So I'm going to, in real time in front of you, tell the future. I'm going to predict something that has not occurred yet. I'm gonna predict that tonight when I go home and watch, uh, Weather on the Nines with Chief Meteorologist, uh, Mike Clay, that his shirt will be, uh, uh, hold on, uh, green. No, no. Blue.
No. Ah, it'll... Gray. It will be... He, he will be, uh, he will be wearing a, a gray shirt.
When I watch him on the news, he will be wearing a shirt with so- I'm not sure what shade. It'll be some shade of gray. Now, I am predicting this with absolute certitude. I'm not saying it's likely. I'm not saying it's probable.
I'm saying I know it for a fact, even though it has not transpired yet. The riddle is, how can I know this? Is it analytic? No, it's not the definition of a shirt to be gray. It's contingent.
There are lots and lots of different colors that shirts can be. Uh, is it, uh, do I have, uh, because it's, because it's, uh, not analytic, it must be synthetic, right? It is informative. This is bringing a, a property, grayness, that is not inherent to the subject. It's synthetic in, uh, in Kant's term.
Uh, therefore, Hume would say I need experience to know it. But it's in the future, so I do not have direct, uh, experience of it, direct empirical data of it. So how could I know this? Could it be that Chief Meteorologist Mike Clay has worn gray shirts every day for this week or this month or a year or his career? Well, no, Hume has taught us that just because something has a past, uh, pattern does not give us certitude for, uh, future predictions.
We have to assume the future will resemble the past, and there's no way to prove that. So that doesn't give us, uh, an- any certitude. Could I have bribed him? Give him 50 bucks, told him to wear a gray shirt? Well, no, besides him being ex- way too honest for that, uh, at any point, he, he could, he could spill coffee on it, have to, to, to change that.
And yet I know it. The solution is that I have a black and white TV. So everything on the TV is some shade of gray, somewhere between white and, and black. Now, notice how this works. If I only have access to information through one medium, the only way I can see Chief Meteorologist Mike Clay is through my TV, and if that medium has a specific effect on what comes through it, turns everything some shade of gray, then I can know for sure that everything that comes through that medium will have that particular property.
If the medium that I s- that I get it through, uh, uh, uh, gives everything that comes through it one particular property and I'll know what that property is, then I know everything comes through it will have that property, and I know it prior to turning on the TV and seeing what's on there. In other words, I know it a priori relative to the TV. I don't need to see what is actually on the TV. That would be, uh, empirical. I know it a priori from the TV.
I know the TV itself will do this before I see what's actually on it. And yet it's synthetic, because it's not the definition of a shirt to be some shade of gray. There still is content. There still is synthesizing something into it. So this gives me...
It is a limitation. I cannot see colors on my TV, and yet this limitation gives me a power. The limitation is precisely what gives me necessary universal knowledge. Has to be gray. Everything on the TV has to be gray.
I know this as a law of nature for everything that I watch. Now, we have to be careful here. The whole riddle turns on the ambiguity of when I say, "When I see his shirt." Right? Because what shirt am I actually seeing? I'm seeing the shirt on my TV.
What, the shirt that I know about, the shirt that I have necessary universal knowledge of, the shirt that I predicted is the shirt on the TV, not the shirt actually on Chief Meteorologist Mike Clay's back. I have no idea what the shirt on his back looks like, but I know for sure ahead of time, independently of checking, what shirt, uh, what color the shirt on my TV will look like. And this is the distinction that Kant makes. He says we have to distinguish between what he says are Things for us and things in themselves. There is the way the world itself is, the way the world really is on its own, independently of the way that we look at it, independently the way, the way that we see it, independently of any effect we have on it, and that, in this analogy, it's not perfect, but it's an analogy, that would be the shirt on his back, what color it really, really is.
But there's also the color that it is that I see through the only way that I can see it. I can only see it on my TV. That's the only way that I can get to it. And so there is Chief Meteorologist, uh, Mike Clay's shirt for me on my TV, and that is what I have knowledge of. That is what I predicted.
That is what I have necessary universal information about. That is what I have a priori synthetic judgments about. And what Kant is saying, and this is the solution to the riddle in the book, how are a priori synthetic judgments possible, is that our minds are like the black and white TV. Our minds are not purely passive, perfect replications of the world. When we take in sensory data, we don't just register it passively like photographic film or like a mirror or like a tabula rasa, a blank slate.
The mind, the human mind takes this in and organizes it. The human mind structures the information. We get all of this data. There's light waves and sound waves and smells and all of this information, it, and it's chaotic, and we can't deal with it in this raw form. In order to be able to navigate through the world, in order not to be a rained on, in order to have an orderly, structured reality that we can walk through and meet other people in, we have to impose a certain order on it.
Uh, we have to impose a structure that is amenable to human comprehension. And if we can know what that structure is, then we know what everything we ever experience will be structured like, and that's all that math and science are, the study of the structures that we impose on experience. Just like a TV, the only way we get to, to, to, to the world is through our mind, is through our senses, is through this, this structuring, uh, function, and if we can figure out what it is doing to everything that comes in it, then we will know something about everything that comes out of it. We will know facts, synthetic, substantive facts, but about everything, universal, necessarily, about the world for us, the world we live in. Now, you have to, to, to, to realize what he's doing here.
What he's doing here is stunning. On the one hand, he's taking Hume's empiricism and he's saying, "Yes, the only way we get any knowledge of the world is by getting sensory data. Yes, you are right, Hume. Empiricism has a deep, profound insight. The way that I know the world exists, the way I know anything about the world is by turning on the TV.
Otherwise, it's a blank. I've got to have input. You're right. But you're wrong to think that's all that knowledge is, that everything I get is simply through the senses. Descartes, you and the rationalists, you are right.
There are things that I don't get from experience as part of my knowledge. It's just that you were wrong, Descartes, to think that it can go beyond our knowledge. The things that I can know a priori, necessarily, universally, are not from experience, but they're only true of experience."