--- Re: Is Kant a constructivist? ---

John Jones wrote:

A retrospective, funny game of trying to peg current labels on past
philosophers? He certainly wouldn't fit as a cognitive constructivist,
which only accepts the first two epistemological tenets (see footnote
[1]). And even though there seems to be more of a match with radical
constructivism [2], it and the other types may consider the ontological
world far more irrelevent than what Kant did. Despite making causality
into an category or concept of the mind's a priori structure of reason,
Kant still believed there was somehow a relation between experiential
events and noumenal circumstances. In his "Prolegomena to Any Future
Metaphysics" he remarks:

++ wrote:

Yes, some say he invented it and others say he merely perfected it and
completely changed philosophy.

Constructivism is a philosophical perspective derived from the work of
Immanuel Kant which views reality as existing mainly in the mind,
constructed or interpreted in terms of one's own perceptions. Note: In
this perspective, an individual's prior experiences, mental structures,
and beliefs bear upon how experiences are interpreted. Constructivism
focuses on the process of how knowledge is built rather than on its
product or object. Cp. social constructivism; transactional theory. 2.
...

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=define%%3Aconstructivism

++ wrote:

I thought that Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, 'constructed' a
world (in a mighty manner, building a new world of two realms of known
and unknown)
irrespective of whether or not that world reflected constructivist
tenets. But as you say below, Kant would not, despite dragging
causality into appearance, impress constructivists with a world that
offers a noumenal Given:

Kant is discounted as a constructivist if point 3 is a necessary
condition of this philosophy.

3. Cognition organizes and makes sense of one's experience, and is not
a process to render an accurate representation of reality; and

Kant beleived that there were pre-existing structures that filtered
sense experience that matched the world.He suggested that the mind does
not
passively receive sense data but the reception of this data is
automatically ordered, knowing "objective reality" only to the extent
only to the extent that it conforms to the fundemental structures of
the mind. This is not the same as saying that reality conforms to the
mind, only that we perceive the world only as we can. It is as if the
mind carries a template of a possible range of realities within the
paradigm of reason and sense data.

I think constructivism while close would lead to a range of relativist
approaches whereas Kant beleived that the mind would uncover more
objectively.
Constructivism would allow for a geocentric universe, Kant's world
would eventually come up with a heliocentric one.

On 5 Dec 2006 13:17:02 -0800, "John Jones" aol.com>
wrote:

Not a world of known and unknown, but a "mundus sensibilis"
and a "mundus intelligibilis" (a world of the senses and a word
of the intellect, See Critique of Pure Reason, B312)

He anticipates to this in a letter to Herz (21 feb 1772!) where
he uses the phrases: "intellectus ectypus" and "intellectus
archetypus". But then we had to wait almost 10 years before
he sorted all this and other thoughts out.

JH

++ wrote:

No.

It's a critique. It happens to contain a recipe for knowing when one
is using pure reason - and sets forth the limitations of such a recipe.
At best, it's an investigation, in the preface of which Kant clearly
and explicitly states that at least one other branch of knowledge or
science (anthropology) would be needed to actually speak of what people
"do" rather than how they "think." And he's not into how "thinking"
works - in this book, but in how "reason" works.

Now, you can take or leave Kant's view on what reason is, but for most
of us, he's gone further, is far smarter, and knows more about what
he's talking about than we can ever hope to.