Esar comments on Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant - Less Wrong

65 Post author: lukeprog 06 December 2012 12:42AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 05 December 2012 04:19:31PM 5 points [-]

No, Kant thought that you could only have synthetic a priori knowledge if you already had a fair amount of experience with the world. Synthetic a priori knowledge is knowledge which rests on experience (Kant thinks all knowledge begins with experience), but it doesn't make reference to specific experiences. Likewise, analytic a priori knowledge requires knowledge of language and logic, which, of course, is not innate either. Kant doesn't think there's any such thing as innate knowledge, if this means knowledge temporally prior to any experience.

This has it about right: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_priori_and_a_posteriori#Immanuel_Kant