Saturday, May 3, 2008

a priori and a posteriori

In the summary of Kant's book he gives a description between the differences of a priori and a posteriori knowledge. A priori knowledge according to Kant is anything we derive from pure reason while a posteriori knowledge is things we derive from experience. He then goes on to draw a even more important destinction between analytic and synthetic judgment. According to Kant the predicate of the analytic statement is in the object itself. For example all bachelors are unmarried men. It contains in the word bachelor that they are unmarried men and does not add anything to the statement. While the predicate of the synthetic on the other hand adds something to the statement. For example all swans are white you may not know before hand that all swans are white. So by hearing this information you gain some information about the idea of swans.

1 comment:

Safi's Blog said...

dude there are like three posts on this blog about this thing...
i dont think that it is easy to prove anything to be a prior just because if something is beyond our perception, or it comes before it, how can we experience it? we can possibly say that there is something that is before our senses. Iff we come to know what is beyond them, then that then becomes inside the category of what we claim to be within our senses. Then we would have to ask the question whther or not there is some thing beyond that, and if the answer is yesm the we have to repeat this process all over again.