Theme 1: Theory of knowledge and theory of science (pre)

In the preface to the second edition of "Critique of Pure Reason" (page B xvi) Kant says: "Thus far it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to objects. On that presupposition, however, all our attempts to establish something about them a priori, by means of concepts through which our cognition would be expanded, have come to nothing. Let us, therefore, try to find out by experiment whether we shall not make better progress in the problems of metaphysics if we assume that objects must conform to our cognition." How are we to understand this?

Before that citation, the author talks about “the secure path of science” which he thinks mathematic and physics are traveling on. But he states that metaphysics haven’t yet found this path. In order to find this path we need to, as the author say, instead of that our cognition conform to objects the author states that the objects must conform to our cognition, the author has turned it around. What it means, as I think, if we can’t understand or to fully understand the object from our perspective we have to study it from the object’s perspective. For example: if we see the moon rise and falls you could interpret that as the moon is just moving in those directions, up and down. But to fully understand the moons orbit we have to study it from the moons perspective, then and only then can we determine the true fact about the moon and its orbit. Sometime it’s important to see things in other perspectives.  

At the end of the discussion of the definition "Knowledge is perception", Socrates argues that we do not see and hear "with" the eyes and the ears, but "through" the eyes and the ears. How are we to understand this? And in what way is it correct to say that Soctrates argument is directed towards what we in modern terms call "empiricism"?

As I interprets the dialogue when Socrates talks about ears and eyes and that we are seeing and hearing through our eyes and ears, he means that since they define knowledge as perception, at least at that point in the text, and perception is a process which takes place in the mind of a person, these impressions which travels from the object through the ears and eyes are then interpreted, in the mind, to the object in question. The reason why we are not hearing and seeing “with” our eyes and ears is because they are organs, which can’t make a perception on their own, which the mind can through the different organs.  

I’m not quite sure what “empiricism” exactly means but as I understand it, it says that the only true knowledge, which you can rely on, is the knowledge that you have experienced by yourself. This is exactly what they discus when they are saying the knowledge is perception. As they say early in the dialogue: “He who knows perceives what he know, and, as far as I can see at present, knowledge is perception.”. And that, things are to the man who perceives just as they appear to him and to another as they appear to others. If someone has knowledge about something and then he/she easier perceives things, because there’s more to perceive, which in a way contributes to empiricism interpretation of knowledge.