what is a transcendental argument?

Question

what are some transcendental arguments against skepticism? thanks

Answer 1

A transcendental argument aims to uncover the underlying ground for the possibility of knowledge. The idea is to figure out what things have to be the case in order for there to be knowledge at all. Kant's transcendental argument against skepticism was a variation on idealism. Basically, we can know the world because our minds impose structure upon it. The world as we know it is the world as our minds have structured it.

Kant was not a total idealist because he accepted the existence of things beyond experience (the noumenal realm of things-in-themselves), but our actual world – the real world of our experience – is essentially structured by mind, thus mind can have knowledge of it. Skepticism claims that, for all we know, the external world does not exist; everything that we experience as being external to us could be an illusion (which was the point of Descartes notion of the "evil genius", which was basically a being with the infinite powers of God, but who likes to trick us). The point of skepticism is not that any rational person should seriously believe that the world is just an illusion, but rather, the point is to motivate us to find a rational basis for believing what we believe, and this is what Kant was trying to do. If mind and world are totally separate, then what rational basis do we have for believing that we can know anything about it? Kant's answer was that mind imposes the structure by which we experience the world, and thus the world of our actual experience is not independent of mind, but a creation of mind, and thus knowable.