Joseph Pallattil

Karl Popper the philosopher claims that science is the history of corrected mistakes. This notion can be easily verified by the idea of Copernican revolution. Copernican revolution is the radical shift in the field of astronomy from a geocentric understanding of the universe which is centred around the Earth to heliocentric understanding of the universe which is centred around the sun.
Kant’s copernicanism or “the Copernican revolution” introduced significant changes in the way we perceived things in philosophy. The transformation in the concept of an object that comes with this revolution revises the relation between metaphysics and epistemology, and in a sense obscures the boundary between them. In the pre-Copernican philosophy, there is a clear conceptual distinction between the questions of what is the constitution of reality? and how do we attain knowledge of reality?
As a rationalist philosopher Kant was emphasising reason. Kant was striving for giving a secured path for reason as science have. In order to acquire this Kant looks to mathematics, logic and physics. Later, Kant finds that “reason has insight only into what it produces after a plan of its own.” In explaining what this means, Kant suggests that metaphysics needs to undergo a kind of “Copernican Revolution.” And the result of this “Copernican Revolution” will be Kant’s original philosophical position, known as “Transcendental Idealism.”
When Kant says “reason has insight only into what it produces after a plan of its own.” It means that what we can know by reason alone in this world is how objects appears to us, not as it is. This is called Kant’s transcendental idealism. What he means by this is that we know things only as they appear to us and never as they are in themselves. But this should not be confused with any individual interpretations or personal biases. Everyone has unique way of understanding the world. It may change from culture to culture. All of this may be true, but it is not what Kant is talking about here. What Kant means to be talking about are organizational rules that are necessary to any conscious state at all that can be called a representation of an object. So, Kant is not talking about the rules that govern his consciousness, or even the rules that govern human consciousness. What he is claiming is that consciousness as such is always interpretive: there is no such thing as being conscious of something “as it really is.” Consciousness, because of its own internal nature, is always categorizing and interpretive. Consciousness is always of “mere appearances.”