2 Kant, Methodology and Analyticity

Kant’s central concern in his Critique of Pure Reason with the question, ‘How
are
synthetic a priori judgements possible?’, and his view that mathematical
propositions are synthetic a priori, are well known. What is less well known is
that it was his reflections on the dif ferences between mathematical and
philosophical methodology that motivated his critical project, though this was
admittedly obscured by Kant himself in placing his discussion of methodology
at the back of the Critique, in the ‘Transcendental Doctrine of Method’. Kant
opens the first section of Chapter 1 with a claim that Frege too would have
endorsed: ‘Mathematics gives the most resplendent example of pure reason
happily expanding itself without assistance from experience’ (A712/B740).
Where Kant and Frege dif fer, however, is in their views of the role played by
‘intuition’ (‘Anschauung’). According to Kant, mathematical cognition involves
the construction of concepts, and to construct a concept, Kant writes, ‘means to
exhibit a priori the intuition cor responding to it’ (A713/B741). For Frege, on
the other hand, in the case of arithmetic, ‘intuitions’ are not required.
Kant takes the example of a simple geometrical problem to illustrate his
conception of the dif ference between philosophical and mathematical method:
Give a philosopher the concept of a triangle, and let him try to find out in his
way how the sum of its angles might be related to a right angle. He has nothing
but the concept of a figure enclosed by three straight lines, and in it the concept
of equally many angles. Now he may reflect on this concept as long as he wants,
yet he will never produce anything new. He can analyz e and make distinct the
concept of a straight line, or of an angle, or of the number three, but he will not
come upon any other properties that do not already lie in these concepts. But
now let the geometer take up this question. He begins at once to construct a
triangle. Since he knows that two right angles together are exactly equal to all of
the adjacent angles that can be drawn at one point on a straight line, he extends
one side of his triangle, and obtains two adjacent angles that together are equal
to two right ones. Now he divides the external one of these angles by drawing a
line parallel to the opposite side of the triangle, and sees that here there arises an
external adjacent angle which is equal to an internal one, etc. In such a way,
through a chain of inferences that is always guided by intuition, he ar rives at a
fully illuminating and at the same time general
solution of the question. (CPR,A716–7/B744–5.)
The problem that Kant considers here is in fact taken from Euclid’s
Elements (I, 32), and it is his reflections on Euclidean methodology that lead
him to emphasize the need for ‘intuitions’ in geometry. By ‘intuition’ he means
a particular spatiotemporal representation. Without such representations,
according to Kant, I would be unable to solve geometrical problems. ‘I
construct a triangle’, he writes, ‘by exhibiting an object cor responding to this
concept, either through mere imagination, in pure intuition, or on paper, in
empirical intuition, but in both cases completely a priori, without having had to
bor row the pattern for it from any experience’ (A713/B741). For the purposes
of understanding or finding a proof concerning the properties of a triangle, it
does not matter what particular triangle we take (imagine or draw), but there
must be some representation of a triangle. It is in this way that geometrical
judgements can be both a priori (since they are not essentially dependent on any
particular empirical experience) and synthetic (since they still require an
‘intuition’ – a ‘pure intuition’ where there is no actual object). Similar
considerations apply in the case of arithmetic, on Kant’s view, where ‘symbolic
constructions’, involving the manipulation of symbols in accordance with rules,
rather than geometrical constructions are required (cf. A717/B745).
How does Kant see philosophical methodology? The ‘philosopher’ to
whom Kant is refer ring in this discussion is the Leibnizian, who believes that
advances can be made by ‘conceptual analysis’. Clearly, what Kant has in mind
here is a particular model of analysis, in which complex concepts are regarded
as ‘composed’ of simpler concepts, whose extraction it is the task of the
philosopher to undertake. This conception is reflected in his of ficial criterion
for the ‘analyticity’ of a judgement, which can be formulated as follows:

(ANK ) A true judgement of the form ‘A is B’isanalytic if f the predicate B is

contained in the subject A.

According to Kant, however, merely showing what concepts are ‘contained’ in a

given concept cannot genuinely advance our knowledge. Given that
mathematics
does advance our knowledge, it cannot simply consist in conceptual analysis.
Now we may well regard Kant’s view of conceptual analysis as too crude, being
legitimate only where the metaphor of ‘containment’ can be cashed out. 1 But
this does not necessarily undermine his point about the need for some kind of
spatiotemporal representation or ‘intuition’ in mathematics.