Method, Meaning, New Formalism

Abstract

It is a commonplace of contemporary ideas of knowledge, deriving most directly from Kantian epistemology in the eighteenth century that what we see or observe or know depends powerfully upon the point of view from which we know it. As one philosopher summarizes Kant’s central insight,

we know about the world insofar as we experience it according to the unchanging and universally shared structure of mind. All rational beings think the world in terms of space, time, and categories such as cause and effect, substance, unity, plurality, necessity, possibility and reality. That is, whenever we think about anything, we have to think about it in certain ways (for example, as having causes, as existing or not existing, as being one thing or many things, as being real or imaginary, as being something that has to exist or doesn’t have to exist), not because that is the way the world is, but rather because that is the way that our minds order experience. We can be said to know things about the world, then, not because we somehow step outside of our minds to compare what we experience with some reality outside of it, but rather because the world we know is always already organized according to a certain fixed (innate) pattern that is the mind.¹