Judgements can be either a priori or a posteriori in terms of origin, that is, depending on whether
they precede or succeed empirical experience (a distinction which also marks
the difference between necessary and contingent truths); and analytic or
synthetic in terms of content, depending on whether they contain elements
internal or external to the faculty of reason. Kant determines the latter by
means of a subject-copula-predicate relation: the predicate term in an analytic
judgment never contains anything more than what is already contained in the
subject term, while the predicate term in a synthetic judgment will always be
in excess of its subject term. An analytic judgement, therefore, elucidates the
subject term by making clear some particular aspect of it that had been there
all along, while a synthetic judgment adds something to reason that is not
already inherent in it.
Kant gives the following example:
‘If I say, for instance,
All bodies are extended, then this is an analytic judgement, I need not go
beyond the concept which I connect to the body in order to find that extension
is connected to it. To find that predicate, I only need to analyse the concept,
that is, become conscious of the manifold that I always think in it. The
judgment is therefore analytic. But if I say, All bodies are heavy, the
predicate is something quite different from what I think in the mere concept of
a body in general. The addition of such a predicate therefore yields a
synthetic judgement’. Another way of putting this is to assert that analytic
judgements are subject to the logical law of non-contradiction, while synthetic
judgements are not. An illuminating, yet infrequently cited description of this
distinction is Kant's claim that judgments are analytic only if their truth is
'based entirely on the principle of [non]contradiction', while judgments are
synthetic only 'under the condition that an intuition underlies the concept of
their subject'.
- Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A7-A8; B11-B12
No comments:
Post a Comment