Philosophy And Other Important Vocab

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transcendental:

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refers to the method Kant must use to answer how synthetic apriori judgments are possible. Kant is looking for the grounds of our universal and necessary knowledge about the world, and because empiricists argue from particular facts to generalizations based on those facts, their empirical information will always be inconclusive because our experience is always limited and future experience can always contradict our beliefs. The transcendental method proceeds from the nature of experience in general to the necessary conditions of its possibility. The transcendental structures of experience ar those formal features that are not limited to any particular experience but are the universal and necessary features of all experience. If it is impossible to imagine an experience without a certain structural feature, then that is evidence the feature is uni and nec. condition of exp.

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explicative:

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serving to explain logically what is contained in the subject--to analyze logically

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synthetic a priori judgments:

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Judgments that give us knowledge about the world and at the same time do not require experience to confirm them. e.g., "all events have a cause" which is to say not most events or many events, but ALL. We bring this experience to the world rather than deriving it from experience. e.g. "7+5=12", "a straight line is the shortest distance between two points"

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Discursive:

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analytical reasoning

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Synthetic proposition or statement:

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Not analytic; attributing to a subject something determined by observation rather than analysis of the nature of the subject and not resulting in self-contradition if negated. Such statements add to the concept. They are ampliative. The bases of synthetic statements are in experience. Hume calls these "matters of fact". ex: "Our class is in Ladd 106", "Poison Ivy makes you itch", "all bodies are heavy" "the sun will rise tomorrow". These things are very probable, but it would not be stating a logical contradiction if you said otherwise. Its truth is not neccessary or certain. Reason alone cannot decide whether a factual statement is true or false. Relies on induction-at best only very probable. ex: cannot infer from looking at water that it would suffocate you. These give us information and new information about the world, but empirical judgments do not have certainty or necessity of logic.

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Analytic proposition or statement:

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being a proposition whose truth is evident from the meaning of the words it contains; such statements are discursive; explicative. They are self-identical; cannot take away part of the definition. The bases of the statement is in the concept of the terms. They are neccessary truths, to deny them would be a contradiction. They are the analysis of relationships between symbols as we have defined them. The certainty of these statements is not based on external facts, and therefore they cannot tell you about the real world. Based on the principle of contradiction. The predicate is already contained within the subject. Geometry, Algebra, Arithmetic and formal logic. Hume calls them relations of ideas. ex: "no bachelor is married"; "all bodies are extended"

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knowledge a posteriori:

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dependent upon experience, e.g., you would not know where your class met until you saw your schedule, i.e., nothing in the concept of your class would tell you where it was going to meet. I know that poison ivy makes you itch is knowlege a posteriori even if you have not experienced it, for someone had to have experienced that in order for that to be known. The effect of itching is not contained in the concept of poison ivy.

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knowledge a priori

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independent of experience, e.g., you do not need to worry whether you will encounter an unextended body. Deductive knowledge, relating to or derived by reasoning from self-evident propositions; presupposed by experience; formed or conceived beforehand