Analytic Aposteriority and its Relevance to Twentieth-Century Philosophy

Abstract

One of the central features of Kant’s ground-breaking Critique of Pure Reason is its introduction of a new framework for classifying propositions according to their epistemological status, based on two dyadic distinctions: first, between propositions that evince an “analytic” structure and those with a “synthetic” structure; and second, between “a priori” modes of justifying such propositions and “a posteriori” modes.1 This gives rise to four possible kinds of propositional knowledge-claim, two of which are relatively non-controversial: analytic a priori propositions establish logical knowledge, whereas synthetic a posteriori propositions establish empirical knowledge.