I'd like to start by making a really simplified versioned of what I would argue that Kant means when saying that we should try, the thought experiment, to let objects conform to our cognition. I would say that the nature of any object is that which we can apprehend. Meaning that the boundaries of our cognition is a defining structure for the object. The characteristics that an object may hold is therefore restricted to our cognition. This may in a way seem absurd, yet what is an object without the observer?
Kant says; ".. with this faculty we can never get beyond the boundaries of possible experience.."
So he recognizes this absurdity but goes on to say ".. our representation of things as they are given to us does not conform to these things as they are in themselves but rather that these objects as appearances conform to our way of representing.."
So to elaborate, the true nature of an object may not be attained. However we gain nothing from trying to understand that which we could never apprehend. The object is to be understood in the context that it is being observed by us, and any characteristic of it that is of any meaning to us is a characteristic that we may experience, some times of course with great difficulty.
2. Plato/Socrates
Again I'd like to start with a simple statement. The distinction of experiencing with or experiencing through our body is plainly that if we assume that we can experience "with" then that with which we are experiencing must be something absolute which is separated from our "soul", while as if we are experiencing "through" we may accept that what we observe will be effected by our previous experience.
They discuss the "wax" which gets imprinted with our experiences in addition to the more obvious senses as hearing and seeing. The way that these fall into the same category explains quite well what Socrates is arguing I think.
Our whole body acts like a filter through which all our sensations must go. But that filter is also part of the actual experience so that the filter will change in itself by every sensation and thus is ever changing. Thus knowledge could be seen as something that we do not reach but something that we move towards. And in that sense the connection to "Empiricism" is close, for with every sensation one will have an experience different from the last and so with repetitive stimuli coming from the same object we will change our "filter" to incrementally move towards knowledge of that object.
This is also the connection that I see between Socrates and Kant, namely that the understanding of an object is limited by our cognition, but as an important part of that our cognition will be altered by experience. Kant talks of mathematics as a science on a secure coarse on the basis that every object can have it's nature predicted before it has been observed. While Socrates will give critique even to the notion that what we can logically prove some things, since we can not be sure that our minds are not basing this logic on false presumptions. A premise for all science must be that the observations that we make have some element of truth in them, a derivative of the object which we are observing. However a point which neither is discussing is those objects that might not only be limited by the boundaries of our cognition but further limited by themselves. Objects that by their own nature does not contain truth nor absolute knowledge. I think of things that fall under Gödel’s incompleteness theory. Something that cannot be proven might not hold truth. Then knowledge, if to be generally defined and suitable for all objects, must be a collection of that which we can observe and never the absolute nature of that which we are observing.
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