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The nature of a priori knowledge.

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For me to fully understand the concept of a priori and a posteriori knowledge it seems necessary for me to get an explanation of the following:

En empiricist is not able to prove synthetic a priori statements like "Every event must have a cause," this is due to the empiricist merged the synthetic and apostieriory concepts. Kant would say that this claim would claim to be true without turning to experience for it to be verified, also the predicate is not logically imbedded in the subject.

How does one merge a synthetic and apostieriori concept, and why does that render empiricists unable to verify the above statement?

@Edvin,

Edvin wrote:

For me to fully understand the concept of a priori and a posteriori knowledge it seems necessary for me to get an explanation of the following:

En empiricist is not able to prove synthetic a priori statements like "Every event must have a cause," this is due to the empiricist merged the synthetic and apostieriory concepts. Kant would say that this claim would claim to be true without turning to experience for it to be verified, also the predicate is not logically imbedded in the subject.

How does one merge a synthetic and apostieriori concept, and why does that render empiricists unable to verify the above statement?

Isn't your question (or your instructor's question) how does one merge a synthetic and an a priori concept; not a synthetic and an a posteriori (note the spelling) concept? There is no puzzle about the latter. You have got to get the ideas of a priori, and. a posteriori (empirical) straight. Otherwise you are going to get nowhere with this question. You had better spend some time looking them up on the Web.

@Edvin,

I don't know if I am supposed to link to other sites in this forum, but the following website is a good summary of Kant's Prolegomena, and it explains a priori, a posteriori, synthetic and analytic well.

Kant: Judgments

Also, I tried to explain how Kant can come to synthetic a priori judgements in a post in the Kant area of this forum. I would try again, but time is limited.

I enjoy dicussing Kant, a lot. Hopefully we'll be able to have some profitable conversations together.

@Edvin,

The question is not well formulated. I mixed up the terms because of an article mixing them up and thus confused me. But I think I got it straight now.

@Edvin,

I apologize, my other post is in the metaphysics area of the forum, here is the link:

http://www.philosophyforum.com/forum/metaphysics/710-finding-kant-very-difficult-humble-call-aid.html

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