing things, for example, to knowing the things we see. Through the glasses we impose necessity and universality on things. The content of the world is not determined by the glasses, only the form we see it in. For example, humans experience takes on spatial and temporal forms as given by intuition. Experience does not lend us our notions of time and space, they’re inherent within us. Otherwise we could a posteriori examine space and time, which we cannot.

One final argument is that of our ability to conceive of necessity and possibility. The domain of empiricism rests only on that which actually is i.e. what is true of this world. However, humans can conceive of the notions of necessity and contingency. We know that it’s contingently true that we're having this debate, but it's necessarily true that two points on a plain form a straight line. Experience by itself only gives us knowledge of what is, not of what could have been but is not, or is but could not have been, or is and must be, or is not and could not have been etc. Therefore, without some a priori apparatus, we could not conceive of possible worlds, but only of what is. Since we can make these judgments, it follows that there is more to our understanding than the empirical tools.

I reserve the right to introduce new arguments in the next round.

Blackflag

By doing this, we can prove things are true, to us. Not others, but ourselves, and that is, in my justified belief, the only way to gain knowledge.