Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [58]
Although his prose in the Critique and elsewhere is all but unintelligible to most readers—his terminology is difficult and his arguments abstruse—he gives his basic view about the mind clearly enough in the Preface. It is true, he says, that experience furnishes us with only very limited knowledge, but it is far from being the mind’s only source of knowledge:
Experience is by no means the only field to which our understanding can be confined. Experience tells us what is, but not that it must be necessarily what it is and not otherwise. It therefore never gives us any really general truths; and our reason, which is particularly anxious for that class of knowledge, is roused by it rather than satisfied. General truths, which at the same time bear the character of an inward necessity, must be independent of experience—clear and certain in themselves.56
And such clear and certain truths do exist, mathematics being a case in point. For instance, we believe, and feel perfectly certain of our belief, that two and two will always make four. How do we come by that certainty? Not from experience, which provides us only with probabilities, but from the inherent structure of our minds, from the natural and inevitable manner in which they function. For the human mind is not merely blank paper upon which experience writes, and not a mere bundle of perceptions; it actively organizes and transforms the chaos of experience into sure knowledge.
We start to acquire such knowledge by recognizing the relations of objects and events in space and time—not through experience but through inherent capability; space and time are forms of Anschauung (“intuition” or “looking at”) or innately determined ways in which we see things.
Then, having organized our sense data in space and time, we make other judgments about them by means of other innate ideas or transcendental principles (Kant’s term is “categories”); these are the built in machinery by which the mind comprehends experience. There are twelve categories, including unity, totality, reality, cause and effect, reciprocity, existence, and necessity. Kant derived them from a painstaking analysis of the forms of the syllogism, but his basic reason for believing they exist in the mind a priori is that without them we would have no way of making sense of the chaotic mass of our perceptions.
It is not from experience, for instance, that we learn that every event has a cause; if we lacked the ability to perceive cause and effect, we should never understand anything about the world around us. Therefore it must be that we innately recognize causes and effects.57 The other categories, similarly, are not innate ideas in the Platonic or Cartesian sense but are principles of ordering that enable us to fathom experience. It is they, not the laws of association, that organize experience into meaningful knowledge.
Kant’s view of the mind as process rather than neural action steered German psychology toward the study of consciousness and “phenomenal experience.” Dualism persisted, since “mind” was apparently a transcendental—Kant’s word—phenomenon, distinct from perceptions and associations.58 His theory would give rise to other varieties of nativist psychology, particularly in Germany, and would have its modern counterparts, if not descendants, in this country, among them Noam Chomsky’s theory of the innate capacity of the child’s mind to comprehend the syntax of spoken language.
Kant’s nativism led to certain valuable lines of inquiry about the workings of the mind, but in one respect it proved to be a serious hindrance. He held that the mind is a set of processes that take place in time but do not occupy space, and this led him to infer that mental processes