Assess Kant�s account of synthetic a priori knowledge.

What is Kant�s account of the synthetic a priori? Why is it important to philosophy?

Can we only know a priori of things what we ourselves put into them?

Greg Detre

Wednesday, February 28, 2001

Lucy Allais, History of Philosophy VII

The distinctions between a priori/a posteriori and analytic/synthetic knowledge seem to run along parallel lines, but Kant�s crucial insight in the Critique of Pure Reason� was to draw attention to a distinction between them. Once the equivalence between a priori and analytic, and a posteriori and synthetic, had been broken down, Kant endeavoured to show how it would be possible to combine them as a means of extending human certainty� beyond scepticism.

We should first define all four terms. A priori is often taken to mean, �by reason�, but really has the wider meaning of �independent of empirical experience�. In contrast, a posteriori means �on the basis of, or with reference to, empirical experience�. An analytic statement is one in which the concept of the predicate is already contained, or thought, in the concept of the subject - an example would be the statement that a vixen is a female fox - whereas a synthetic statement is one in which this is not so, for instance, the statement that foxes are carnivorous.

Kant�s entire system is intricate and extremely closely bound up with itself. �Experience� and �knowledge� are similar. By �experience�, he means a �self-conscious awareness which involves thought and a capacity to make judgements�, and by knowledge he means judgements about experience.

One of the most salient aspects to Kant�s thought is his transcendental idealism. This amounts to an epistemological dualism, between phenemona, objects as they appear to us, and nuomena, objects as they are �in themselves�. We know the one intimately, and we can have almost no knowledge about the other. He is keen to distance himself from Berkeleyan phenomenalism, aware that this sounds similar to �the world just is ideas�, but Kant�s extra ontological claim about nuomena crucially distinguishes him. However, he makes few claims of certainty about things in themselves, other than that they exist, but thinks that they might even resemble ideas. He denies that we can have theoretical knowledge about them.

We normally think in terms of analytic a priori statements, such as �all bachelors are unmarried�, or synthetic a posteriori statements such as �you are wearing a red coat�. Kant considered analytic a posteriori statements to be impossible, though Kripke�s recent innovation of necessary a posteriori truths might cast this into doubt.

Synthetic a priori judgements allow us to gain knowledge about phenemona, or more strictly, about our own cognitive nature. Kant saw that we cannot know a priori about the world, since it is not demonstratively so, that is, it could be different to how it is. However, we can know about the world as it appears to us, the world of phenemona, since the way it appears to us, as the particularly constituted cognitive beings we are, could not be different. Thus, we can know things that are not merely analytic, without reference to experience. But there is a caveat here � when Kant describes our knowledge of phenemona as, �a priori�, this is because they are the way they are because of us, and the categories that we project onto them. We can know about synthetic a priori truths because they are, in a sense, truths about ourselves.