Kant’s semantic turn

Resumo

In the opening sections of this paper I reconstruct Kant’s project for a critique of pure theoretical reason by showing that in its initial formulation in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) his aim is to make explicit the conditions under which problems of pure theoretical reason are solvable. The doctrine of the solvability of those problems demands an answer to the following question, which was considered by Kant the fundamental task of the critique of pure theoretical reason: how are synthetic theoretical a priori judgments possible? In other words, under which conditions can these judgments be said to be determinately true or false? This task is carried out in the form of an a priori theory of the reference and meaning of theoretical a priori concepts and of the truth of synthetic a priori judgments. I consider that this theory could and should be interpreted as an a priori or transcendental semantics.