Explain Kant’s distinction between analytic and synthetic judgements. Can the distinction be sustained?

Submitted for PH201 (History of Modern Philosophy) Coursework

This essay explains Kant’s distinction between analytic and synthetic judgements, and argues that it cannot be sustained without an objective standard for conceptual content.

Kant defines analytic judgements as those where the predicate is “covertly” contained within the concept of the subject, so that denying the predicate leads to a logical contradiction; they are therefore “judgements of clarification”. He gives as an example, “All bodies are extended”, since our concept of the subject ‘body’ already includes the idea of taking up space, so the predicate ‘extension’ is built into its definition. By contrast, synthetic judgements are “judgements of amplification”: the predicate adds to the subject something which “could not have been extracted from it through analysis”. His example is, “All bodies are heavy”, as the concept of ‘body’ does not include the idea of weight; we can conceive of a massless body, and so we must go beyond mere analysis and refer to experience to determine whether the judgement is true (Kant, 1998, p.141).

Kant notes in introducing this distinction that he is considering only “affirmative judgements, since the application to negative ones is easy” (Ibid.). Even so, a common objection to this distinction holds that it is too narrow, since “it applies only to judgements of subject-predicate form”, but many judgements – like disjunctive judgements, which have more than one subject – do not have the form ‘S is P’ (Van Cleve, 1999, p.19). Thus, insofar as Kant’s distinction hinges on the predicate being contained within the subject – what Van Cleve calls ‘the containment characterisation’ (Ibid., p.18) – it is too restrictive to account for various judgements of interest to him, including conditional statements (‘if A, then B’) and contrapositive statements (both crucial to mathematical reasoning).

This objection is easily overcome, by altering slightly the emphasis of the earlier definition. If we take as the fundamental feature of analytic judgements that their denial results in a contradiction (originally noted as a mere consequence of the containment characterisation), the distinction can be applied to a wider range of judgements. (Kant, 1998, p.280) himself stresses the importance of contradiction: “If the judgement is analytic, whether it be negative or affirmative, its truth must always be able to be cognized sufficiently in accordance with the principle of contradiction”. On this view, the containment characterisation is merely a special case of the criterion of analyticity that applies to subject-predicate judgements.

This argument thus causes no difficulty, but yields the following revised account of the analytic/synthetic distinction: a judgement A is analytically true iff from its negation, we can derive a formal contradiction using only laws of logic and substitutions authorized by definitions; it is analytically false iff we can derive a contradiction in this way from A itself; it is synthetic iff neither of these hold – that is, it is not analytic (Van Cleve, 1999, p.20).

Kant’s Leibnizian contemporaries, J.G. Maass and J.A. Eberhard, raised another challenge I will call the ‘Objectivity Problem’. Their concern was that “Kant’s division of judgements into analytic and synthetic [is] purely relative, in other words subjective or psychological” (Rovira, 2020) because there is no objective test for what is “contained” in a concept. In the Prolegomena (Kant, 1977), “Gold is a yellow metal” is given as an analytic judgement, since “my concept of gold […] contained the thought that this body is yellow and metal”. But different knowers attribute different content to a term like ‘gold’: for laypeople, it may only include ‘a yellow metal’; for chemists it may also include ‘atomic number 79’. So the statement, “Gold has atomic number 79” might be synthetic for the layperson yet analytic for the chemist. If the same judgement can be simultaneously analytic and synthetic depending on who asserts it, the distinction would seem to lack the objectivity required for it to serve as a fundamental division in epistemology. Note that treating the contradiction characterisation as primary does not eliminate this objection, since (except in the case of logical tautologies) the question remains whether the relevant contradiction test depends on subjective conceptions rather than an objective standard.

One response to this argument, proposed by J.G. Schultz, is that these are in fact two different concepts masquerading under one word. One thus distinguishes between sentences and judgements: the layperson’s concept of ‘gold’ is not the same as the chemist’s, so although the sentence “Gold has atomic number 79” is synthetic for the former and analytic for the latter, “such relativity will not undermine Kant’s project in the slightest”, for they are expressing different judgements and no contradiction arises (Van Cleve, 1999, p.19).

This ostensibly compelling response sidesteps the crux of the matter. In genuine disputes – say, over whether geometry is synthetic (Kant’s view) or analytic (the Leibnizians’ view) – the parties are not using different concepts for ‘triangle’, and yet they disagree on whether “the interior angles of a triangle sum to 180 degrees” can be deduced simply by unpacking the concept. As (Hogan, 2013) stresses, Kant’s link between analytic judgements and logical contradiction presupposes a stable, intersubjectively agreed content. If one can simply expand a concept indefinitely (for instance, defining ‘event’ as ‘a caused occurrence’), many of Kant’s allegedly synthetic truths would collapse into trivially analytic ones. Likewise, Kant’s claim that ‘body’ analytically includes ‘extension’ but not ‘weight’ requires a principled standard for deciding which marks intrinsically belong to ‘body’, independent of any particular thinker’s associations or experiences. Hence, Schultz’s solution does not fully address whether there is an objectively verifiable way to see that geometry (or any domain) must rely on synthetic rather than analytic reasoning; Kant requires a further account about how we fix the content of shared concepts and why geometry counts as “irreducibly synthetic” by that standard. Kant tries to secure objectivity by demanding proof that a concept truly applies to something real: before one can assert a judgement is analytic, one must show that there is actually an object matching the concept at issue. In foregoing example, simply defining ‘event’ as involving a cause does not automatically guarantee that all events in nature must have causes. One must also show – synthetically – that reality features ‘events’ instantiating that expanded definition (Schulz, 1790). But this approach makes his distinction circular: he calls a judgement synthetic if verifying its content requires going beyond the subject-concept, yet establishing what that subject-concept legitimately contains often looks like it also depends on some broader empirical or intuitive check.

Thus, even after reformulating Kant’s analytic/synthetic distinction in terms of logical contradiction to withstand the charge of narrowness, it cannot be sustained in the absence of an objective criterion for fixing conceptual content without becoming circular.

Bibliography

Hogan, D., 2013. Metaphysical Motives of Kant's Analytic-Synthetic Distinction. Journal of the History of Philosophy, April, 51(2), pp. 267-307.

Kant, I., 1977. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. s.l.:Hackett Publishing Company, Inc..

Kant, I., 1998. Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rovira, R., 2020. Is the division of judgments into analytic and synthetic relative? The discussion between Maaß and Kant (through Schultz). Kant-Studien, 111(3), pp. 445-469.

Schulz, J., 1790. Rezension von Johann August Eberhard, Philosophisches Magazin. Jenaer Litteraturzeitung, pp. 281-284.

Van Cleve, J., 1999. Problems from Kant. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Result

Mark: 78% (Lower Mid First)

Feedback:

In your essay, you engage very well with the question of whether Kant's distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments can be sustained, demonstrating an outstanding level of understanding of its key aspects.

One of your essay’s many strengths is your critical reasoning already regarding the definition of the key terms: You argue that the containment criterion is too restrictive, and that we must shift the emphasis to the contradiction criterion instead. Accordingly, you refine your definition of the terms in § 5. Your critical discussion is also on a very high level: You demonstrate both skills in explaining the objections as they were formulated by Maass and Eberhard as well as Schulze, and critically engage with them by explaining with regard to Schulze why “This ostensibly compelling response sidesteps the crux of the matter.”

I do not entirely get your point in the penultimate paragraph that Kant’s distinction becomes “circular: he calls a judgement synthetic if verifying its content requires going beyond the subject-concept, yet establishing what that subject-concept legitimately contains often looks like it also depends on some broader empirical or intuitive check.” Couldn’t one resolve this by arguing that Kant employs a conception of the dispositional a priori (as it was called in the lecture) such that “establishing what that subject-concept legitimately contains” does not require experience in the same sense as the verification of a synthetic judgment? Moreover, Kant’s “proof that a concept truly applies to something real” involves, in the case of synthetic a priori judgments, intuition a priori (space and time), for instance the construction of a geometrical figure in space. In this sense, it does not rely on experience (at least in the official story, but you could of course argue that this is not convincing for certain reasons).

Advice on how to improve for future assignments:

I do not really have tips for improvement because your essay is already extraordinarily good.

One formal note, the Critique of Pure Reason is normally quoted in this manner: CPR A 94 / B 128.

Very well done!