The Synthetic a Priori
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Complex sentences and attitudes
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However, there is a class of sentences that causes some problems. These are sentences like, "Ezekiel believed that he saw the chariot of God." Here we recognise that there is a sentence within a sentence. That is, the above sentence can be decomposed into two fragments as follows, "Ezekiel believed that ….." and "Ezekiel saw the chariot of God." However, the first part is not itself a sentence, but something that can form a sentence when the dots are filled in with another sentence. We do not appear to be able to decompose these sentences any further. Thus, this kind of sentence is not atomic or compound, but a different type altogether – we call it a complex sentence. Complex sentences express attitudes. The expression "…. believed that…" expresses the attitude of belief on the part of the conscious subject towards the idea (or proposition) expressed by the sentence that follows it. Thus, logically we can analyse a complex sentence into three components: 1. Subject, 2 Attitude, 3. Proposition." We might represent this diagrammatically by ... The existence of complex sentences expressing prepositional attitudes has been a notoriously difficult problem for logicians. However, whilst complex sentences are very interesting, we include them here for the sake of completeness only, since the argument about the synthetic a priori does not depend on them.
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Contents of
The Synthetic a Priori
1 Empiricism, Platonism, Innate Ideas and the A Priori
2 Analytic a priori
3 Kant and the synthetic a priori
4 Compound (molecular) and atomic sentences
5 Logically atomic sentences and the philosophy of logical atomism
6 Complex sentences and attitudes
7 Subject and predicate, individual and property
8 Synthetic and analytic, definitions offered by Kant
9 A priori and a posteriori
10 The synthetic a priori in Kant - the Critique of Pure Reason
11 Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, the self and transcendental apperception
12 Empiricist philosophies of mathematics - conventionalism (formalism)
13 Empiricist philosophies of mathematics - the empiricism of J.S. Mill
14 Hybrid empiricist philosophies of mathematics
15 Empiricist philosophies of mathematics - Wittgenstein and non-cognitivism
16 A.J. Ayer and conventionalism - his reply to Kant
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