The Problem of Truth in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason

The absence of a separate entry or section on “truth” in the Critique of Pure Reason, the presence of some ambiguous, complicated and problematic-interpretable expressions and utterances in some parts of that work, and the formation of some extreme contradictory interpretations concerning these utterances on the part of some of Kant’s commentators, are the most important obstacles encountered by contemporary Kantian scholars in presenting a unitary, coherent and transparent view of Kant’s theory of truth. Hence, the question about the nature of truth in Critique of Pure Reason has become a fundamental problem among Kantian scholars. The present paper, without undue adhering to one of the two extreme common interpretations on Kant’s theory of truth (which one of them has considered Kant to be advocate of traditional correspondence theory of truth and the other has taken him as the founder of coherence theory of truth), and only by analyzing Kant’s new conception of “judgment” as an epistemic (and not logical) relation between representations emphasizes this important point that the general structure of Critique of Pure Reason requires that the traditional correspondence theory of truth not be entirely abandoned and not completely preserved in its traditional form. In other words, by revising and completing the traditional correspondence theory of truth, the Critique established the foundations of a new conception of truth that can be called “transcendental correspondence theory of truth”. According to this new conception, truth is a condition without which a judgment or cognition cannot correspond with its object and consequently cannot have objective validity; The constituent representations of a judgment could become true knowledge or objective empirical judgment only when they are synthesized in accordance with possible experience (i.e. universal a priori rules or principles of experience).