Outline of Video Fourteen: "Does the Mind Shape the World?"

• Kant: all knowledge begins with sense, but relationships and structures are provided by the mind
• Different kinds of knowledge
• a priori knowledge: knowledge based on concepts that organize or structure experience and that are presupposed in experience (e.g., space, time, causality)
• a posteriori knowledge: knowledge that depends on experience
• Copernican revolution in epistemology: objects must conform to mind; the world in itself (noumenal) is unknowable; only world as experienced (phenomenal) by mind is knowable
• The a priori or rational context for scientific inquiry is like our presupposed language
• Romantics (e.g., Humboldt): each culture/language organizes the world differently
• Nietzsche: thought is based on the grammar of a language
• Critique of Kant: rather than revealing the universal, necessary characteristics of reason itself, Kant's categories express only Enlightenment, German (or European) 18th-Century presuppositions
• Conclusions: our perceptions are always shaped by our conceptual schemes

Outline of Video Sixteen: "Does Science Give Us Truth?"

• Correspondence Theory: truth is the relation between statements or thoughts and extramental reality
• Scientific realism: theories are true if they describe reality
• Einstein: our task is to find out the truth about nature, even if that means changing the basic presuppositions of our theories
• Problem: not all true propositions (e.g., those in logic) are descriptions
• Coherence Theory: a proposition or belief is true if it is coherent with other beliefs
• Popper/Kuhn: there is no one truth because there is nothing "really out there." This is not relativistic, because it insists that a theory is true if it meets the requirements of science (simplicity, comprehensiveness, predictive)
• Pragmatic Theory: truth happens to ideas or beliefs in virtue of their practical application
• Scientific instrumentalism: theories are instruments that are useful for calculating and predicting; this is especially applicable in quantum theory (Bohr)
• The search for Truth (capital T) perhaps needs to be replaced with the search for multiple truths