Abstract
Abstract This paper draws out and connects two neglected issues in Kant’s conception of a priori knowledge. Both concern topics that have been central to contemporary epistemology and to formal epistemology in particular: knowability and luminosity. Does Kant commit to some form of knowability principle according to which certain necessary truths are in principle knowable to beings like us? Does Kant commit to some form of luminosity principle according to which, if a subject knows a priori, then they can know that they know a priori? I defend affirmative answers to both of these questions, and by considering the special kind of modality involved in Kant’s conceptions of possible experience and the essential completability of metaphysics, I argue that his combination of knowability and luminosity principles leads Kant into difficulty.
Highlights
Suppose that all truths are knowable but that there is some truth that is unknown
If the old knowability proof is valid, semantic anti-realism is in trouble, for it seems absurd to think that there are no unknown truths
For let us turn to our candidate knowability principle, and in particular the question of whether we should attribute it to Kant
Summary
The knowability principle I will attribute to Kant is strictly stronger than the claim that for any transcendental truth there is a metaphysically possible world in which it is known. The idea is that the anti-realist is concerned to place an epistemic condition on meaning and thereby truth such that what is true is at least in part a matter of what we might be able to go about discovering (proving, verifying, etc.) They are no more interested in whether some contingent falsehood is known in some world quite unlike our own than they are when the knower in question is quite unlike ourselves. (We are reasoning in a non-actual context again.) it would not be feasible—it would not be possible in our transcendental, anti-realist sense—for us to know that all red things are colored things. For let us turn to our candidate knowability principle, and in particular the question of whether we should attribute it to Kant
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