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Kant on the Laws of Nature and the Limitations of our Knowledge
James Kreines
How does Kant account for the particular natural laws of interest in
the different branches of natural science? Are they supposed to involve
the sort of necessary connection that would, given Kant’s epistemology,
rule out empirical knowledge of them? It is recently popular to answer
in the negative, holding that Kant defines particular natural laws in
terms of the principles which guide our empirical inquiry. I reject this
recently popular account. Kant’s general account of what a particular
natural law is does not derive from any account of our knowledge of
laws. Kant has non-epistemic reasons for holding that, because
particular natural laws must be explanatory, they must involve necessary
connection and strict universality. Given Kant’s epistemology, it
follows that our knowledge of particular natural laws is limited to
special cases in which at least some kind of a priori derivation is
available, as is supposed to be true for Newton’s laws of motion; in
cases that differ, we are left with only empirical inquiry, which can
increasingly approximate knowledge of laws, but without ever achieving
this goal. And Kant does not conceive of this limitation of our
knowledge as a philosophical drawback; he specifically seeks to
establish this limitation because it contributes to his broader case
that all of our knowledge is limited or restricted.
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