The conditions of experience › Why reason needs a critique

In the Introduction, Kant distinguishes knowledge that begins with experience from knowledge derived entirely from experience. Encountering objects awakens our cognitive capacities. It does not follow that everything those capacities contribute was copied from the encounter. The question is whether some conditions must already operate for an encounter to become knowledge of an object. Introduction I.

This inquiry addresses both the possibility of knowledge and the legitimacy of metaphysical claims. Kant explicitly engages Hume's challenge concerning cause and effect in Introduction VI. He also asks why reason repeatedly pursues questions that go beyond what experience can settle. A critique examines the authority of those attempts. It is an assessment of a faculty's powers and limits, rather than a declaration that reasoning is useless. Introduction VI–VII.

His methodological reversal appears in the second-edition Preface. Instead of assuming throughout that cognition must conform to objects, Kant proposes examining whether objects, as objects of our experience, must conform to our way of cognizing them. He compares the reversal to Copernicus's change in explanatory standpoint. The analogy concerns how to frame the problem. It does not mean that an observer can choose the world's contents or make any preferred belief true. Second-edition Preface.