Theme 1: Theory of knowledge and theory of science

1. Kant believes that we can gain deeper understanding by letting objects conform to our cognition instead of the opposite way. He wants to use the human cognition to find new conclusions of metaphysical problems.

Kant wants to experiment with what he calls A priori knowledge or justification which is independent of experience,  which is a type of deduction justified by arguments of a certain kind. While A posteriori knowledge or justification is dependent on experience or empirical evidence, as with most aspects of science and personal knowledge*.

A priori knowledge will bring an object into a wider perspective and we will obtain a deeper knowledge. With empiricism we don't know anything about the object a priori. And without a priori knowledge we cannot make associations and assign the object attributes.

Hence, an understanding and knowledge can not just be fed to the human mind. 

He suggests that we can not gain knowledge solely through experience itself. When we gain an experience we must understand it. Experience in itself requires understanding and the cognition that needs understanding is something that we attain a priori.  The problem is that we can't know anything about the objects a priori. We must therefor assume that the objects conform to our concepts and then can the experience be cognized.

Here he uses human intuition to attain an understanding. We can let the objects conform to the constitution of the human intuition. The intuition might turn into cognitions if it can be determined as representations of the established objects.

2. Plato suggests that we see through our eyes and then use our reflections and thoughts to gain our own understanding of an object.

So our understanding of objects is based on both the perceptions from our senses and from our reflections and thoughts.

Each and everyone interpret objects in their own way. Our own experience is our own truth at that moment. What we can comprehend as warm one day could be cold to us the next, even though the temperature itself hasn't changed.

Socrates refuses the thesis that knowledge is purely perception, and his objection is that the mind makes use of a range of concepts which it could not have obtained, and which do not operate, through our senses. In the mind there is a part of thought (knowledge), which has nothing to do with perception.

The theory of empiricism is that knowledge is the theory that all knowledge is based on experience derived from the senses and sensory experiences*.

Each individual have their own reflection on an observation or sensory experience and it will lead to different conclusion according Socrates.

So the similarities of the arguments stated by Socrates and Empiricism, is that they both consider knowledge as something we gain by using our senses.

*http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/apriori/
*http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/