what was Kants proof that objects exist independently from our perceptions??

Question

was he correct or has his theory been refuted and disproven?

Answer 1

Part of the problem with Kant is that he DOESN'T really prove this. He does discuss something slightly different, which has so much support now that few would disagree with it.

This idea is this: you cannot percieve things as they really are. Your senses at no point feed raw information directly into your brain. Instead, you get perceptions which are heavily modified from what it originally received.

Since his time, developments in biology have amply proven this time and time again. The image your eyes get, for example, is obscured by veins on the surface, slightly out of focus, and has a huge blind spot off to one side. What's more, you get TWO slightly different images but only percieve ONE of them! Whether you like it or not, your brain takes this information, gives it a lot of processing, weighs some factors more than others (we know now that the human brain is set up to percieve borders more than continuity and movement more than stillness, for example) and only then do you get something out that may or may not have any resemblance to the real world.

So Kant has a good point. You can't unilaterally trust your senses. The problem comes when you go one step further as you have - if your senses aren't 100% reliable, how do we know they're even 1% reliable? If we KNOW the physical world isn't what we percieve it to be, how do we even know it's there at all?

Kant never really mentions this, other than to completely discard the idea of solipsism (the idea that only your mind exists and everything else is illusion). To his credit, solipsism is really a non-idea; irrationality at its finest. If everything is unreal then there is no point continuing any kind of discussion from there. Kant - as most of us - prefers to believe that the world is at least partially real for the simple reason that it SEEMS to be. Occam's razor would suggest that this is explanation enough, but other philosophers have not been quite so forgiving.