KNOWLEDGE

[L:72] In the Logic Kant sharply distinguishes opinion, belief, and knowledge, which are the three "modes of holding-to-be-true", three kinds of judgment "through which something is presented [i.e., represented] as true". Knowledge is the strongest mode of judgment of truth and is apodeictic: "what I know, I hold to be apodeictically certain, i.e. to be universally and objectively certain", although Kant suggests that we can make this judgment about "a mere empirical truth". [L:78] This kind of knowledge--"or certainty"--is a judgment of truth by on "a cognitive ground that is both objectively and subjectively sufficient". There are two kinds of knowledge (certainty), empirical and rational. Rational certainty is mathematical (in which case it is intuitive certainty) or discursive; all rational certainty is apodeictic. By contrast, "empirical certainty" is not apodeictic (And thus not, strictly speaking, knowledge?) but assertoric. Kant comments, "we cannot have rational certainty of everything, but where we can have it, we must prefer it to the empirical". [A320/B377] In the Critique, Kant's first definition of knowledge--as "objective perception"--occurs early in the Dialectic. Kant gives this "definition" in the midst of an appeal not to use the term `idea' loosely, but to follow his terminology for the various kinds of representations; the passage rather confusingly invokes many earlier distinctions. Kant writes: "The genus is representation in general. Subordinate to it stands representation with consciousness. A perception which relates solely to the subject as the modification of its state is sensation, an objective perception is knowledge. This is either intuition or concept....The concept is either an empirical or a pure concept". [A822/B850] Much later in the Dialectic Kant speaks of knowledge in the terms of the Logic, writing "the holding of a thing to be true...has the following three degrees: opining, believing, and knowing....when the holding of a thing to be true is sufficient both subjectively and objectively, it is knowledge....Objective sufficiency is termed certainty". Presumably the "empirical knowledge"--experience--discussed in the Aesthetic and Analytic is different from this, which Kant characterizes (and then presumably goes on to critique) as "the transcendental employment of reason". In the Deduction in B, KAnt speaks of the understanding as "the faculty of knowledge"--presumably empirical knowledge of appearances. "This knowledge consists in the determinate relation of given representations to an object; and an object is that in the concept of which the manifold of a given intuition is united", suggesting, as he does later, a coherence theory of (the nature of) truth. Of course, there is no kind of this knowledge beyond experience.