The difference between Pure and Empirical Knowledge

All our knowledge begins with experience.

The faculty of cognition can be used only through sensory objects.

These produce representations that make our understanding work to:

• compare, connect, or separate these
• convert the raw material of our sensuous impressions into a knowledge of objects called experience.

Therefore, in temporal terms, our knowledge begins with experience.

But it does not follow that all arises out of experience.

Our empirical knowledge might be a compound of knowledge which:

• we receive through impressions
• come from the faculty of cognition itself.

In this case, we cannot distinguish the latter from the original sensory element.

Is there a knowledge totally independent of experience and sensory impressions?

Knowledge of this kind is called a priori, in contradistinction to a posteriori empirical knowledge, which is sourced from experience.

Thus, if a man undermined his house, we say, “he might know a priori that it would have fallen.”

• He did not need to wait for the experience for it to actually fall.

But still, he knew previously be experience that heavy bodies fall.

“Knowledge a priori” is knowledge that is absolutely independent of all experience. It is either:

1. Pure

This has no empirical element mixed in.

2. Impure

For example, the proposition, “Every change has a cause” is an impure apriori proposition because change can only be derived from experience.