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Kant’s Dilemma of Knowledge and Truth

O 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