/lit/ - Literature

>>3641738
well kant sees humes "relations of ideas/matters of fact" as involving two different questions about knowledge.

the epistemological question, whether knowledge is a priori (known without reference to experience) or a posteriori (knowledge known only from experience)

and the semantic question. this divides judgements into analytic (necessarily true or axiomatic) statements which logically can't be refuted. kant gives the example of "all bodies are extended", i quite like russell's example that "a tall man is a man". synthetic judgements express more than an axiom, such that the former cannot be deduced from the latter or vice versa. a good example is "John F. Kennedy was assassinated". neither the concept of John F. Kennedy or assassinated includes the other without reference to experience. because of hume's proof that causality is not analytic, the opposite of synthetic judgements can always hold true, even if experience tells us it may not. All propositions we know only through experience are synthetic.

These can be arranged in a sort of matrix (pic related).
Analytic a priori judgements are those that can be deduced without reference to experience, through knowledge of only the concepts, and are therefore logical statements ("all bodies are extended").
Analytic a posteriori judgements are purely hypothetical and cannot truly exist, as all analytic statements should be provable without reference to experience.
Synthetic a posteriori judgments are judgements wholly about experience, such as "the water in the kettle is boiling".
Synthetic a priori judgments are those which are known to be true independent of experience, but the denial of which is still a logical possibility. Kant believes that objects in experience are only objects insofar as they are structured by principles of the mind (namely time and space) that can be known a priori and also be synthetic. Kant also believes causation to be synthetic and a priori.

Does this help?