Kant's synthetic a priori:
Hume's Law - that analytic truths are knowable a priori whereas synthetic truths can only be know a posteriori.
Kant wanted to show that a priori synthetic knowledge is possible.
Kant claimed that we could know a priori that every event has a cause. This is not a tautology as it is not in the meaning of the word 'event' that there must be a cause.
Kant argued that we could know this a priori by analysing experience and working out must be the case in order for us to enjoy the type of experience that we do. If such an analysis can unearth transcendental conditions that might tell us something substantive about the world as we conceive it: it would establish certain synthetic a priori truths.
Analogy of a black and white TV - you don't know what picture you will see when you turn on the TV but you are sure that the image will be black and white as this is the way the TV has structure the experience.

	Created by lucy-hook over 11 years ago

A-Level Philosophy (Reason and Experience) Note on Innate Knowledge, created by lucy-hook on 10/04/2013.