Imagining Kant's theory of scientific knowledge: philosophy and education in microbiology

Abstract

In the field of observational and experimental natural sciences (as is the case for microbiology), recent decades have been overinfluenced by overwhelming technological advances, and the space of abstraction has been frequently disdained. However, the predictable future of biological sciences should necessarily recover the synthetic dimension of "natural philosophy." We should understand the nature of Microbiology as Science, and we should educate microbiology scientists in the process of thinking. The critical process of thinking "knowing what we can know" is entirely based on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. However, this book is extremely difficult to read (even for Kant himself) and almost inaccessible to modern experimental natural scientists. Professional philosophers might have been able to explain Kant to scientists; unfortunately, however, they do not get involved this type of education for science. The intention of this review is to introduce natural scientists, particularly microbiologists and evolutionary biologists, to the main rigorous processes (aesthetics, analytics, dialectics) that Kant identified to gain access to knowledge, always a partial knowledge, given that the correspondence between truth and reality is necessarily incomplete. This goal is attempted by producing a number of "images" (figures) to help the non-expert reader grasp the essential of Kant's message and by making final observations paralleling the theory of scientific knowledge with biological evolutionary processes and the role of evolutionary epistemology in science education. Finally, the influence of Kant's postulates in key-fields of microbiology, from taxonomy to systems biology is discussed.

Keywords: Critique pure reason; Evolutionary epistemology; Kant; Microbiology as science; Science Education.

Fig. 1

The three consecutive compartments with the conditions for knowledge. In the first row, the Kant’s conditions; below, analogies of these conditions; in violet, biological analogies to the conditions for knowledge, to introduce the relation of knowing and evolving

Fig. 2

Æstetics, the condition for sensibility. Up in the figure, external “things-in-themselves” than are perceived in our sensibility by the deformation of an “a priori” space–time dimensional field in our mind. Below, two successive instants where these “things-in-themselves” are perceived as eventually composed by parts, with different intensities or dimensions, that is, we have an “intuition” of them

Fig. 3

The 12 categories. The “things” or “objects” sequentially captured by our sensibility (vertical tube) are analyzed in their qualities, quantities, relations, and modes by the 12 categories of pure understanding (in yellow) matching them with empirical concepts, giving rise to judgements (in gray). Dark yellow arrows correspond to the “schemas” providing an abstract “image” of what was perceived by sensibility (see Fig. 4)

Fig. 4

The schemas. The schemas provide an abstract image of the nature of intuitions detected in our sensibility. The schemas (in blue) serve to link (dark yellow arrows) the “categories of understanding” (in yellow) with the intuitions of our sensibility, exclusively based on their “time component” (see Fig. 5). Each of the relational categories has its own schema

Fig. 5

Extensive and intensive magnitudes, substances and necessities, revealed by time. The schemas are able to analyze the objects perceived (intuited) by the sensibility by using a “time dynamics” procedure. Left at the top, the time in filling a virtual space provides information about quantity (magnitude); at the bottom, along time, different qualities (intensities) are tested (color, in the figure) until reaching the one fitting with the empirical concept (reality) also informing about increase, limitation or absence of this quality. Right at the top, differentiation of accidental detection (colors changing over time) from detection of substances (the circle never change); at the bottom, detection of existence in time (occurs at least once), possibility (might or not occur at a given time), and necessity (necessarily occurs at all times)

Fig. 6

The process of understanding (knowledge). Once the objects of intuition captured by our sensibility have given rise to analytic judgements (grey), the process of reasoning occurs by a progressive condensation of knowledge using the principles of reason (blue), able to identify the empirical concepts, that are combined by judgements of reason (dark grey) to give rise to synthetic knowledge (ideas, in green). The progressive condensation of the elements of knowledge seems to be “attracted” by final (or pseudo-final) causes (illusions), that are necessarily out of the knowledge process. The Kant’s process of knowing, with successive refining and assembling steps recalls an evolutionary process searching for a final optimum of complex information