Kant and the Brain: A New Empirical Hypothesis

Abstract

Immanuel Kant's three great Critiques stand among the bulkier monuments of Enlightenment thought. The first is best known; the last had until recently been rather less studied. But his final Critique contains, I contend, a remarkable development of his theory of how human beings create and use systems of knowledge. While Kant was not himself concerned with the neuronal substrates of cognition, I argue this development yields a novel empirical hypothesis susceptible of experimental investigation. Here I present the Kantian motivation and describe experimental work aimed at testing predictions arising from the new hypothesis.