- Learned through reason alone, never experience.
- Most are learned by experience, but some can only be learned through reason.
- Necessarily true.
- Explicative: they "unpack" concepts but do not add to our knowledge.
- Most are only contingently true, but some are necessary truths.
- Ampliative: they do add to our knowledge
Kinds of Knowable Proposition
Ways in which Propositions are Known
Analytic
Synthetic
a priori
a posteriori
Ordinary experiential statements, e.g.
"It rained today."
"The sun rises in the East."
Necessary conditions for the possibility of experience , e.g. "There is an order to the universe."
Conceptual truths, e.g.
"If A=B and B=C, then A=C."
"All humans bear the DNA of Homo sapiens sapiens."
For Kant, propositions of ethics were synthetic a priori propositions.