PRE Theme 1: Theory of knowledge and theory of science

In this post I am going to reflect about two questions that are addressed to two texts, Plato’s Theaetetus and Kant’s second preface to Critique of Pure Reason.

1. In the preface to the second edition of "Critique of Pure Reason" (page B xvi) Kant says: "Thus far it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to objects. On that presupposition, however, all our attempts to establish something about them a priori, by means of concepts through which our cognition would be expanded, have come to nothing. Let us, therefore, try to find out by experiment whether we shall not make better progress in the problems of metaphysics if we assume that objects must conform to our cognition." How are we to understand this?

I think he meant that we know the world in the way we experience it and how we are used to experience it. Like if we are standing on the earth and looking at the sun you see that the sun rotates around the earth. But from another perspective you see that it is, in fact, the earth rotating around the sun. Therefore he means that we can learn more about knowledge if we assume that objects must conform to cognition, instead of cognition must conform to objects as we perceive.

2. At the end of the discussion of the definition "Knowledge is perception", Socrates argues that we do not see and hear "with" the eyes and the ears, but "through" the eyes and the ears. How are we to understand this? And in what way is it correct to say that Soctrates argument is directed towards what we in modern terms call "empiricism"?

I understood it so that he meant we see thing around us and hear things around us, but it is in our brains and in our minds we create the perception of what is around us, how things interrelate and so on. And it is how we perceive we know things, basically. Empiricism is about that as well. It is based on the idea that only that is proven by experience can be count as reliable. .