2. The Analytic-Synthetic distinction and idea of a Critical Philosophy

The main problem of the Critique

• How do our understanding and the representations we receive conform?

• There are certain principles which must be true, like the causal principle, but Kant must determine how we can know it

• Descartes proposes that these principles are implanted in us by God to ensure perceptual conformity, but Kant rejects this explanation as a ‘deus ex machina’

  • Thus, certain principles aren’t known analytically, empirically, through makers knowledge (God knows these principles because he created them) or by some Deus ex machina

    • Therefore, we must be able to obtain synthetic a priori principles to derive things like causation

      • Syntheticity solves for the problem of causation not being true by definition and a prioricity gives the principle necessity

The a priori - a posteriori distinction

A priori - A posteriori:

• Knowledge a posteriori is empirical and a priori if independent of experience — only a priori knowledge can be necessary (not contingent)

  • “There is no doubt that all our cognition begins with experience.” (B3)

• It might be helpful to conceive of a priori knowledge as knowledge justified independently of experience (I don’t need to check empirically whether a bachelor is an unmarried man)

The analytic-synthetic distinction

• A judgement is analytic if the predicate is contained (covertly) in the concept (the containment condition)

  • Analytic judgements are also subject to the law of non-contradiction

• Synthetic judgements concern a predicate outside of the object-concept though still connected to it (Amplification)

  • “The arithmetical proposition is therefore always synthetic.” (B16)

• Kant argues for a synthetic a priori (judgements which amplify our knowledge independent of experience), but not an analytic a posteriori

  • Kripke argues that to gain knowledge of a truth a posteriori doesn’t include the understanding of it which grants it necessity

• The synthetic a priori effectively becomes the self-knowledge of the conditions of possible experience

The objectivity problem

• There is no objective way to determine what a person thinks is already contained in the concept, which isn’t solved by the contradiction test

  • It seems possible that different people could have different concepts of the same object entailing some sort of psychological dependence

  • “the predicate of an affirmative analytic judgement is already thought beforehand in the concept of the subject.” (4:267)

• Schultz and Van Cleve both suggest that these people merely have two different concepts, but this is unsatisfying given the referent of the concept is the same

Concept legitimacy

• For a concept to be legitimate, it must have objective reality whereby an attribute belongs to the concept along with other attributes without depending on these other attributes

• A concept must be exhibitable in intuition or obtainable from experience to be legitimate, the determination of which Kant thinks is a necessarily synthetic move

• ‘Objective reality’ pertains to a form of possibility in between logical possibility (law of contradiction) and nomological possibility (as governed by the laws of nature)

Quine on synonymy

• To describe something as analytic is to say that a proposition restates itself (i.e., the two statements/expressions are synonymous, such as a=a)

• Quine argues that synonymy is only explicable with regard to analyticity, meaning it is presupposed and circular for any such definition

• Even then, somethings are relationally defined, like left and right — it is also not obvious that analyticity is mysterious or needs well defining