Abstract
The tension between what we take as knowledge of a standpoint-independent world and the standpoint-dependent nature of our knowledge has continued to present a problem for our understanding of an external reality: I call this the Realist Orientation problem. I explore the idea of standpoint-dependent knowledge from its origins within Immanuel Kant's transcendental idealism. By examining and assessing various interpretations of Kant's transcendental idealism (by Guyer, Langton, Allais, Strawson, and Allison), I aim to see how a Kant-inspired view of our mind's conditions can overcome the Realist Orientation problem. I assess each interpretation on how well it satisfies the Realist Orientation condition, how plausibly it appears to interpret Kant, and how consistent it is. I come to conclude that no Kant interpretation can reconcile this Realist Orientation consistently, and no consistent interpretation can satisfy the Realist Orientation. I take this as evidence for the structural problem of correlationism, a term borrowed from speculative realism. Given that our knowledge is restricted only to things as they appear to us, we cannot take ourselves to know of the existence of things in themselves, despite our inclination to. In light of this, I gesture towards a Kant-inspired view called 'speculative noumenal realism' that respects Kant';s limitations on knowledge while adequately taking into account our realist intuition. This view concludes that we can reasonably retain our thought of a standpoint-independent world, but that we cannot claim this thought as knowledge.