Answer to Question #203469 in Philosophy for lisa

Question

According to Kant without the categories of understanding the world of experiences would be unintelligible. Identify and critically analyse the role of these categories in the acquisition of knowledge.

Answer 1

Kant gives four categories of understanding. He further subdivided the categories into another subcategory.

The categories are; quality, quantity, modality, and relation.

1.Quality

Quality is the attribute found in a person. Quality leads an individual through the decision-making process. For example, when an individual able to make a judgment on a matter then that would be referred to as quality. The subcategories of quality are reality, negation, and limitation

a) Reality

Is the sum of all things that exist in a system.

b) negation

This is the existence of an idea as either true or false. When comparing two statements, one can either be true will the other becomes false. Navigation can be used to establish the truth about a matter.

c) Limitation

According to Kant human beings are rational beings with limitations therefore limitations does not make him complete.

2. Quantity

This is the characteristic that describes the magnitude which can explain continuity or discontinuity.

a) Unity

This is a point where the world and self come together. The connection between the world and self leads to experience. This is called transcendental apperception.

b) Plurality

Plurality is the existence of different correct solutions to a problem. Kant believes that in the world there exist many solutions to a problem, however, an individual settles on one. Plurality opposes monism and dualism.

c) Totality

Is the corresponding thought that is established through synthesis so that affirmation applies to it universally

3. Relation

In philosophy, a relation is a type of fact that is true or false of two things.Relations obtain between two substances ("this spot is bigger than that spot") or two properties ("this red is a darker shade than that red").

a) Accident

An accident, in philosophy, is a property that the entity or substance has contingently, without which the substance can still retain its identity.

b) Ontology

Ontological relations are entities like "father", which is a person considered in his relation to a child.

c) Epistemology

Epistemological relations are often logical connections that obtain between two concepts or ideas, like "entailment." The fact that all men are mortal and that Socrates is a man entails that Socrates is mortal—the relation between Socrates' mortality and the mortality of all men is an entailment relation

d) Casualty

Causality (also referred to as causation, or cause and effect) is influence by which one event, process, state or object (a cause) contributes to the production of another event, process, state or object (an effect) where the cause is partly responsible for the effect, and the effect is partly dependent on the cause.

4. Modality

Modal logic is often referred to as "the logic of necessity and possibility", and such applications continue to play a major role in philosophy of language, epistemology, metaphysics, and formal semantics.

a) Potentiality and actuality

The concept of potentiality, in this context, generally refers to any "possibility" that a thing can be said to have.

b) Existence and Non-existence

Existence is the ability of an entity to interact with physical or mental reality. In philosophy, it refers to the ontological property of being.

c) Metaphysical necessity

philosophy, metaphysical necessity, sometimes called broad logical necessity,^[1] is one of many different kinds of necessity, which sits between logical necessity and nomological (or physical) necessity, in the sense that logical necessity entails metaphysical necessity, but not vice versa, and metaphysical necessity entails physical necessity, but not vice versa.

The concept of a metaphysically necessary being plays an important role in certain arguments for the existence of God, especially the ontological argument, but metaphysical necessity is also one of the central concepts in late 20th century analytic philosophy. 

These are the major categories of understanding the world of experience.