[Phillyosophy]

Any ideas on how knowledge of cause and effect relationships is possible according to Kant?

[Clough]

If you look on the following sites, you may find the answer to your question. I hope that you do.

Kantianism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Immanuel Kant - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

German idealism: Information from Answers.com

Immanuel Kant

[VSPrasad]

Hume argued that the idea of Necessary Connection is part of the idea of cause and effect,but experience can never be the source of that idea. Experience only show the constant conjunction of cause and effect Therefore, we cannot have knowledge of cause and effect.

Kant's tasks: (1) To unify Rationalism and Empiricism that is, to show how (scientific) knowledge is possible, and how both reason and experience contribute to that knowledge. (2) To refute the skepticism of Hume who claimed that experience (and reason for the matter) is extremely limited in what kind of knowledge it can provide.

Kant wanted to show that truths which are necessary like mathematics but apply to experience like sense impression are possible. Scientific knowledge of the world of our experience which is Universal and Necessary is possible. Kant's metaphysics is his a ttempt to show how (scientific) knowledge is possible.

Some Technical terms used in Kant: A Priori Truths: Truth which is independent of experience, a necessary truth A Posteriori Truths: Truth which is based on experience, contingent Analytic Judgment: A judgment in which the concept of the predicate term is found in the concept of the subject term. (often called true by definition) Synthetic Judgment: A judgment in which the concept of the predicate term in not found in the concept of the subject term. Kant's task is to show how synthetic a priori truths are possible.

According to Kant, knowledge is to be understood in terms both of Intuition, that which is immediately before us through perception and Reason which is the way the mind organizes perception so that it becomes the object of experience.

http://www.wfu.edu/~hhardgra/kantmet.html

Wilkerson first lays out Kant’s argument in the Second Analogy step by step:

“1 I must be able to identify objects (cf. Transcendental Deduction)

2 In particular, I must be able to identify objectively successive events.

3 The ground for such identification must be in my experience.

4 The ground in question is that successive perceptions of objectively successive events are necessarily connected, occur in a necessary order.

5 A concept that carries such necessity is a pure concept of the understanding, in this

case the concept of causality.

6 Thus successive perceptions of objective sequences are necessarily connected according to a rule, the rule of cause and effect.

7 Thus there must lie in whatever precedes an event the condition of a rule according to which the event invariably and necessarily follows.

8 That is, all objective events obey the Universal Law of Cause and Effect”

http://www.trinity.edu/cbrown/modern...causation.html