My position refutes the very notion of 'pure reason'.
— creativesoul
I'd like to see the reasoning to support that. I'd say there is pure reason, but it consists only in tautologies and 'contentless' formal logic. Some people, Kant among them, claim that there is synthetic a priori reasoning (as well as the tautologous analytic a priori kind) but I'm pretty sure that should not be accepted. — Janus
Propositions concerning relations of ideas are intuitively or demonstratively certain. They are known a priori—discoverable independently of experience by “the mere operation of thought”, so their truth doesn't depend on anything actually existing (EHU 4.1.1/25). That the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle sum to 180 degrees is true whether or not there are any Euclidean triangles to be found in nature. Denying that proposition is a contradiction, just as it is contradictory to say that 8×7=57.
In sharp contrast, the truth of propositions concerning matters of fact depends on the way the world is. Their contraries are always possible, their denials never imply contradictions, and they can't be established by demonstration. Asserting that Miami is north of Boston is false, but not contradictory. We can understand what someone who asserts this is saying, even if we are puzzled about how he could have the facts so wrong.
However, truth conditions are not equivalent to truth, and neither truth conditions nor truth is equivalent to a proposition. — creativesoul
Is your book going to be full of distinctions that no one is unclear about, and which don't need to be made? You do this often. — S
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