POSTULATE OF EMPIRICAL THOUGHT

[A218/B265] (Associated by Kant with the categories of possibility, existence, and necessity.) In the Critique, the "postulates of empirical thought in general" are Kant's accounts of the categories of modality, namely possibility, actuality, and necessity. [A233/B285] Later he explains "why I have entitled the principles of modality postulated", writing: "the principles of modality...predicate of a concept nothing but the action of the faculty of knowledge through which it is generated. Now in mathematics a postulate means the practical proposition which contains nothing save the synthesis through which we give ourselves an object....With exactly the same right we may postulate the principles of modality, since they do not increase our concept of things, but only show the manner in which it is connected with the faculty of knowledge". (The Postulates, along with the Analogies, set down important criteria for Kant's coherence theory of truth in the empirical world of appearances. The anticipations of perception and axioms of intuition deal with the categories relevant to the "laws of sensibility". The postulates of empirical thought deal with the categories relevant to the "laws of understanding". The analogies of experience deal with somehow "regulative" conditions of experience.)