Kantian metaphysics and epistemology is superior to Objectivist epistemology and metaphysics

Note: though I reference Empiricism allot, I am mostly just making parallelisms. Rand did not abide by the Rationalist/Empiricist division, but, as Stanford Encyclopedia states, “Rand counts as a kind of an Empiricist” [4]. While she wouldn't attach herself to the term, many of the same issues and principles apply. Objectivist Leonard Peikoff writes “consciousness begins as a tabula rasa (a blank state); all of its conceptual content is derived from the evidence of the senses” [5A]. According to Objectivism, the senses are necessarily valid. [5B]. They serve as the unquestionable foundations of all knowledge, outside the realm of proof or doubt. They “have no power of choice, no power to invent, distort, or deceive” [5C]. Mistaken knowledge gained from sense experience is always the result of a conceptual error, not perceptual. Peikoff claims any attack on the senses is self-refuting because the concepts employed on the attack are themselves dependent on the validity of the senses. This, however, does not prove the thesis that perceptual data are axiomatic. Clearly, our senses let us down many times. The very fact that we all have a blind spot in an eye corresponding to where the optical nerve connects the retina to the brain, provides reason for questioning some aspects of sense data; particularly when one eye is closed and the mind fills in the missing portion itself [6]. Moreover, we have probably all seen those illusions where straight lines appear to be crooked, or still lines look like they’re moving. Though in themselves minor, these deceptions undermine Rand’s entire axiomatic foundationalism. Moreover, it amounts to weak support of Rand’s direct realism. Perception is mediated, not immediate and, therefore, not direct. When I view an object, I do not directly engage with it perceptually. In between myself and the object are my sense organs and the conceptual apparatus in place to subsume sense data into a meaningful experience. Peikoff says if a child mistakenly identifies a fat man in a red suit as Santa Claus, his senses have made no error, merely his conceptual judgment. But there are clearly cases when the senses deceive us, such as with the McGurk effect. If we watch a video of a man going “bah bah bah” over and over, and then a second time with the exact same sound, only with the man’s mouth wording “fah fah fah”, we’ll hear it as “fah fah fah” [7]. Nothing conceptually will reveal the factual truth that the man is actually saying “bah bah bah” when our ears here “fah fah fah”, so the error is in our senses; specifically, our dominant sense of sight overriding our hearing. Rand’s philosophy, ironically--given Rand’s abhorrence of Kant’s supposed proximity to subjectivity--is much more in danger of lapsing into subjectivism than Kant’s, because Rand hasn’t given us any means of establishing a lawful objective reality. On her accounts she did, yes, but she does not actually supply any means of circumnavigating certain difficulties. Age-old Empiricist problems are not escaped by Rand. This is because Rand commits herself to some of the same principles that produced so many problems for pre-Kantian Empiricists, and for which Kant’s philosophy bypassed. From sense-experience, we can make the proposition that the sun is shining and the rock is hot. The further claim that the rock is hot because the sun is shining requires something more than experience. As Hume discovered, experience is not equipped with providing a lawful account of reality; of applying necessary facts to the world; and specifically, of establishing causality. Hume encompasses perhaps the most dangerous skeptical challenge to philosophy with which Kant was primarily motivated to answer and Rand cannot. Any account of reason that leaves the configuration of concepts up to a construction entirely from perception is not going to be up to the task of escaping subjectivism; not while remaining consistent. Kant escaped Empiricistic subjectivism and skepticism (as well as the wreckage of Rationalist metaphysics) by uprooting the Rationalist and Empiricist traditions and providing an alternative: No pure a priori knowledge of the external world is possible, and, although all knowledge begins with experience, not all knowledge arises from it. "Reason itself is structured with forms of experience and categories that give a phenomenal and logical structure to any possible object of empirical experience. These categories cannot be circumvented to get at a mind-independent world, but they are necessary for experience of spatio-temporal objects with their causal behavior and logical properties" [1]. Reason is limited to its employment in sense experience. Objects lying beyond this domain, such as God, cannot be known. Reason employed without sense experience cannot be called knowledge. Sense data is, furthermore, not on its own enough to ground knowledge. A conceptual apparatus (not entirely foreign to what’s found in Rand, I might add) is necessary to interpret sensory input (though not gained by the senses more in line with Rand’s blank state picture). This interpretation accords to what Kant called the categories. Since all knowledge must abide by this criteria, objects of knowledge are phenomenal rather than noumenal. This phenomenal knowledge is still objectively valid. I think it’s worth noting how Rand grossly misinterprets Kant. Particularly grievous are her claims that phenomenal knowledge is illusory. This is not true, and Kant was fully committed to the objectivity of the sciences (“sciences” as understood in his time). “Kant is an empirical realist about the world we experience; we can know objects as they appear to us. He gives a robust defense of science and the study of the natural world from his argument about the mind's role in making nature. All discursive, rational beings must conceive of the physical world as spatially and temporally unified, he argues. And the table of categories is derived from the most basic, universal forms of logical inference, Kant believes. Therefore, it must be shared by all rational beings. So those beings also share judgments of an intersubjective, unified, public realm of empirical objects. Hence, objective knowledge of the scientific or natural world is possible. Indeed, Kant believes that the examples of Newton and Galileo show it is actual” [1]. Reality does not have any intrinsic divisions. The Kantian categories, therefore, set out the basic concepts governing our own conceptual scheme. Characteristic of Aristotelian logic, Kant's categories are embodied in the forms of possible judgment. The categories total 12 pure concepts divided into four groups of three. They are the essential categories that govern cognition. Under this framework, “objective empirical judgments. .. are endowed with their objectivity and generality in virtue of the a priori concept embodied in the relevant forms of judgment" [8]. Included in Kant’s categories are causality and dependence [8]. According to Hume’s account of our concept of causality, it cannot be any more than just a habit of the mind resulting from constant conjunction. Rand maintains that the mind is initially a blank state and that all concepts are founded in perception. She therefore does not provide any escape from Hume. Kant does so by arguing that reality is given structure by the forms of experience and the categories. Causality is not derived from the senses; it's an a priori concept necessary for the cognition of objects. Experience cannot validate causality on its own. Even constant conjunction does not account for the concept of causality: day always conjoins with night, but no one has ever seen day as the cause of night. However, more than causality is at play in this scenario. To go back to the previous example, the very concept of substance underlies our notion of the rock and sun being material objects. Moreover, space and time are not found in the stimulus array. There are no sense organs for time and space. Euclidian geometry is not derived from experience. Pythagoras did not go about measuring right triangles to find out that A^2 + B^2 = C^2. Kant is also more in line with what one would expect might result from evolution. Given our knowledge of evolution, it is natural that humans would be biologically programmed for various functions such as language learning. As Chomsky argues, language is extremely complicated, yet children learn it extremely quickly and demonstrate a natural ability to grasp its grammar. We would not usually expect young children to learn so effortlessly such a complex system. The fact that children are not directly instructed on language, for the most part, and pick it up on their own just further grounds the fact that something innate must be in place that enables children to learn language. Under Rand’s commitment to Tabula Rasa, it seems virtually impossible that they could pick it up so fast. Actually, if humans abided by Rand’s view of knowledge acquisition, we would not even live long enough to grasp any significant knowledge of the world. In any experience, we are showered with a hurricane of stimulation. Just look around whatever environment you’re in at the moment and try to take in the array of sounds, sights, feelings etc. .. How does this mania of sense data somehow merge into a meaningful experience? This question is no problem for Kant; part of why Kant saw Hume as wrong was because Empiricism simply has no possible way of answering the question. Our effortless ability to synthesize experience is evidence for Kantianism. I will hopefully be able to expound on this latter, but for now, find myself out of characters. [1] . http://goo.gl...[2] . http://goo.gl...[3] . http://goo.gl...[4] . http://goo.gl...[5] Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand - Leonard Peikoff[5A] P.38[5B] P.39[5C] P.40[6] . http://goo.gl...[7] . http://goo.gl...[8] . http://goo.gl...