Kant’s Theory of Knowledge: Trials, Science, and Experience
Trials:
The “Critique of Pure Reason” is Kant’s attempt to determine whether mathematics, physics, and metaphysics are sciences. This begins by analyzing the elements of all knowledge, concluding the existence of trials. Judgment is any relationship between subject and predicate in the form “S is P”.
Types of Trials:
Kant provides a double classification of judgments: first, separating judgments depending on the relationship of subject and predicate (analytical or synthetic), and second, as they relate to experience (a priori or a posteriori).
Analytical Trials:
These are trials in which the predicate is contained in the subject, and are purely formal (construction adds no new knowledge). Examples include judgments such as “All bachelors are unmarried.” Analytic judgments are always true due to the principle of non-contradiction. No experience is required. They express what Hume called the relations of ideas.
Synthetic Trials:
These are trials in which the predicate is not included in the subject (for example: “The wall is white”). Its opposite is therefore possible. Therefore, to know if they are true, one must resort to experience.
A Priori Trials:
These are judgments obtained outside of experience. They do not depend on experience for their validity, and no experience can validate them, so they are always valid, i.e., universal and necessary. For example: “3 + 4 = 7”.
A Posteriori Trials:
These are judgments obtained “later” to experience, so they are not universal and necessary. For example: “Dogs are faithful”.
Before Kant, trial division was only performed in two types: analytic judgments, provided a priori, and synthetic judgments, a posteriori.
Explanation of Scientific Knowledge:
Kant began by considering the following problem: What do I know? Before discussing this question, we need to distinguish between “knowledge”: Knowledge includes two elements: a “concept” and “intuition”. Thus, you always know the structure of a trial (“A is B”).
- Thinking: Is the pure sense, requires only concepts, not intuition.
- Saber: This is true and universal knowledge.
- Science: A science that is such, must meet 3 conditions:
- To increase our knowledge (synthetic judgments)
- As necessary and universal (a priori judgments).
Therefore, all scientific opinion must be synthetic a priori.
Knowledge:
For the empiricists, the origin of knowledge is experience. Experience is the limit of knowledge. However, for the rationalists, humans also have innate ideas, not derived from experience, that allow the knowledge of what is beyond any possible experience.
Joining these two ways of thinking, Kant tells us that all knowledge begins with experience, but that not all knowledge comes from it. Thus, experience is a composite of:
- What we perceive from experience.
- What we produce spontaneously when receiving sensory impressions.
Knowledge = synthesis of elements
A Posteriori:
“They come from experience”
- “Given” (for the thing known) – Matter or content knowledge of all knowledge
A Priori:
“Independent of experience”
- “Seat” (for the individual knowable) – The form of knowledge
Drafting of the “raw material” of knowledge