Kant's Concepts of Justification

Abstract

Epistemologists surveying the literature on “Kant’s epistemology” often feel at sea. Even bracketing differences in terminology and emphasis, Kant’s writing about knowledge can seem foreign to the contemporary discussion in a way that, for instance, Hume’s or Reid’s does not. Those working in Kant’s epistemology, on the other hand, dissect with great care his arguments about space and time as the forms of intuition, the deductions of the categories, the structure of the antinomies, the prohibition on knowledge of things-inthemselves, and so forth. But none of these topics bears any obvious relation to what goes on in much contemporary epistemology. The main exception, perhaps, is the literature on the Refutation of Idealism: there we find an attempt on the part of commentators to articulate Kant’s anti-skeptical argument in a way that contemporary epistemologists will appreciate. Typically, however, the conclusion is that Kant’s argument is a miserable failure when judged by contemporary standards or successful only insofar as it is bound up with Kant’s other views and thus of less interest to the general philosophical public. In this paper I want to discuss a neglected portion of Kant’s epistemology that, by contrast, does connect directly to topics of great interest in contemporary thinking about knowledge, and does not rely on any peculiarly Kantian doctrines. I will also suggest, however, that understanding this portion of the critical philosophy can be very useful for those interested in the finer details of Kantian exotica. The portion of Kant’s epistemology that I have in mind is his theory of justification, where by “justification” I mean the evaluative concept that specifies conditions under which a propositional attitude is rationally acceptable with a moderate-to-high degree of confidence. Kant employs bothepistemic