Q&A: Kant’s Analytic
Kant’s Analytic
Question
Hello,
About fifteen years ago I finished writing my doctoral dissertation on Immanuel Kant.
In my work I dove into Kant’s “Analytic.” In particular, I examined the imagination and the connection between this faculty of cognition and time in light of Kant’s remarks about number and the act of counting.
I would like to point out a very major error in your remarks about Kant in Truth and Not Stable:
Nowhere does Kant claim that all scientific propositions are synthetic a priori!
Kant presents only a very limited number of such propositions, namely the well-known “principles,”
and he also notes that all propositions of mathematics (arithmetic and geometry) are of this kind.
The latter receive this special status by virtue of their close connection to the forms of intuition, space and time (and this is not the place to spell out his rather non-simple justification for this).
As for science, he concludes only that the proposition “Every event has a cause” is synthetic a priori.
But he does not present any concrete scientific proposition as such!
I am sorry that such a significant error found its way into your remarks.
I understand, of course, that your book seeks to paint a very broad subject with broad brushstrokes.
But this is not a case of summary forced by circumstances, but rather a substantive mistake.
It is this mistaken presentation that is “refuted” by you, but it is not Kant whom you are refuting in your remarks….
Best regards
Answer
Hello,
Thank you for the comment/correction. I no longer remember my exact wording, but my claim is this:
Kant formulates the category of the synthetic a priori. He includes within it causality and induction. In doing so, he thought he had solved the epistemological problem of skepticism: how it is possible to arrive at knowledge of the regularity of the world (the laws of nature).
The meaning of this is that the laws of nature, essentially, are also synthetic a priori, since it is impossible to arrive at them by experience alone. Of course, I am assuming here that although they contain empirical (a posteriori) components, in essence they are synthetic a priori, since the strength of the chain is determined by its weakest link.
As I understand it, this necessarily follows from his doctrine, even if he does not write it explicitly and speaks only about causality and induction. Without this, his words offer no solution at all to the epistemological problem (see Bergmann, Introduction to Epistemology, chapters 8–9).
So I assume you are right that my remarks are not a quotation but a reconstruction or reorganization of his doctrine. But in substance it is there.
Best regards,