ABSTRACT
In the introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason Immanuel Kant draws three important distinctions: a priori versus empirical, necessary versus contingent, and analytic versus synthetic. We are in possession of certain modes of a priori knowledge, and even the common understanding is never without them. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason Necessity and strict universality are thus sure criteria of a priori knowledge. In all theoretical sciences of reason synthetic a priori judgments are contained as principles. If conceptual considerations are limited to those mobilizing definitions or analyses and logic, there is still room for the synthetic a priori. Fortunately, Kant has another characterization of analyticity that is less open to the charge of narrowness. He is invoking the containment characterization of analyticity, and he is clearly right about the results of applying it, at least to some cases if not to this one.
