Did Kant Solve Skepticism?

Thomas Morrison asks just what Kant learned from his Critique of Pure Reason.

- Thomas Morrison

Can we know how things really are regardless of how they appear to us? Throughout history, many philosophers - known as skeptics - have argued that we can not. Part of what Immanuel Kant is attempting in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781) is to show that arguments for skepticism are unsound since they rest on a misuse or misunderstanding of concepts such as 'experience', 'things', and 'knowledge'. I hope to show that in this specific sense Kant does solve skepticism, but that by changing the meaning of crucial terms he leaves us with a far more puzzling problem.

Knowing Skepticism

How did we get ourselves into the problem of skepticism to begin with?

There are two assumptions operating in the skeptic's question. The first is that there is a distinction between appearances and reality - between objects as they appear to us and objects as they are in themselves, independent of us. The second is that there is a distinction between direct and indirect knowledge between our own immediate experiences and what we can come to know only indirectly, by inferring it from experience. These two assumptions together lead to what I will call the 'mind world gap': the gap between the inner and outer worlds; that is, between appearances and reality; or between thought, and the world we think about.