A Commentary to Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason'

by Norman Kemp Smith

III. Concerning the Division of General Logic into Analytic and Dialectic.[659]—The following passage from Kant’s Logic[660] forms an excellent and sufficient comment upon the first four paragraphs of this section:

“An important perfection of knowledge, nay, the essential and inseparable condition of all its perfection, is truth. Truth is said to consist in the agreement of knowledge with the object. According to this merely verbal definition, then, my knowledge, in order to be true, must agree with the object. Now I can only compare the object with my knowledge by this means, namely by having knowledge of it. My knowledge, then, is to be verified by itself, which is far from being sufficient for truth. For as the object is external to me, I can only judge whether my knowledge of the object agrees with my knowledge of the object. Such a circle in explanation was called by the ancients Diallelos. And, indeed, the logicians were accused of this fallacy by the sceptics, who remarked that this account of truth was as if a man before a judicial tribunal should make a statement, and appeal in support of it to a witness whom no one knows, but who defends his own credibility by saying that the man who had called him as a witness is an honourable man. The charge was certainly well-founded. The solution of the problem referred to is, however, absolutely impossible for any man.

“The question is in fact this: whether and how far there is a certain, universal, and practically applicable criterion of truth. For this is the meaning of the question, What is truth?...

“A universal material criterion of truth is not possible; the phrase is indeed self-contradictory. For being universal it would necessarily abstract from all distinction of objects, and yet being a material criterion, it must be concerned with just this distinction in order to be able to determine whether a cognition agrees with the very object to which it refers, and not merely with some object or other, by which nothing would be said. But material truth must consist in this agreement of a cognition with the definite object to which it refers. For a cognition which is true in reference to one object may be false in reference to other objects. It is therefore absurd to demand a universal material criterion of truth, which is at once to abstract and not to abstract from all distinction of objects.

“But if we ask for a universal formal criterion of truth, it is very easy to decide that there may be such a criterion. For formal truth consists simply in the agreement of the cognition with itself when we abstract from all objects whatever, and from every distinction of objects. And hence the universal formal criteria of truth are nothing but universal logical marks of agreement of cognitions with themselves, or, what is the same thing, with the general laws of the understanding and the Reason. These formal universal criteria are certainly not sufficient for objective truth, but yet they are to be viewed as its conditio sine qua non. For before the question, whether the cognition agrees with the object, must come the question, whether it agrees with itself (as to form). And this is the business of logic.”[661]

The remaining paragraphs[662] of Section III. may similarly be compared with the following passage from an earlier section of Kant’s Logic:[663]

“Analytic discovers, by means of analysis, all the activities of reason which we exercise in thought. It is therefore an analytic of the form of understanding and of Reason, and is justly called the logic of truth, since it contains the necessary rules of all (formal) truth, without which truth our knowledge is untrue in itself, even apart from its objects. It is therefore nothing more than a canon for deciding on the formal correctness of our knowledge.

“Should we desire to use this merely theoretical and general doctrine as a practical art, that is, as an organon, it would become a dialectic, i.e. a logic of semblance (ars sophistica disputatoria), arising out of an abuse of the analytic, inasmuch as by the mere logical form there is contrived the semblance of true knowledge, the characters of which must, on the contrary, be derived from agreement with objects, and therefore from the content.

“In former times dialectic was studied with great diligence. This art presented false principles in the semblance of truth, and sought, in accordance with these, to maintain things in semblance. Amongst the Greeks the dialecticians were advocates and rhetoricians who could lead the populace wherever they chose, because the populace lets itself be deluded with semblance. Dialectic was therefore at that time the art of semblance. In logic, also, it was for a long time treated under the name of the art of disputation, and during that period all logic and philosophy was the cultivation by certain chatterboxes of the art of semblance. But nothing can be more unworthy of a philosopher than the cultivation of such an art. Dialectic in this form, therefore, must be altogether suppressed, and instead of it there must be introduced into logic a critical examination of this semblance.

“We should then have two parts of logic: the analytic, which will treat of the formal criteria of truth, and the dialectic, which will contain the marks and rules by which we can know that something does not agree with the formal criteria of truth, although it seems to agree with them. Dialectic in this form would have its use as a cathartic of the understanding.”