Elusive Knowledge of Things in Themselves

Abstract

Abstract Kant argued that we have no knowledge of things in themselves, no knowledge of the intrinsic properties of things, a thesis that is not idealism but epistemic humility. David Lewis agrees (in ‘Ramseyan Humility’), but for Ramseyan reasons rather than Kantian. I compare the doctrines of Ramsey an and Kantian humility, and argue that Lewis’s contextualise strategy for rescuing knowledge from the sceptic (proposed elsewhere) should also rescue knowledge of things in themselves. The rescue would not be complete: for knowledge of things in themselves would remain elusive. Reading this may damage your epistemological health. Kant said that we have no knowledge of things as they are in themselves. Perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps you, gentle reader, do have knowledge, right now, of things as they are in themselves. But look out. In the halfhour it takes you to read this, you may lose it. Proceed at your own risk. The idea that we have no knowledge of things in themselves is famously linked with the name of Immanuel Kant. It is not famously linked with the name of David Lewis; yet in ‘Ramseyan Humility’, Lewis has said that he agrees. The thesis that ‘we find out nothing about [things] as they are in themselves’, is ‘true . or at least something very like it is’ [Lewis 2001:1]. > Some may find this surprising. Transcendental idealism seems an unlikely candidate for Lewis’s tolerance, much less his endorsement. But there is no cause for anxiety-or at least, there is not thatcause for anxiety. The candidate in question is not idealism after all, but a kind of epistemic humility, which says that we have no knowledge of the intrinsic propertiesof things. A thesis about the limits of knowledge is not a thesis about the mind-dependence of the known. Humility is not idealism. And humility, I have argued, is what Kant means by his claim that we have no knowledge of things in themselves [Langton 1998]. That interpretation is controversial, but I shall assume it in what follows. It is humility, not idealism, that Lewis defends.