Kant’s Dilemma of Knowledge and Truth

KANT'S DILEMMA OF KNOWLEDGE AND TRUTH ONE OF MANY HARD AND FAST distinctions in Kant is that between a priori knowledge and a posteriori knowledge. The former may be either pure or mixed, Kant tells us, but in neither case is it ever reducible to a posteriori knowledge. So central is this distinction to what he is about that what Kant calls his " Copernican Revolution ,; in philosophy consists in showing how one of the species of these two types of knowledge, namely, a priori synthetic knowledge , is possible. A priori judgments which are not merely analytic are possible for Kant only on the assumption that objects conform to mind rather than the other way around. This is the message of the first Critique. But no sooner does Kant forge this distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge than he is on the horns of a dilemma. Either he holds that knowledge applies as straightforwardly to a posteriori knowledge as it does to a priori knowledge or else he confines knowledge proper to a priori knowledge , a posteriori knowledge being for Kant no more than true opinion or true belief. But if he takes the first alternative, Kant's definition of knowledge ends up being self-contradictory, whereas if he opts for the second possibility Kant is saddled with a contradictory view of truth. To spell out the dilemma, suppose that knowledge for Kant applies in the strict sense to both a priori knowledge and a posteriori knowledge. In that case, knowledge for Kant would consist in both the conformity of object to mind and in the conformity of mind to object. For Kant's view is that while all synthetic judgments taken from the point of view of their form are possible only if the understanding imposes its categories on the raw material of sensibility, still, considered from Q41 JOHN PETERSON the viewpoint of their matter or content, not all true synthetic judgments consist in this same conformity of object to mind according to him. Rather, only that knowledge which is exemplified in synthetic a priori judgments consists, from the standpoint of its matter and form both, in the conformity of object to mind. For example, the source of the knowledge I have that all events are caused is not experience but human understanding, while the source of the knowledge I have, if it is knowledge, that all cats have fur is sense experience, even though, from the viewpoint of their form, both judgments according to Kant require the imposition of categories. It is neither logic nor the nature of the understanding but rather sense experience which justifies the ascription of the predicate "having fur" to the subject " cats " in the foregoing example. For that reason Kant would say that from the standpoint of its content the knowledge I have that all cats have fur consists in the conformity of mind to object and not, as with a priori synthetic knowledge, the other way around. Therefore, if he predicates " knowledge " univocally of both a priori and a posteriori knowledge, Kant is saddled with the contradiction that knowledge is both the conformity of object to mind and the conformity of mind to object. Nor is the other horn of the dilemma any more palatable or more negotiable for Kant. For suppose Kant predicates "knowledge " of a priori knowledge only, a posteriori knowledge being for him something of the order of true opinion or true belief. In that case, since they are known by us, synthetic a priori judgments would be true for Kant, and true not in the ordinary sense of conforming to objects (for then they would not be necessarily true for Kant), but rather true in the sense that objects conform to them as a rule.1 What it would 1 Kant characterizes this difference in the sense of "true" as predicated of a priori synthetic judgments and as predicated of a posteriori judgments as the difference between transcendental truth and empirical truth respectively (N. Kemp Smith, trans. Kant's Uritique of Pure Reason, B 185, B 82-84, B 87). KANT'S DILEMMA OF KNOWLEDGE AND TRUTH 248 then mean to say that one of these...