Kantian baby rats

There are a huge number of cases where philosophers got the 'right' answer to some degree before scientists got to it, just due to the sheer number positions philosophers have held on every subject. The problem is that we don't know which position is correct until after the science has been done.

Does anyone else find it as funny as I do that Einstein was able to disprove through evidence something that Kant said was universally known, independent of sensory experience?

This result seems to have nothing to do with Kant. The logical explanation for this has to do with the fact that rats have evolved in three dimensional Euclidean space. Any result that Kant had in this regard is a lucky coincidence.

@naysayers: It's entirely possible to move around in three-dimensional space without having a concept of three-dimensional space. As evidence I cite almost everything ever.

Anticipation, or a stopped clock? Kant didn't just think that we have a built-in idea of "space", but that we have a built-in idea of Euclidean geometry. We now know, however, that non-Euclidean geometry is easily imagined, and that space is non-Euclidean. You might think it not enough so to notice in everyday life, but Saul Steinberg suggested otherwise.

I have not read Kant, though. I googled /Kant Euclidean/ to see if my beliefs about Kant were accurate, but all I found was philosophologists[1] going to inordinate lengths to reconcile Kant's ideas about space with the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry and general relativity. I suppose that if someone said, "look, Kant was just wrong about this", it would deprive Kantologists of a living.

[1] Who stand in the same relation to philosophers as musicologists do to musicians. Robert Pirsig points out in "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" that philosophy students actually do philosophology, not philosophy, in contrast to music students, who actually do music.

Kant's success rate was of course higher than "chance," with "chance" being "1 out of all concepts ever."

However he couldn't seem to beat "chance," with "chance" being "the chance Kant had to figure out the stuff he did on the evidence he had."

Democritus is sometimes given credit for anticipating atomic theory. And the quite a few Greeks did real work in mathematics back when the division between philosophy and math was not clear.

A newborn fawn gets up and starts walking around in a few hours. Either he learned in a short time that the universe is 3 rather than 199 dimensions, or he already had that knowledge essentially encoded at birth. Big deal Kant. Actually, big deal scientists (forgiving all the additional detail I'm sure is in those papers).

I find it curious that the writers would reference Kant on this. Surely it's a signalling explanation rather than as a true causal precedent of their research.

"Both make the point that this validates Kant's claim that space is an innate concept prior to experience."

I think this misses the point of Kant's claim. Kant absolutely did not want to say that we are biologically ordered such as to represent geometry in three dimensional space. And Kant, given the results of this study, would deny that rats 'represent space' at all: rats can't 'represent' in the sense Kant thinks is relevant to rational beings. He (and I guess I also) would say that this is to anthropomorphize rats. Rats don't have concepts, representations, experiences, etc. in any sense comparable with rational beings.

Kant's point is that an a priori representation of space (from which we glean euclidian geometry) is a feature of finite rational beings such that it would be the same for any finite rational being that has any form of sensibility whatsoever. So it's a claim that's totally independent of biology. Our a priori access to space is just what it means to have an outer world. Kant would have considered the biological point irrelevant because it concerns our empirical experience of space via our brains and sense organs. But the our a priori understanding of space is (logically, not temporally) prior even to the empirical claims that we have brains and sense organs, and its by having such an a priori concept that a natural, biological science can be meaningful. The synthetic a priori propositions which forest geometry are grounded on pure reason. This doesn't mean that experience is irrelevant to them, just that any particular experiences of space are.

So the study doesn't support or harm Kant, it's just irrelevant to his claims. He wasn't really interested in anything like the biological or psychological aspects of our capacity to experience the outside world. Cognitive science, Kant might say, just studies a different subject matter entirely. Lastly:

"I've often wished for a list of cases where philosophy has proven useful"

Why do you think philosophy is supposed to be useful?