Notes on <Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason> - How are Synthetic a priori Judgements Possible?(Introduction)
- Kant’s Logical Formulation of the Problem of Metaphysics
- Synthetic apriority: Objections and Replies
Kant’s Logical Formulation of the Problem of Metaphysics
Both Leibniz and Hume believes that knowledge is divided to two fundamental types: necessary, a priori knowledge and contingent a posteriori knowledge. Kant affirms that all our knowledge begins with experience but not all knowledge arise out of experience. That is, there are a priori knowledge like mathematical judgments and principles of causality.
An example of synthetic a priori knowledge is the geometry. They are not analytic, but they are still necessarily true.
Synthetic apriority: Objections and Replies
The distinction between regressive and progressive interpretation of Kant’s methodology in Critique regarding whether we assume mathematics and natural science as trustworthy is covered in previous notes. Critique is taking the progressive route, and is based on no data “except reason itself”.
Conceptual Containment
A criticism about the analytic/synthetic distinction is what it is for for one concept to contain another and how this relation is determined(analytic judgments are the judgments that predicate is contained in the subject). If it means “belong to the definition of”, then it may seem that Kant presupposes a naive view of the possibility of determinate definitions of concepts. If it can be understood in terms of our “thinking” the predicate either in or outside the concept of the subject, then the test of analyticity/syntheticity may seem to become merely introspective or phenomenological. This would open Kant to the charge of psychologism. It would also make it possible for a judgement to be analytic for one person but synthetic for another.
Kant does not in fact hold a naive view of definition: he maintains that “mathematics is the only science that has definitions” and that analytic judgements provide the materials for the construction of definitions rather than presuppose them. In defense of Kant’s notion of containment, it may be said that although the edges of concepts are usually blurred, there must be identifiable core elements in concepts, or it will follow that we cannot know the content of our concepts, and perhaps even that there are no such things(see Quine’s Two Dogmas of Empiricism).
Two versions of the distinction
Kant’s account of analyticity is ambiguous, because it advances two criteria which are not equivalent: a judgement is said to be analytic if (1) its truth can be determined by the principle of contradiction on the basis of purely conceptual considerations or the meanings of the terms involved (2) it is self-evidently true rather than such as to extend our knowledge since a judgement could be true for conceptual reasons without being self-evidently true.
So-called synthetic a priori judgments can be called non obvious analytic judgments.
Kant’s distinction as epistemological
What has became clear is that primary force of Kant’s characterization of certain judgments as synthetic a priori is not logical but rather epsitemological, concerend with ground of justification of judgments. This accords with what Kant has written in Prolegomena that the analytic/synthetic distinction concerns the ‘content’, not the ‘logical form’ of judgements.
Synthetic a priori judgements are those that define the structure of experience, this structure being manifest in, and identifiable through, our acceptance of certain judgements as non-logically necessary.
The difference between analytic and synthetic judgements is that the former are true by virtue of the relation of concepts to one another, whereas synthetic judgements are true by virtue of their relation to something ‘X’ outside the circle of concepts. To solve the problem of synthetic a priori judgement is, therefore, to explain the relation of judgement to its object, a relation that logical principles cannot account for, and that empirical judgements presuppose.
On Kant’s view, neither concepts nor sensory experience are individually sufficient for knowledge: they are jointly necessary(and sufficient) for knowledge.