Kant's "form" of knowledge

The red tinted glasses experiment emphasizes how people can be easily influenced by their perception, ways of thinking just because a factor of our senses are different, like us wearing red glasses and it makes the world around us crimson or pink.

Rationalists believed that the basis for all human knowledge lay in the mind and the empiricists believed all knowledge of the world proceeded from the senses. In the book it stated Kant thought that both ‘sensing’ and ‘reason’ is important and contribute to our perception and understanding of the world. When he stated that he thought rationalists went too far in their claims as to how much reason can contribute, it illustrates a sense to us readers that by using what is available in our mind we are blinded by what we can perceive. Things that we obtain and learn from our 5 senses are of an importance to how we assess the world as well as using our reasons.

The fact that Kant also said empiricists placed too much emphasis on sensory experience conveys another fact. This is that we cannot alone rely on what we see, because sometimes our sensory experiences lie to us. Not only that if we the red-tinted glasses was put onto an empiricists philosopher then that means the philosopher will believe his knowledge of the world is that the world is all different shades of red, which is bias because he or she is the only one affected by the red tinted glasses.

I think this explanation was trying to explain, whether we are able to see perfectly, or colour blind the way we perceive the world is unique in our own way, however that alone would not be enough to establish a convincing explanation, because we also need our mind, our reason to go with our sensory ideas.

Kant named our two forms of intuition “time” and “space”. He claimed that it is not only the mind which conforms to things; things also conform to the mind. This is what he called the “Copernican Revolution” in the problem of human knowledge. In my opinion here it is trying to express to us that human knowledge cannot be fully complete if we do not understand the fact that both factors helps us to understand the world a bit more.

However it is said that we cannot have certain knowledge of things, only how they appear to us and with prior experiences we can say how they might act or perceived to be by the human mind. This emphasizes that there are things we cannot know of before we have actually understood or perceived them through our senses. By using our senses and mind we in turn gain experience and form knowledge.

In life I have experienced how easy it is to be covered by reality and taken over by what we perceive first and peer pressure. There were once discrimination towards friends, because of their behavior and due to first experiences I was too blind to judge with all my senses. But through time I have learnt to not judge someone by what was said about them, like how to not “judge a book by its cover”.

Overall I think the red tinted glasses is trying to tell us that there are a lot of ways that people can easily be influenced by just a little difference in the way their sensory organ functions. However we cannot fully rely only one part of our human abilities, but we must use what we have fully to understand what we want to know.