Knowledge Argument Immanuel Kant

Knowledge Arguments For many years, philosophers have discussed the topics of knowledge, such as skepticism, rationalism, empiricism, and constructivism. While rationalism claims that our primary source of knowledge is reasoning, empiricism rejects it by claiming that we gain our knowledge by experience rather than reasoning. Skepticism, on the other hand, questions if we have knowledge at all because if we are not one-hundred-percent sure of something, we cannot say that we have knowledge of it. Constructivism is another theory, which agrees with some claims of each of rationalism and empiricism and discards others, but it does not agree with skepticism. Of the theories mentioned, constructivism best responds to the problem of the knowledge because it agrees with the ideas, from both of rationalism and empiricism, which make sense. Empiricism claims that all of our knowledge depends on sense experience only instead of both reason and experience. Empiricists argue that we would not be able to understand what colors look like if we had never seen them. Describing taste, colors, smell, etc, would be meaningless

One of the best contributors of constructivism is Immanuel Kant. Kant, who was born in Prussia, is one of the best known philosophers in the history of philosophy. Kantian constructivism is the claim that we can analyze knowledge through priori, which is reasoning, and a posteriori, which is experience. Kant’s claim is that our knowledge does not necessarily come from experience itself, but rather we already have knowledge and it begins with experience (Lawhead 237). In another argument, Kant says, “Without sensibility no object would be given to us, without understanding no object would be thought (Lawhead 243). Kant did not directly disagree with either rationalism or empiricism; instead, he agreed with both of them in an attempt to reconcile