Kant: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

In order to introduce this novel conception of objectivity (to which he gave the name ‘transcendental idealism’) Kant began from an exploration of a priori knowledge. Among true propositions, some are true independently of experience, and remain true however experience varies: these are the a priori truths. Others owe their truth to experience, and might have been false had experience been different: these are the a posteriori truths. (The terminology here was not invented by Kant, although it owes its popularity to Kant’s frequent use of it.) Kant argued that a priori truths are of two kinds, which he called ‘analytic’ and ‘synthetic’ (A. 6-10). An analytic truth is one like ‘All bachelors are unmarried’ whose truth is guaranteed by the meaning, and discovered through the analysis, of the terms used to express it. A synthetic truth is one whose truth is not so derived but that, as Kant puts it, affirms something in the predicate that is not already contained in the subject. It is a truth like ‘All bachelors are unfulfilled’, which (supposing it to be true) says something substantial about bachelors and does not merely reiterate the definition of the term used to refer to them.

Nevertheless, it is impossible to know the world ‘as it is in itself’, independent of all perspective. Such an absolute conception of the object of knowledge is senseless, Kant argues, since it can be given only by employing concepts from which every element of meaning has been refined away. While I can know the world independently of my point of view on it, what I know (the world of ‘appearance’) bears the indelible marks of that point of view. Objects do not depend for their existence upon my perceiving them; but their nature is determined by the fact that they can be perceived.

Neither experience nor reason is alone able to provide knowledge. The first provides content without form, the second form without content. Only in their synthesis is knowledge possible; hence there is no knowledge that does not bear the marks of reason and of experience together. Such knowledge is, however, genuine and objective. It transcends the point of view of the person who possesses it, and makes legitimate claims about an independent world.