roger wasson company - cheapersunglasses.com

ploy the power of judgment in a number of ways: to conceive
the building of a garage and its possibility, to make my intention
known to the persons I wish to employ, etc. And in general,
every intelligent action presupposes the minds’ power of
judging with respect to presented data of experience.
But, as we have already seen previously, the power of judging
presupposes the mind’s initial possession, as tools or forms of
thought, of the basic relations which make intelligent judgment
possible. Thus from such an intelligent action as the building
of a garage, I reach, by process of inference, the necessity of a
synthetic a priori element in knowing. Indeed, it may be said
that if intelligence did not possess the determinate conditions
which make judgments possible---i.e., the categories---there
would be no way of distinguishing it from non-intelligence: in
fact, there would be no way of distinguishing it from nonintelligence:
in fact, there would be no way of distinguishing
anything from anything else, since such a distinction ultimately
presupposes the mind’s innate power of thought. It can only be
concluded therefore, that the mind does come to experiential
data with a categorical structure which it necessarily employs in
understanding these data; or that intelligible experience is impossible:
and since this last is self-contradictory by rendering
itself unintelligible, the former alternative must stand.
The whole point of our argument reaches its climax when we
realize that we could not understand a definition of knowledge
itself if we did not know what is was to know something: so
that hopeless skepticism results unless we admit the synthetic a
priori: “Knowledge . . . is, strictly speaking, indefinable in the
sense that its meaning could not be conveyed to anyone who
did not already know what the experience of knowing was. To
know what knowledge is, you must first known what it is to
know something.” 4 This predicament serves to illustrate clearly
4 H. A. Larrabee, Reliable Knowledge, p. 5.