Transcending Kant

Joshua Mozersky argues that reality itself might be accessible to us.

- Joshua Mozersky

Immanuel Kant is the grandfather of social constructivism the theory that people construct reality out of a shared human experience. According to Kant, the world we experience of space, time, matter, and causation, is structured by the human mind. His point is not just that our concepts of the world are determined by our mental architecture. Rather, space, time, matter, and causation themselves are mentally structured kinds.

Kant assumes that the structure of rational thought is universal. Hence, we are not each trapped in an individual reality of our individual making, but instead share a common world of experience. Today, sociologists tend to emphasize the variety of human thought that arises from differences in culture, history, or social position. The result is a more fragmented view of human thought than Kant imagined. Where he saw everyone inhabiting a single mentally constructed reality, many today see us as occupying different realities, each dependent on contingent background features. But this does mean that Kant + contingent variability = social constructivism. Hence, he is the grandfather of social constructivism.

Kant deployed his own 'constructivism' to respond to Hume, who argued that the senses can only deliver imperfect information about the view just from your particular perspective and there is no way to push beyond personal experience to knowledge of the universal or general structure of the world. Kant points out that this only follows if we assume that gaining knowledge is a matter of the mind conforming itself to what lies outside of it, and so is separate from it. If, on the other hand, the mind is responsible for the general features of the empirical experience of the world, then we can uncover the large-scale properties of reality from sufficiently critical reflection on the workings of the mind, and in particular, from reason itself.