How is the law of causation a synthetic a priori concept?

How is the law of causation a synthetic a priori concept?

Attached: 440px-Kant_gemaelde_3.jpg (440x574, 57K)

It isn't, only particular propositions are synthetic (either a priori or a posteriori). Necessity itself is simply a priori, it's one of the categories.

Okay, how is cause-and-effect an a priori concept?

The problem Kant's trying to solve is that to logically predicate something about something thing "in the world" requires certainty about the thing's essence, and that would involve a finite being (a human) somehow having infinite knowledge (in both a qualitative sense, and in the temporal sense that the judgment has held and will hold good forever). One sceptical solution to this problem was to say that we never make more than "probable" or habitual judgments, but we don't actually know anything with certainty, for example the laws of nature or their regularity. But a lot of logically strange questions then arise how we even have concepts of necessary causality if we can never see it in nature. How can a finite being interact with finite, particular events and somehow derive a judgment about the internal, necessary, infinitely and universally true nature of those events? Even worse, how is it that even a child can make logical judgments of universal and necessary form?

Kant's solution is to say that we see everything under the aspect of causality, so that causal relations are as much a necessary precondition of our experience as is our intuition of things as temporal and spatial. This preserves the apodictic nature of logic by separating logic from the essences of things in themselves. Logic becomes a part of us, a tool for making pure judgments of universally valid form, in general. Anyone can do this, because it's simply part of our native comportment. But to do it well and correctly still requires diligence.

Essentially Kant was trying to rescue logic of the prestigious Wolffian-Leibnizian rationalist kind from scepticism and "common sense" philosophy that uses certain problems with rationalism (like the casuistry of deducing an entire cosmology from a few harebrained logical principles) as a basis for saying that all judgments are merely probable. Kant wants to rescue the "scientificity" of Enlightenment logic, rationalism, and Newtonian physics, but he understands he can't do that without sacrificing a "strong" rationalism that claims to predicate straightforwardly about the world as it is in itself. That all being said, his solution was pretty much satisfying to nobody.

gotta say this kant guy sounds pretty smart

>how we even have concepts of necessary causality if we can never see it in nature.
Just a misinterpretation of repeated conjoinment to make reasoning simpler

>How can a finite being interact with finite, particular events and somehow derive a judgment about the internal, necessary, infinitely and universally true nature of those events?
They can't. Only probabilistic truths

> how is it that even a child can make logical judgments of universal and necessary form?
Misinterpretating conjoinment as causality is not something so difficult that a child can't do. Causality is just an approximation of reality that is easier to reason about despite being less accurate

>
Kant's solution is to say that we see everything under the aspect of causality, so that causal relations are as much a necessary precondition of our experience as is our intuition of things as temporal and spatial.
Yeah, I don't get his argument. Is he just asserting that inferring causality is some sort of innate aptitude and we should believe this because of what? Cause we're scared about what happens otherwise?

>Essentially Kant was trying to rescue logic of the prestigious Wolffian-Leibnizian rationalist
I thought he was trying to save it from Hume

>That all being said, his solution was pretty much satisfying to nobody.
Then why is often considered the greatest modern philosopher?

also maybe your mind runs on causal hardware so it comes preloaded with causality

It's not that the law of causation is itself synthetic a priori, its that the concept of a "cause" itself contains the necessary connection with its "effect"; the latter can only be posited through and follow on from the former. Therefore what Kant does is to show that we don't come to know and understand causality through the succession or repetition of cause-and-effects, but rather that experience is derived from the pure categories of understanding. The way in which we know causality is orientated according to the contiguity and simultaneity of a priori concepts, the immediate spatiotemporal experience of the subject. What is synthetic a priori are judgements made concerning causal relationships, not causality itself.

That's a bug not a feature

idk bro maybe if you have a causal mind even with no outside input pure self reflection could arrive at causality seems like a good foundation 2 me