Immanuel Kant, Critical Assessments (Vol. II): Kant's Critique of pure reason

IMMANUEL KANT Critical Assessments

IMMANUEL KANT Critical Assessments Edited by Ruth F. Chadwick and Clive Cazeaux

VOLUME II Kant's Critique of Pure Reason

London and New York

Contents

First published 1992 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge a division of Routledge, Taylor & Francis 270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint a/the Taylor & Francis Group

Transferred to Digital Printing 2006 Selection and editorial material

© 1992 Ruth

F. Chadwick and Clive Cazeaux

Acknowledgements

Phototypeset in 1O/12pt Times by Intype, London All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Immanuel Kant: Critical Assessments (Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers Series) I. Chadwick, Ruth II. Cazeaux, Clive III. Series 193 Libl

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10 Publisher's Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent Printed and bound by CPI Antony Rowe, Eastbourne

Introduction Clive Cazeaux and Ruth F. Chadwick Knowledge as a Relation and Knowledge as an Experience in the Critique of Pure Reason Ermanno Bencivenga Copernicus' Role in Kant's Revolution Norwood Russell Hanson Knowledge and Experience: An Examination of the Four Reflective 'Perspectives' in Kant's Critical Philosophy Stephen Palmquist Kant's Notion of Transcendental Presupposition in the First Critique A. C. Genova Kant's Paralogisms Patricia Kitcher Kant's Doctrine of the Self Susan Mendus Personal Identity and Kant's 'Refutation of Idealism' Richard E. Aquila Kant on the Perception of Time W. H. Walsh The Unity of Time and Space, and its Role in Kant's Doctrine of A Priori Synthesis Michael D. Newman The Concept of Experience and Strawson's Transcendental Deduction Kim Davies

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168 185 201

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11 Why did Kant Write Two Versions of the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories? Michel Meyer 12 Synthesis and Transcendental Idealism Ralph C. S. Walker 13 Thought and Intuition in Kant's Critical System Daniel C. Kolb 14 Things-in-Themselves Lauchlan Chipman 15 The Complementarity of Phenomena and Things-in-Themselves W. H. Werkmeister 16 The Schematism and Empirical Concepts Robert B. Pippin 17 Kant's Schematism Reconsidered Eva Schaper 18 The Originality of Kant's Distinction between Analytic and Synthetic Judgements Henry E. Allison 19 Can Kant's Synthetic Judgements be made Analytic? Lewis White Beck 20 Transcendental Arguments Revisited Jay F. Rosenberg

Acknowledgements 204 228 244 263 276 286 304

324 347 363

Knowledge as a Relation and Knowledge as an Experience in the Critique of Pure Reason: reprinted from Canadian Journal of Philosophy 15 (1985) with permission. Copernicus' Role in Kant's Revolution: reprinted from Journal of the History of Ideas XX (1959) with permission. Knowledge and Experience: An Examination of the Four Reflective 'Perspectives' in Kant's Critical Philosophy: reprinted from Kant-Studien 78 (1987) with permission. Kant's Notion of Transcendental Presupposition in the First Critique: reprinted from Essays on Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason', edited by J. N. Mohanty and Robert W. Shahan (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982). Kant's Paralogisms: reprinted from Philosophical Review XCI (1982) with permission. Kant's Doctrine of the Self: reprinted from Kant-Studien 75 (1984) with permission. Personal Identity and Kant's 'Refutation of Idealism': reprinted from Kant-Studien 70 (1979) with permission. Kant on the Perception of Time: reprinted from Kant Studies Today, edited by Lewis White Beck, by permission of Open Court Publishing Company, La Salle, Illinois. © 1969 by The Edward C. Hegeler Foundation, La Salle, Illinois. The Unity of Time and Space, and its Role in Kant's Doctrine of A Priori Synthesis: reprinted from Idealistic Studies 11 (1981) with permission.

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The Concept of Experience and Strawson's Transcendental Deduction: reprinted from Analysis 42 (1982) with permission. Why did Kant Write Two Versions of the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories?: originally published in Synthese 47 (1981) 357-83 © 1981 by D. Reidel Publishing Co., Dordrecht, Holland, and Boston, USA. Reprinted by permission of Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Introduction Clive Cazeaux and Ruth F. Chadwick

Synthesis and Transcendental Idealism: reprinted from Kant-Studien 76 (1985) with permission. Thought and Intuition in Kant's Critical System: reprinted from Journal of the History of Philosophy 24 (1986) with permission. Things-in- Themselves: reprinted from Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 33 (1972). The Complementarity of Phenomena and Things-in- Themselves: originally published in Synthese 47 (1981) 301-12, © 1981 by D. Reidel Publishing Co., Dordrecht, Holland, and Boston, USA. Reprinted by permission of Kluwer Academic Publishers. The Schematism and Empirical Concepts: reprinted from Kant-Studien 67 (1976) with permission. Kant's Schematism Reconsidered: originally published in the Review of Metaphysics 18 (1964), reprinted with permission. The Originality of Kant's Distinction between Analytic and Synthetic Judgements: reprinted from The Philosophy of Immanuel Kant, edited by Richard Kennington (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1985), with permission. Can Kant's Synthetic Judgements be made Analytic?: reprinted from KantStudien 45 (1953-4), with permission. Transcendental Arguments Revisited: reprinted from Journal of Philosophy LXXII (1975) with permission of the author and the Journal.

Three criteria have guided our choice of essays for the volume. (1) Our main criterion was that each essay, to merit inclusion, should be making an overall, definite point relevant to the Critique of Pure Reason and not pursuing secondary enquiries which commentators have introduced to supplement the Critique. (2) As a consequence of (1), each essay had to be a relatively free-standing piece of interpretation. By 'free-standing', we mean that a paper, for its import, does not rely heavily upon and assume the reader's familiarity with previous essays. This is to exclude responses to specific essays and papers which are criticisms of arguments for or against particular interpretations. We wanted the volume to be as self-contained as possible, with the significance of each contribution lying in the original argument advanced by the author and not dispersed through a series of references. (3) We took the extent to which an essay has been cited by other commentators to be a measure of its importance and, therefore, its suitability for inclusion. Obviously, this final criterion could not be exercised in the cases of more recent papers, as insufficient time has passed for critical trends to appear in their wake. In these cases, merit which satisfied (1) and (2) was sufficient to confirm inclusion. No fixed understanding of the Critique'S content has influenced the selection process. However, a univocal reading has emerged. It is not surprising that a predilection for essays which make a general but definite point should be committed to a particular mode of interpretation. In the business of interpretation, one can either stick vehemently to the letter of original works and strive for close, textual consistency or volunteer sympathetic hypotheses which promote an overall understanding. Of course, no single project is going to follow one approach entirely at the expense of the other; the distinction has been made to illustrate extremes. The essays here, though, do side with the latter approach, and it is this predilection which has enabled the univocal reading to emerge.

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The two principal arguments in the Critique evince the possibility of knowledge within experience and the impossibility of knowledge beyond the limits of experience. The principle which underlies both arguments is Kant's concept of the transcendental. Generally, the transcendental alludes to the conditions which must apply for the possibility of knowledge. However, for us, the condition which is emphasized overall is that concepts must apply to the objects of experience which are to be known by them; the emphasis is on there being a necessary affinity between subject and object. The implication is that Kant is questioning the traditional philosophical distinction between verbal knowledge and material object. Bencivenga turns to Kant's Copernican Revolution to examine what the consequences of this affinity are for the verbal-material opposition. In his essay 'Knowledge as a Relation and Knowledge as an Experience in the Critique of Pure Reason', he claims that difficulties in Kant's text have prevented the significance of the Revolution from being fully realized. Kant discards the contemporary epistemological model of the world possessing a pre-ordained, determinate reality to which our knowledge must aspire and replaces it with a symbiotic kinship between knower and known; there is still a reality to be known, but how it is to be known lies within us. This is the Copernican Revolution as it is generally understood. However, Bencivenga maintains that Kant is actually saying more than this. Kant, he claims, is proposing that knowledge necessarily involves the relation to an intentional object; if it were not for the fact that the objects of experience conform to our understanding, then it would be impossible to conceptualize experience into an intelligible form. That the philosophical language of Kant's day did not include the notion of an intentional object would explain the difficulties and contradictions which have hampered this reading of the Revolution. Fortunately, there is sufficient material in the A Deduction for Bencivenga to make his point. Kant is not just reversing the order of perception but, with the necessary relation to an intentional object, revising the distinction between knowledge and object so that the notion of the real as it is experienced takes on a whole new meaning. The textual validity of the analogy to Copernicus deserves comment. The analogy is based on Kant's own comparison between his new epistemological stance and the reversal in astronomical perspective inspired by Copernicus. Hanson, though, in his essay 'Copernicus' role in Kant's Revolution', proclaims that this understanding of the Copernican Revolution, as the shift in thought which grounds Kant's critical system, has accrued unwarranted significance. Commentators, he claims, including Kemp Smith and Alexander, speak of the Copernican Revolution as though Kant employed the term himself when, in fact, he never uses the expression. The only two references to Copernicus in Kant's entire corpus

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occur in the Preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason and here, Hanson argues, the appeal to Copernicus is made not to suggest following his example of 'activating' the observer but to show the importance of making trial of untested hypotheses; Kant is playing not on the nature of his hypothesis but merely on its newness. That the hypotheses submitted by Copernicus and Kant should both upturn the existing theoretical models within their fields is pure coincidence. Nevertheless, Hanson adds, even though the received sense of Kant's Copernican Revolution is the result of creative interpretation, some justification can be found for it. The key hypotheses in the developments of mathematics and physics which Kant alludes to each stress the point that the mind looks for what it has itself put into objects. The fact that Hanson has to make his point is a testimony to the appropriateness of the accepted analogy. Given that the transcendental describes the conditions which must apply for the possibility of knowledge within experience, a clarification of Kant's distinction between knowledge and experience would be germane. There are four reflective perspectives, Palmquist suggests, which assist Kant's distinction between knowledge and experience. 'Experience' within the distinction, Palmquist claims, refers either to the immediate encounter which the subject has with an object or to the empirical knowledge which such an encounter yields. 'Knowledge' within the main distinction, however, is reflective knowledge: the knowledge obtained as a result of the conscious decision to go beyond or back over the content of empirical knowledge. There are four critical perspectives which give rise to reflective knowledge corresponding to the four permutations which occur when the analytic-synthetic and the a priori-a posteriori distinctions are multiplied. For example, the transcendental perspective is directed towards exacting the a priori conditions which a subject must apply for the possibility of empirical knowledge, and so corresponds to the synthetic a priori. Palmquist recommends that, equipped with the four perspectives - the empirical, the transcendental, the logical and the practical - we can chart the relation between knowledge and experience throughout Kant's entire critical system. To appreciate the transcendental style of argument fully, we need to recognize the contribution which Kant's notion of presupposition makes to it. Kantian scholarship has thrown up four possible interpretations of what constitutes a transcendental argument, only one of which, Genova argues, is legitimate. A true transcendental argument is exemplified by the Transcendental Deduction, which gives a priori justification for the objective validity of an exclusive conceptual scheme. Now what is important is that presupposition for Kant is not just a necessary condition but the material possibility or principle which must be the case if what presupposes it is to be the case. So the presuppositions within the Tran-

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scendental Deduction are the schematized principles of the categorial scheme which must be in place for the possibility of any objective experience. However, the criticism most often directed against the notion of a transcendental deduction is that, rather than justifying the only conceptual scheme possible for experience, it in actual fact justifies one particular scheme among many. Against this, Genova maintains that the Copernican Revolution puts paid to any thought of a conceptual scheme being vetted through correspondence or comparison by situating human cognition as the source of objective determination. The logical possibility that things could be other than they are is ruled out because the presuppositions underlying human cognition are the precepts for objectivity, so the only possible objects of experience are the objects we experience. To construe the Transcendental Deduction as an argument which simply legitimizes one particular conceptual scheme among many is to miss the point; Kant has provided a new paradigm of objectivity, replacing the paradigm of metaphysical realism. The Paralogisms in the first Critique, Kitcher announces, can be explained by means of the Transcendental Deduction and the transcendental-empirical distinction. While they purport to be an exposure of illusions into which the rationalists inevitably fall, Kitcher holds that the First and Third Paralogisms, at least, are Kant's own Paralogisms, in that the illusions arise from his own doctrines. It is because of the Subjective Deduction in the Transcendental Deduction that Kant endorses the minor premiss of the First Paralogism that I am the absolute subject of all my judgements. This is a transcendental claim in that it asserts a necessary condition of experience. Error creeps in when we confuse this with an empirical claim supported by an intuition. All the Paralogisms involve a confusion between transcendental and empirical claims. Kitcher exposes a tension in Kant's work, however, between the argument in the Subjective Deduction and the Paralogisms, and his 'twoselves' doctrine, between the view that the categories must apply to all experience and the necessity of speaking of a 'mere something' subject to no category. In contrast to this direct reading of Kant, Susan Mendus is concerned in her essay to correct some misinterpretations of the Paralogisms which she takes to be common to English-language commentators. It is frequently assumed that Kant's doctrine of the self is an attempt to answer questions about personal identity and, as such, a response to Hume. Both Strawson and Bennett, Mendus claims, take Kant to be dealing with corrigibility in relation to the ascription of mental states to an identical experiencing subject; although they hold opposite views, they both take the underlying issue to be the question of how I can be certain that a perception is mine and not someone else's. However, according

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to Mendus, the question of corrigibility never arises in Kant's text, and what is more, corrigibility does not affect Hume's enquiry. Hume's problem is what gives unity to a set of perceptions which has already been picked out as one set, not what criteria justify casting any particular perception as a member of this set rather than another. Mendus argues, with Kitcher, that Kant claims that the self is not an experience in its own right but a condition of the possibility of experience. I can have no awareness of a self as the subject of the 'I think' because the 'I think' does not correspond with anything at all. Mendus takes the crucial difference between Kant and Hume to be that Kant exposes the source of the belief in a continuing subject of experience. He is not interested in providing Hume with an impression of a continuing self with which to unite his set of perceptions. The 'I think' is not the perception of an object but the transcendental act which fulfils the possibility of experience. The univocal reading of the Paralogisms which Mendus and Kitcher supply is reinforced by Aquila in his examination of personal identity in the Refutation of Idealism. Aquila argues that the Refutation is not concerned with the self as the condition which gives necessary continuity to successive experiential states but with the circumstances which provide the pronoun'!' with a definite, empirical referent. It therefore goes further than the Deduction. Kant offers the thesis that I am conscious of my own existence solely through the perception of objects existing external to me in space. Recent interpretations, he opines, have failed to do justice to the Refutation because they have conflated unity of consciousness or the mere consciousness of a self with the more replete knowledge of oneself. Consciousness of a self is really the province of the Transcendental Deduction, and the assumed synonymity between it and knowledge of oneself has promoted the conviction that the Refutation is nothing more than an extension of the Deduction. Both Bennett and Strawson deal in terms of the awareness of a self as the subject of experience but, Aquila avers, we should be thinking more in terms of the identity of the subject to fulfil Kant's intentions. In this part of the Critique Kant is interested in the self as a particular individual empirically determined in time. A determination of time, Aquila expounds, is not the obtaining of a state of affairs at some moment but the expression of durational existence. To sustain an awareness of duration, the immediate consciousness of outer objects is, as Kant puts it, 'indispensable'. The empirical identity of an individual, precisely who the experiencing subject is, is determined solely in virtue of the reference to permanent objects existing in space. This is much stronger than the Deduction argument, which only requires a general notion of objects existing in space. In the Analogies of Experience, Kant sets out to show that certain conditions must abide for there to be any perception of time. W. H.

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Walsh's pivotal claim in 'Kant on the perception of time' is that Kant's transcendental method is evident here. He gives a concise exposition of each of the three Analogies and details the physical and phenomenal conditions necessary to ground the three corresponding temporal modes of duration, succession and coexistence. The gist of his essay is that the notion of a constant and uniformly flowing time in the Critique is essentially a question of objectivity. To ascribe events to a single system in which they all connect without paradox or contradiction is to make a claim about the objective ordering of events over and above how occurrences appear for a particular experient. Only after the order of things has been secured objectively can discussion proceed about the subjective order as it appears in experience. For this to be possible, the experienced world has to be of a certain form. The everyday pattern of events will only be recognized as a pattern if it is seen against the backdrop of something permanent. Kant has been criticized for holding that we need to think in terms of total regularity; surely a limited number of random events would not make it impossible for us to make sense of our experience. Here Walsh agrees with Kant, seeing the difficulty of setting limits to the number of exceptions once some are admitted. The underlying substance necessary for us to be able to posit a unitary time framework, as Walsh explains, is the single, objective history which binds temporal reality. The precise nature of the object which is expected to be total is unclear. Walsh suggests that substance in the First Analogy is not a metaphysical or physical absolute but the continuous phenomenality evinced by experience. Whereas in Walsh's essay the conditions of intelligibility are to be found in the phenomenal world, Michael Newman's paper, 'The unity of time and space, and its role in Kant's doctrine of a priori synthesis', introduces the suggestion that such conditions also have to be looked at within the experient. Newman's message is that unity, in this instance, does not presuppose the synthesis of a manifold but rather synthesis presupposes a unity. With the synthesis of a manifold, space and time as the forms of intuition are given as the sensible constituents of experience and combined into a unified representation. However, Newman contends, talk of unsynthesized intuitions should not instil the idea that they are readily available components in the constitution of experience. To counter this interpretation, he continues, Kant combines time and space and gives them as a formal intuition, that is, as the representation of a unity. This means that the possibility of any spatio-temporal awareness must presuppose that each sense-impression belongs to a unitary order. The unity of apperception - the '1' which necessarily endures through all experience - can be introduced as a parallel here. To be aware of, say, drawing a straight line in its entirety, each moment of the

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pencil marking the line must fall within my experience. It is only because the 'I' endures throughout that I am aware of drawing the length of the line. If unity presupposed a synthesis, it would not be the case that a unified representation was simply the sum of the stages in which the event occurred, for there would be no necessity binding the individual stages together into a unified whole. That is why here, as Newman announces, it is the other way round. A necessary condition for the synthetic arrangement of sense-impressions into a unified representation is that each impression occurs within a single spatio-temporal framework. That is what Kant intends by giving space and time as the forms of intuition and their unity as a formal intuition. The Transcendental Deduction explores further the opposition between experient and experienced world in its move from the necessary conditions of the possibility of experience to the objective character of experience. Here Strawsonian reconstructions prevail; in fact, Strawson's indirect prominence makes the inclusion of a direct extract in this volume unnecessary. The success and appeal of his account of the Deduction are undoubtedly due to its economy: a necessary condition for the possibility of experience is simply the applicability of the distinction between 'This is how things seem' and 'This is how things are.' For Strawson, the possibility of experience is equivalent to the possibility of judgements of experience, since experience, to be experience that is of interest to us, must be of some general, i.e. conceptual, character. However, Kim Davies's short but provocative essay, 'The concept of experience and Strawson's Transcendental Deduction', raises a problem for both Kant and Strawson. He thinks that the concept of experience here requires investigation. He wants to know who make up the community alluded to by Strawson's first-person plural because if it is, as he suspects, the community of critical philosophers, then the conclusion that the seems-is distinction is a necessary condition of the possibility of experience becomes a statement of the obvious. The concept of experience exercised in critical philosophy already includes the distinction between how things are and how they are experienced, as it is the means by which claims to knowledge are justified. The discrepancies between the two versions of the Transcendental Deduction have inspired much debate and incurred much disagreement. According to Michel Meyer, Kant was driven to write two versions because of a duality in his view of knowledge in the first Critique. The duality gives rise to a paradox, and each version of the Deduction explores one alternative. The problem, as Meyer poses it, is as follows. The Deduction is concerned with what it is for something to be an object for a subject. Kant frequently claims that the object is 'given', but what does this mean? One alternative is that the object is given to intuition, which

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implies that there is knowledge at the level of sensibility. This appears to make the understanding superfluous, and conflicts with Kant's doctrine that both sensibility and understanding are required for knowledge. The other is that something else, x, is given in intuition, but in this case the understanding goes beyond sensibility in synthesizing it as an object. This is also in conflict with Kant's epistemology. The first version of the Deduction takes the latter view, and restricts the understanding's activities by defining experience as a synthesis of concepts and intuitions which takes place at three levels. The second takes the former view and argues for the necessity of the role of the understanding by making it alone responsible for synthesis. Both are unsatisfactory, as they conflict with aspects of the 'spirit of Kantianism'. The first ignores the claim that objects can only be phenomenal and not (as the given x) transcendental. The second gives too much autonomy to the understanding. Some commentators have thought that there is evidence here of the 'patchwork theory'. Meyer rejects this approach. For him the essential requirement of Kant's epistemology, that both sensibility and understanding are needed for knowledge, is maintained by the refinements and compromises in the two versions. If one alternative is preferred, the equilibrium between sensibility and understanding is lost. Ralph Walker's essay, 'Synthesis and transcendental idealism', similarly finds Kant facing two incompatible and equally unappealing interpretations, and offers a solution. Transcendental idealism traverses the middle ground between all-out idealism and common-sense realism. It presents the world not as a figment perpetuated by the mind or as an array of existents independent of the mind but as a world of appearances created by the mind in correspondence with the world of things-inthemselves. Ambiguity over the precise relation between appearances and things-in-themselves, Walker maintains, threatens transcendental idealism's procession: how do appearances and things in themselves connect? Kant stipulates that things in themselves are unknowable, yet if they go some way towards determining the character of experience, then surely we can claim some knowledge of them. Walker suggests that looking at Kant's doctrine of synthesis can not so much divulge the nature of the relationship as make plain why it must stay a mystery. Synthesis is the organizing of unconnected representations and can be empirical or transcendental. In the second edition Critique, though, all synthesis is transcendental, that is, the mind constructs appearances according to its own condition. This means there is no room left for things-in-themselves to ground appearances. Here, in what would otherwise pass for an impossible situation, Walker catches sight of a possibility by recalling a point Goodman makes in relation to Wittgenstein. Similarity in appearance between two objects is no guarantee that the objects

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are similar in themselves. The way in which we organize experience will depend on the primitive predicates which structure our conceptual repertoire. A community with a different set of concepts will divide its world up differently. What is important is that neither framework is closer to the 'facts' than the other. In addition, there is no way of knowing just how an appearance maps on to a thing-in-itself. To want to know precisely how the two correspond is to proceed with the conviction that for every property displayed by our phenomenal object there is a kindred property within the twinned thing-in-itself. To reason as such is to exercise conceptual determination beyond where it is appropriate to do so. Only by admitting to there being some relation can a world of sensible appearances be created by the mind in correspondence with the world of things-in-themselves. The un know ability of the way in which components interact affects the relation between thought and intuition. In Kantian scholarship, the distinction between thought and intuition is subject to attack on two separate counts: how can the acceptance of two distinct faculties be justified if no single intuitive element can be distilled from experience; and how can the two faculties be distinguished, as neither edition of the Critique offers criteria for the distinction? Kolb sets out to defend Kant (and indirectly affirms Walker's point) on the issue, and of the two criticisms, proposes that the latter is the easier to meet. That there are two distinct faculties, he announces, can be demonstrated by reflecting on the nature of knowledge itself. Knowledge for us is necessarily transitive, a discursive relationship between subject and object. The a priori concept of an object as distinct from the subject enables us to understand the very concept of knowledge whereby we know but always entertain the possibility that we are wrong. Thus, it is in virtue of this transitivity that we can distinguish between how a thing appears and how it actually is. However, a distinction between thought and intuition recognizes that there is something for knowledge to be appropriate to. So although no empirical insight into the manner of our cognitive performance is available, the nature of knowledge itself, by transcendental reflection, substantiates Kant's distinction between thought and intuition. The question of how we are to interpret the thing-in-itself remains one of the most controversial areas of Kant scholarship. Is it to be understood in an ontological or epistemological way? Walker, as we have seen, takes the former view. On the contrary, the thing-in-itself, Chipman claims, is a contrast concept: not a goal before which the understanding should humble itself but a locus, a theoretical device, partnering the more readily empirical considerations in Kant's theory of knowledge. For Kant, the objects of experience are appearances. His thought should not be construed as the imprisonment of knowledge within the confines of subjectivism. In fact, the success of Chipman's treatment is due to his

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objectifying appearances and invigorating a kinship between them and things-in-themselves. From the abidance of appearances, it is a viable conviction that there are things-which-appear. As far as the experience goes, within the enclosure of the opposition, there is no immanent different between, say, a daggerish appearance and a dagger which appears. That the former in no way entails the latter is not a disability here. All that is required is that the accountability of an experience be conducive to the concept of a thing-which-appears. There is, however, a two-way incongruity between an appearance and a thing-which-appears. In addition to the lack of entailment already stated, there is, in the opposite direction, nothing which impels a dagger to present a daggerish appearance. An object can always volunteer another, alternative, incommensurate appearance. At this point, Chipman introduces what he calls the logical inexhaustibility of objects: the fact that it will always be logically possible that there is more to what appears than what appears. This potentially infinite disclosure means that to invoke the thing-whichappears is to bring into play the concept of a thing-other-than-as-itappears. Things-other-than-as-they-appear, Chipman suggests, are Kant's things-in-themselves, for it is this annexe of possibility which preserves the 'in itself'. The thing-in-itself is then not some secluded, extraphenomenal particular but a conceptual elongation of the object of experience. Given that the concept of 'object' has general application, appearances and things-in-themselves work in tandem to distinguish something appearing F from an F-ish appearance. With Werkmeister's examination of the thing-in-itself, the possibility that Kant wants to remove the distinction of kind from between verbal knowledge and material objects is brought to the fore. In 'the complementarity of phenomena and things-in-themselves', Werkmeister identifies things-in-themselves with the conceptual models employed in the physical sciences on the grounds that an object of study undergoes a shift in status when empirical investigation proceeds beyond the realm of direct sensory experience. When we see a rainbow, bands of colour are the objects of our experience, not the rays of light or the atoms constituting the water molecules, yet we think of the latter as the 'determining ground' of the rainbow. These theoretical entities, Werkmeister claims, are things-in-themselves and, as paradigms, serve to establish an unequivocal complementarity between appearances and things-in-themselves. The benefit of his account is that it gives credence to the possibility that the thing-in-itself is a particular which does not recognize the material-verbal distinction: talk of rays and atoms has filtered through into common usage to the extent that they are no longer held to be scientific fictions but actual, though unperceivable, existents. So the epistemological construct, with time, ossifies into an ontological construct.

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Is this what should happen to the Kantian thing-in-itself? Despite Werkmeister's attempt to silence controversy, the dispute continues. We are volunteering the hypothesis that it is Kant's intention to affirm that concepts necessarily apply to the objects of experience, with the implication that verbal knowledge and material objects are treated as components of equal standing. Our hypothesis is a sympathetic one, presented to assist a coherent reading of the Critique. Pippin, though, in his essay 'The Schematism and empirical concepts', casts a more subdued light over the work and emphasizes the difficulties which can arise when inadequacies in the original text are taken into consideration. He is interested in how the concept in Kant's epistemology furnishes empirical knowledge. He sees the Critique's central concern as being the ancient 'one over many' problem of how the concept, as a universal, relates to the objects of experience. If we assume that this problem is the hub of Kant's enquiry, then, Pippin advises, the explanation he offers is far from satisfactory. He makes it clear that concepts, for Kant, are rules which arrange the disorganized content of the manifold into an intelligible order. Kant proposes that concepts are directed by schemata or 'figures-in-general' submitted by the imagination. So for the concept 'dog' to be able to determine an indefinite number of dog-instances, the imagination must first supply the figure of a dog-in-general. But, as Pippin observes, the notion of a figure-in-general only postpones the difficulty. If concepts are the rules which determine the particular objects of experience, then, by introducing the notion of a schema to govern their application, Kant has simply retreated from one rule to another. Pippin's analysis highlights a second difficulty. The Copernican Revolution has it that the subject's cognitive faculties structure how the world appears, yet the Transcendental Deduction demands that the world receives structure objectively. The problem then is that the organizing principle which emanates from a subjective source is being asked to determine an objective world. If, as Pippin suggests, the Schematism chapter is the focus of concern in the first Critique, then the difficulties which he finds with empirical concepts would seem to indicate that the volume leaves Kant's theory of knowledge unresolved. The idea that concepts necessarily apply to the objects of experience avoids the difficulties raised by Pippin. Schaper, in her essay 'Kant's Schematism reconsidered', avows that the work only gives the impression of being unfinished because the Schematism chapter is a foretaste of the third Critique; it is not until the third Critique, she adds, that Kant's critical project as a whole receives its conclusion. Her interpretation of the chapter questions the sovereignty of the idea that the mind structures experience. She conducts her study in the light of the third Critique to show that Kant moves on from the binary 'source and structure' model so that the age-old problem of correspondence or 'fit' between concept

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and object is no longer faced head-on. His framework of source intuitions being subsumed under concepts would seem to perpetuate the confrontation, but, Schaper declares, this happens only up to a point, beyond which we must recognize, like Kant, that an affinity exists between the subject and the something which is other than the subject. The incompatibility between the requirement of objective experience and the stipulation that it is the human mind which structures experience does not arise because the contrast is not as stark as the incompatibility suggests. In interpreting Kant, it is useful to think of concepts structuring experience to a degree, but beyond that, the opposition becomes too strict. The doctrine of the Schematism is a preface to this fact. The metaphor of affinity as an expression of Kant's intention is reinforced by the specific manner in which he distinguishes analytic from synthetic judgements. In 'The originality of Kant's distinction between analytic and synthetic judgements', Allison argues that it is the material role which Kant assigns to synthetic judgement that ensures the originality of his distinction. Kant's contemporary Eberhard and the twentiethcentury commentator Lovejoy dismiss his distinction as nothing more than a rehash of the identical-non-identical distinction put into currency by the Leibniz-Wolff school. Traditionally, an analytic judgement simply explicates what is already contained in the concept of its subject, whilst a synthetic judgement adds to the determination of its subject by predicating a quality not already included in the concept of its subject. With the intuitive model of knowledge advanced by Leibniz, a concept completely determines an object, so synthetic judgement has no real work to do. However, with Kant, synthetic judgement is a cognitive process which subsumes an intuition under a concept to determine a particular, the subject of the judgement. The Kantian twist is that synthetic judgement is distinguished from analytic judgement by being an active, material extension of knowledge. It is this determinate opening to intuition which to Allison separates Kant's distinction from that of his predecessors. Whereas Allison looks at the analytic-synthetic distinction via the exercise of determination, Beck approaches the subject by considering the role definition plays within it. Despite the difference in emphasis, Beck's conclusion is very much akin to Allison's. The dispute over whether Kant sometimes affirmed judgements to be synthetic which we nowadays would take to be analytic Beck thinks can be mollified by again recognizing Kant's novel understanding of the synthetic. Kant's opponents generally take the analytic-synthetic distinction to rely on the finite definition of a subject concept, but Beck proposes that, for Kant, what marks the divide is the extraconceptual condition which ultimately makes a concept indefinable. Synthetic judgements, or judgements of experience, arise through the necessary interaction between sensibility and understanding; they involve the bringing of intuitions under concepts.

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Now, definitions are really conceptual relations, yet concepts alone cannot admit sensible, source material; this is the province of intuition. Beck exhumes the Kantian conviction that it is a judgement's opening to intuition which determines its epistemic status. A finite definition of the concept of the subject is precluded because what finally gives meaning to the concept is the condition of sensibility. Synthetic judgements are those whose reference is obtained not through definition but through intuition. How does Kant argue for this opening to intuition? An intuition is the direct contact that we, as experiencing subjects, have with each of the objects in our experience; every object, as we experience it, is represented by a particular intuition. On this account, experience is necessarily discursive: a concept must apply to an object (represented by an intuition) for the possibility of empirical knowledge. Rosenberg, in his 'Transcendental arguments revisited', shows how the notion of a transcendental argument connects with Kant's assertion that experience is necessarily discursive. A transcendental argument is generally taken to be an argument which legitimizes the use of certain key concepts (the categories) by evincing their authority as the necessary conditions for experience. Rosenberg, however, offers an equivalent definition whereby a transcendental argument is an argument whose conclusion makes possible the very experience which is its own ground of proof. He is working against the notion that the categories are a fixed set of a priori conditions; the danger, he claims, is that Kant, in setting down the categories, simply made universal what was only the theory of his time. Rosenberg, with his definition of a transcendental argument, wants to promote the idea that concepts and their objects evolve through time so that experience is always preserved as a discursive act. The notion of a fixed set of concepts is replaced by the notion of a conceptual core which is continually undergoing revision. What Rosenberg wants to stress is that successive conceptual cores will be justified transcendentally by the fact that their employment makes accessible the very experiences to which they are applied. The Critique of Pure Reason is a revision of the philosophical understanding of how we conceptualize reality. The thesis advanced by the Critique is that a necessary affinity exists between the experiencing subject and the objects of experience. Using this affinity, the two principal arguments in the work evince the possibility of knowledge within experience and the impossibility of knowledge beyond the limits of experience: the former is confirmed by the fact that we do have experience and the latter by the fact that concepts applied outside their experiential context only generate speculative metaphysics. Concepts, Kant announces, are not detached, intellectual items which we happen to bring to objects but dynamic components in the production of experience. We enjoy the

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Immanuel Kant

experience of an objective world because concepts are always already engaged in rendering the objects of experiences intelligible, Clive Cazeaux Ruth F. Chadwick

1 Knowledge as a Relation and Knowledge as an Experience in the Critique of Pure Reason*

University of Wales College of Cardiff

Ermanno Bencivenga

Kant was very proud of his Copernican Revolution. So it is a bit ironical that the exact nature of this revolution should have turned out to be as obscure and controversial as it has.! In this essay I will try to provide a new way of looking at the issue. It is my hope that this new perspective will prove not only historically but also theoretically valuable; in particular, that it will present Kant's revolution as one that we might want to tak~ seriously, and maybe even think we still need.

I Two aspects of knowledge The subject matter of this section is our nai've conception of knowledge, so I had better explain what I take this naIve conception to be. Simply put, I think of the na'ive conception of knowledge as the way people conceive of knowledge before considering and taking seriously sceptical objections to the very possibility of knowledge. Notice that there need be nothing particularly naIve in this 'naIve' conception: it may be a quite sophisticated and formalized piece of analysis. And one need not think that only naIve people have the conception in question. You may well think that sceptical doubts are essentially futile, and that the most appropriate response to them is to forget about them; if you do, you probably hold something quite close to the naIve conception I have in mind, but this does not make you at all naive. Clearly, I am using the word 'na'ive' in a technical sense, But this sense is not new, Nobody who talks about 'naIve set theory' means to imply by their choice of words that either Cantor or his theory were naIve; what this choice of words emphasizes is the fact that the theory in question represents the most natural conception one might have of sets before considering the paradoxes and taking them seriously,

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The most crucial feature of the naIve conception of knowledge, for my present purposes, is the fact that this conception has several aspects. In other words, knowledge in this conception is many things at once. I will not consider here all the things knowledge is supposed to be 2 (in the conception in question; from now on, I will often omit this qualification). I will concentrate on two. On the one hand, knowledge is (conceived as) an experience 3 intelligent beings have, with specific features that distinguish it from such other experiences as believing, imagining, daydreaming, wishing, loving, hating. As opposed to wishing and loving, the experience of knowing is supposed to be low in emotional content, or at least whatever emotional content it has is supposed to be somehow irrelevant to it. As opposed to believing and imagining, knowing is thought of as forced on us: I may believe or imagine what I like, but I may not always know what I like, and often what I know I don't like. Also, knowledge is conceived as an incorrigible experience: if I have an experience of knowledge e at time t, then no further experience of knowledge can contradict e (in some sense to be specified)4. If I believe that e is an experience of knowledge, and some further experience that I take to be of knowledge contradicts e, then I must revise my former belief about e, and recognize that e was not an experience of knowledge. On the other hand, knowledge is (conceived as) a (binary) relation, in the following sense: having an experience of knowledge also is being in a relation with an object distinct from that experience. s If a has the relation of knowledge to b, then a is the knower and b is the known. The knower must be an object of a special kind: since it is also the object that has the (conscious) experience of knowledge, it must be a conscious, intelligent being, in short, a subject. As for the nature of the known, the matter is more controversial. Nowadays, it would be natural to think of the known as a proposition; in linguistic jargon, it would be natural to think that the primary construction of the verb 'to know' is the construction 'X knows that A'. As an alternative to this propositional construal, we might have an objectual construal of the relation: in this construal, subjects would not know (only) propositions but in general objects, and the primary construction of the verb 'to know' would be 'X knows Y'. So whereas in the propositional construal I could only know propositions about this table, in the objectual construal I would know the table. Given Kant's preference for the objectual mode,6 I, too, will favour it here, but nothing essential hinges on this decision: virtually the same points I will make could be made in propositional terms. In the naIve conception, the relational and the experiential aspects of knowledge are connected in a precise way. The connection is as follows: knowledge is the kind of experience it is because it is the kind of relation it is. The relation between a knower and a known (in the objectual

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construal) involves at least the awareness on the part of the knower of the existence and/or (part of) the structure of the known, where the known is a determinate object with a determinate structure, and awareness is conceived in general as some kind of mirroring, as a function whose arguments are whatever the awareness is an awareness of.? So it is not surprising that the experience of knowledge should be conceived as being largely independent of the emotions and preferences of the subject, in fact as forced on the subject (in the sense explained above): the subject may have had a (causal) role in bringing about the object of knowledge, but now that the issue is simply one of becoming aware of the existence and structure of that object, the subject's inclinations have little or nothing to do with the success of the operation. As for incorrigibility, either something has a given structure (at a given time) or it does not, so if we become aware of the existence and/or structure of something (at a given time), there is no way we can later become aware of its nonexistence or of its having a different structure (at the same time).

II Hume's attack

We know that Hume launched a sustained attack against the naIve conception of knowledge. It is not often pointed out, however, that his criticisms were not directed against all aspects of that conception equally, and as a result are not equally destructive of all those aspects. , Clearly, these criticisms are quite formidable with respect to the relational aspect of knowledge. There is no reason to think - Hume claims - that the subjective necessity by which we associate causes and effects is indication of any other kind of (objective) necessity, that is, that this experience constitutes the awareness on the part of the subject of the (necessary) structure of any other object (or state of affairs). And these remarks can be generalized. There is no reason to think of any experience as establishing any connection with any object distinct from the experience: a simple mental experiment (of the 'brain-in-the-vat' kind) will show that it is perfectly possible for the subject to have exactly the experiences it has without its being in a relation with anything beyond the experiences themselves. s Consider, however, the following passages: In order to justify myself, I must distinguish in the imagination betwixt the principles which are permanent, irresistible, and universal, such as the customary transition from causes to effects, and from effects to causes: And the principles, which are changeable, weak, and irregular .... The former are the foundation of all our thoughts and

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Immanuel Kant actions, so that upon their removal human nature must immediately perish and go to ruin. 9 Had not the presence of an object instantly excited the idea of those objects, commonly conjoined with it, all our knowledge [!] must have been limited to the narrow sphere of our memory and senses; and we should never have been able to adjust means to ends, or employ our natural powers, either to the producing of good, or avoiding of evil. 10

One way of interpreting these passages is to say that, while Hume questioned the relational character of our (alleged) knowledge of causes and effects, he did not question that this 'knowledge' was an experience of a very special kind, and in fact was ready to use the word 'knowledge' (without scare-quotes) to refer to it. We might even go so far as finding, in the adjectives used by Hume, evidence for a substantial agreement between him and the naIve epistemologist on what kind of experience knowledge (of causes and effects) is. It is independent of the particular subject ('universal'), forced on the subject (,irresistible'), and incorrigible ('permanent'). These remarks, too, can be generalized from our knowledge of causes and effects to knowledge in general; if they are, we realize that Hume's attack - whatever force it is taken to have against the relational aspect of knowledge - may have none against the experiential aspect.

III The Revolution Now turn to Kant. We know that it was his 'recollection' of Hume that 'first interrupted. . . [Kant's] dogmatic slumber', 11 we know that according to Kant Hume's position 'deserved the concentrated attention of the brighter spirits of his day' but in fact 'suffered the usual misfortune of metaphysicians, of not being understood', 12 and we know that Kant's solution of the problem raised by Hume was in the form of some kind of revolution. What kind of revolution? Here is one of the ways Kant himself describes it:

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of knowledge in terms of a correct (or true) representation of reality, and of correctness (or truth) in terms of correspondence with that reality. But what does it mean, on the other hand, to say that objects should conform to knowledge? My answer to this question is consistent with my earlier remarks relative to Hume (and is motivated by them). Whereas in the naIve conception of knowledge the relational aspect is primary and the experiential aspect is based on it, in the new revolutionary framework Kant takes the experiential aspect - the one that Hume's criticism had left substantially untouched - to be primary and the relational aspect to be the dependent one. Whereas in the naIve conception knowledge is the kind of experience it is because it is the kind of relation it is to objects (knowledge conforms to objects), in the revolutionary framework knowledge is the kind of relation it is because it is the kind of experience it is, because it has the kind of (phenomenological) structure it has; in fact, it is its structure as an experience that determines the structure of the objects it puts us in relation with (objects conform to knowledge). In what follows, I will try to make all of this precise.

IV Knowledge-of-objects It will be useful to begin with an analogy. Looking for unicorns does not put you in relation with any unicorn, and wanting a sloop may be simply wanting 'relief from slooplessness'.13 The failure to establish any relation in these cases (to a unicorn, a sloop, or anything else) is evidenced by the fact that the relevant sentences lack existential import: even though

(1) I am looking for a unicorn is true, (2) For some x, x is a unicorn and I am looking for x is not true; in fact it is not even true that

Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects .... We must therefore make trial whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge. (B xvi; Kemp Smith's translation) However, the description is not very clear. We can probably understand what it means for knowledge to conform to objects: it means thinking

(3) For some x, I am looking for x. But on the other hand, unicorn and sloops still matter: looking for a unicorn is not the same as looking for a butterfly, and wanting a sloop is not the same as wanting ice-cream. Some mention of unicorns and sloops is still needed to explain what kinds of experiences would count as looking for a unicorn and wanting a sloop.

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One way to signal the 'intermediate'14 state of 'unicorn' in 'looking for a unicorn' is to substitute (4) I am looking-for-a-unicorn for (1). In this way, we emphasize that what we are talking about is a property of mine (and of the experience I am having), and that though this property is certainly different from the relevant property in the case of (5) I am looking-for-a-butterfly, no relation to a unicorn or to anything else is stated in (4). Quine called this sense of looking for something notional. IS In away, the denomination may be misleading: when I look for a unicorn, I don't look for the notion of a unicorn, I look for a concrete, bona fide unicorn. But there is a sense in which the denomination is accurate: having the notion of a unicorn is all I need in order to look for a unicorn. It is not necessary for me to be acquainted with any unicorn; in fact it is not even necessary that there be any unicorn. Turn to knowledge. In the naIve conception, when I say (6) I know a table, I am asserting the existence of a relation betwen myself and a table, and if what I say is true, then there is such a relation between me and a table, so that it would be legitimate to rewrite (6) as (7) For some x, x is a table and I know x. But suppose now that you accept the most sweeping form of the 'Humean' objection, and you find no compelling reason to think that any experience puts you in relation with any table, or in general with any object distinct from the experience itself. Still, you may want to mention specific objects, or objects in general, to characterize an experience that you still call knowledge. That is, you may want to say: knowledge of a table is an experience that has exactly those features that it would have if this experience consisted of becoming aware of the existence and/or structure of a table. Since an experience of this (hypothetical) kind would have to be universal, irresistible, and so on, the experience of knowing a table must be universal, irresistible, and so on, and this whether or not in fact this experience puts you in relation with a table or with anything at all, whether or not (7), or for that matter

21

(8) For some x, I know x is true. Just as we did with looking for unicorns, it is natural to signal our changed attitude with respect to knowledge by substituting something like (9) I know-a-table for (6). The substitution emphasizes that what we are concerned with is a property of mine (and of the experience I am having), and that no relation is stated by (9). Again in analogy with the experience of looking for something, I need not be acquainted with any tables to characterize the experience of knowing-a-table, and in general I need not be acquainted with any object to characterize the experience of knowingan-object. It is not even necessary for me that any tables or objects exist: all that is necessary is to have the notion of what it is to be a table or an object. It is a major claim of mine here that Kant followed exactly this line of thought in his approach to the problems raised by Hume. I can defend my claim in some textual detail by considering a passage (from the first edition Transcendental Deduction) in which Kant claims he wants to make clear 'what we mean by the expression "an object of representation" , (A 104-5).16 This claim suggests that the passage in question is a natural one to look at if we want to get a better understanding of the obscure notion that objects should 'conform to knowledge'. Kant begins with a question: What ... is to be understood when we speak of an object corresponding to, and consequently also distinct from, our knowledge? The question is a challenge for the naIve conception of knowledge: if knowledge is awareness of an entity distinct from the awareness itself, how are we to conceptualize a reference to this entity? The reason why this challenge is a very serious one is indicated immediately: outside our knowledge we have nothing which we could set over against this knowledge as corresponding to it. In other words, we are locked inside our experience: we cannot 'get out' of it and compare it with some independent reality. For all we know (think of the 'brain-in-the-vat' experiment), our experience could be all that there is. So reference to an object is really reference to an unknown:

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Immanuel Kant It is easily seen that this object must be thought only as something in

general

V Appearances

= x ...

Or, even more strongly, it is an empty reference: we have to deal only with the manifold of our representations, and. that x (the object) which corresponds to them is nothing to us - being, as it is, something that has to be distinct from all our representations. But this does not mean that the reference is useless. Why? Because we know what it would be for our experience to relate to objects: Now we find that our thought of the relation of all knowledge to its object carries with it an element of necessity; the object is viewed as that which prevents our modes of knowledge from being haphazard or arbitrary, and which determines them a priori in some definite fashion. And we can express this condition as a property of the experience, in particular, as some kind of internal consistency: For in so far as they are to relate to an object, they must necessarily agree with one another, that is, must process that unity which constitutes the concept of an object. 17 The conclusion, quite naturally, is that the unity which the object makes necessary can be nothing else than the formal unity of consciousness in the synthesis of the manifold of representations. It is only when we have thus produced synthetic unity in the manifold of intuition that we are in a position to say that we know the object. 17 So we start out with the idea that the object known is something over and above our experience, we realize that this idea does not have an experiential fulfilment, but we notice that the idea can be used to characterize a property of experiences, and we decide to say that when an experience has that property, then it is the experience of knowing an object. In the interest of clarity, it would have been best if Kant had called the experience (as I did) one of knowing-an-object, or some variant thereof, but on the one hand his style is usually quite colloquial, so that he prefers to give old terms new definitions rather than introducing new terms,18 and on the other hand what I just said is only one half of the story he wants to tell.

So far I have explained how Kant tries to salvage the experiential aspect of knowledge from Hume's attack, but I have not yet supported my claim that he ultimately wants the relational aspect of knowledge to be based on its experiential aspect. I turn now to this second task. Defining a sense in which knowledge is a relation (at this stage of the game) means finding a way to de-hyphenate 'knowledge-of-objects', and therefore reassigning existential import to knowledge claims. Basing the sense in which knowledge is a relation on the sense in which knowledge is an experience means asserting that it is only by one or more statements of the form (10) X knows- Y

that I can justify a statement of the form (11) X knows Z.

and ultimately a statement of the form (12) For some

z,

X knows

z.

There are two reasons why it is difficult to understand fully how Kant achieved all of this. One has to do with the intrinsic complications of the revolution he was attempting, the other with the limitations of the philosophical language he had inherited. The combination of these difficulties often makes Kant's statements extremely confusing. To avoid the same impression of confusion, I will first give a description of Kant's move that disregards the two difficulties, and then consider the difficulties in turn. The simple (and partly misleading) formulation goes as follows. Normally, we think of objects as primary, and of an object being represented as an accident of that object. The representation itself, of course, we think of as an accident of a subject. It is in this general conceptual framework that the naIve conception of knowledge finds its most natural place, and with it all the problems it brings about. But suppose now that we take representations, or in general experience, as primary. In general, a representation is the representation of something. My representation of this table is a representation of this table, and your representation of Pegasus is a representation of Pegasus. Following upon a long tradition, we may call a representation A the entity which is a representation of the intentional object of A, and call

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Immanuel Kant

intentional object every entity that is the intentional object of some representation. Now suppose that I have a representation of a green monster. The intentional object of my representation, of course, is a green monster, but my representation of it does not happen to cohere with the rest of my experiences in the way found necessary by Kant to call that representation knowledge-of-an-object (in this case, knowledge-of-a-greenmonster). For brevity, say that my representation does not have the property C (for connectedness) .19 Still, I may think of my representation as establishing a relation between me and a(n intentional) green monster, and I may express this relation by saying

a statement like (14) that can justify the truth of a statement like (15) (though, of course, nothing like that is needed to justify the truth of (18) I represent a brown chair).20 Suppose now that we decide to call the intentional object of a representation with property C an appearance. Then a lot of what I said above will begin to sound very Kantian. For Kantian appearances are defined to be the objects of representations (more precisely, of empirical intuitions; see A 20/B 34). They are also quite clearly thought of as dependent on experience; a particularly good statement of this position is the following:

(13) I represent a green monster. On the other hand, suppose that I have a representation of a brown chair, and suppose that this representation does have the property C. Again, I may think that this representation establishes a relation between me and an (intentional) object, and I may well decide to call this relation one of knowledge. That is, I may decide that because (14) I know-a-brown-chair is true, (15) I know a brown chair is also true, where the brown chair is an intentional brown chair. Proceeding in this way, I can recover knowledge as a relation. In fact, if I allow for quantification over intentional objects, it is perfectly legitimate for me to rewrite (15) as (16) For some x, x is a brown chair and I know x. Also, since a representation is practically by definition adequate to its intentional object, this move will not force me to give any new construal of the kind of relation knowledge is. Knowledge will still be (intensionally) what it was before, that is, (15) will still entail something like (17) I am aware of the existence and/or (part of) the structure of a brown chair. And finally, knowledge as a relation will be based on knowledge as an experience exactly in the sense required on p. 23: it is only the truth of

Save through its relation to a consciousness that is at least possible, appearance could never be for us an object of knowledge, and so would be nothing to us; and since it has in itself no objective reality, but exists only in being known, it would be nothing at all. (A 120, my italics) And finally, the relation of appearances to what I called knowledge-ofan-object is easy to establish: Since truth consists in the agreement of knowledge with the object, it will at once be seen that ... appearance, in contradistinction to the representations of apprehension, can be represented as an object distinct from them only if it stands under a rule which distinguishes it from every other apprehension and necessitates some one particular mode of connection of the manifold. (A 191/B 236) So much for what is simple about the issue. In order to explore the complications now, it may be useful to begin with some of the qualms I have with my own exposition above. In the last few years, Richard Aquila has suggested in a number of places that Kantian appearances should be regarded as intentional objects. 2! On the face of it, we agree on the matter, but I think that the agreement is a purely verbal one. For consider the following passage: Kant avoids [the] supposition [that appearances be identical with some sort of transcendentally real particular] by suggesting that they are, in an important sense, not existing objects of any sort. They are merely intentional objects. 22 Quite simply, the point at issue here is that the sense in which appear-

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ances are 'not existing objects of any sort' is in the end not at all important for Kant. And understanding how this is the case will make us understand more clearly what the Copernican Revolution is. The Copernican Revolution is a paradigm shift. And more importantly, it is a paradigm shift in our general conceptual framework, that is, in the way we think of (conceptualize) the whole of our experience, not just a specialized part of it. But how can a shift like this be itself conceptualized, if what it asks us to do is to give up the whole way we normally conceptualize things? And, given the strict connection between our conceptual framework and our language, how can it be expressed? Maybe there is no answer to the questions above. Maybe a change like the one I am talking about is impossible. 23 But it is important to understand what such an answer could not be. It could not consist in a simple description of the result of the Revolution. For such a description would have to be formulated in some conceptual framework; but if we formulated it in the old framework we would be missing the point, and the new framework is supposedly not available yet. What, then, is the alternative? Well, maybe the alternative is to remind ourselves that a revolution is after all an operation and that the right way to characterize an operation is not that of describing its result but that of giving the instructions necessary for performing it. These instructions, and the operation itself, may take time to process. During the processing, there will be intermediate steps to go through, ladders and other tools to be used, but it is possible (and likely) that once we get to the final stage some of these implements may be disposed of. The role the notion of an intentional object plays for me in characterizing Kant's Revolution is exactly that of a ladder eventually to be thrown away, of an auxiliary notion which is very useful in the course of the process but has no crucial significance at the end of it. Essentially, the Copernican paradigm shift consists in going from conceptualizing representations as representations of objects to conceptualizing objects as objects of representations. This operation is best performed in two steps. First, we temporarily 'bracket' all ontological assumptions, thus creating a neutral jargon in which to characterize the new relation between objects and representations. It is at this stage that the notion of an intentional object is useful, for it provides a very natural way of doing the bracketing: intentional objects are (in the Meinongian sense) 'beyond' ontological considerations. With this notion at our disposal, we can say things like 'Appearances are the intentional objects of representations that count as knowledge-of-objects.' Then, however, it is pointed out that (some of) the objects conceptualized in the new way are the only existing objects, the only objects that are in any sense that is at all important. 24 At that stage, it is possible to forget the bracketing and the attending notion of an intentional object.

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Saying at that stage that appearances are merely intentional objects amounts to dramatically misperceiving the change in values that is implicit in this (as in any other) conceptual revolution. It amounts to misperceiving the fact that the notions of an object and of what it is to be real (as opposed to 'merely intentional') have been entirely reconceptualized. It amounts to perversely looking at the result of the Revolution from the standpoint of the old conceptual framework. 25 So the notion of an intentional object is for me only a tool for the formulation of the Copernican Revolution. It is also, however, a very useful tool. It makes it possible, as I pointed out above, to have a neutral language in which to express the Revolution. And an additional problem Kant had (additional, that is, to characterizing the Revolution) is that he did not have this useful tool. This is where the second of the two difficulties mentioned on p. 23 comes in. An intentional object is somewhat intermediate between 'real' objects on the one hand, and representations or states of mind on the other. Like 'real' objects, an intentional object is an object, with properties like being red or round, not (only) like being vivid or recollected or before one's mind. Like states of mind, an intentional object is dependent on (the having of) experience. But the philosophical language in which Kant was educated, and in which most of his own teaching was conducted, did not allow for (any reference to) such intermediate entities. In that language, one could refer to things (real things), and to determinations of things, and everything had to fit one category or the other. We know that Kant usually lectured in metaphysics from Baumgartern's Metaphysica. 26 In §191 of this work we read Ens vel non potest exsistere, nisi ut determinatio alterius, (in alio), vel potest .... Prius accidens (praedicamentale, ... cuius esse est inesse ... ) posterius est substantia, ens per se subsistens, ... quod potest existere, licet non sit in alio, licet non sit determinatio alterius. In particular, representations are accidents: Cogito, mutatur anima mea .... Ergo cogitationes sunt accidentia animae meae . . . (§505) Cogitationes sunt repraesentationes. Ergo anima mea est vis repraesentativa. (§506) And if an accident is taken to be a substance, the word 'phenomenon' is used to refer to it: Accidentia, si videntur per se subsistentia, sunt phaenomena substantiata. (§193)

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If we think of the importance of this word 'phenomenon' for Kant - in particular, of its intimate relation with 'appearance' - such a purely negative characterization may well be seen as a problem. Not surprisingly, the problem infects 'appearance', too. Here is the relevant definition:

Quod non tantum videtur, set et est, verum, quod tan tum videtur non est, apparens dicitur. (§12) And Baumgarten's further uses of apparens (for example at §97, §337) are consistent with this definition. Kant's comment on §193 above, as reported in Metaphysik Herder, is only a scanty note: Bin Accidens durch eine confuse Vorstellung als eine Substanz gedacht. z.E. RaumY Taking this note seriously, one could qualify space as a phenomenon only in the negative sense of being a representation mistakenly taken to have subsistence of its own. But of course, Kant wants to assert the phenomenal character of space in a much more positive sense. For example, he wants to say that perception of this permanent is possible only through a thing outside me [in space] and not through the mere representation of a thing outside me. (B 275) So certainly he does not want to reduce space to a representation (or even less, to a misrepresentation), but notice that the metaphysical terminology he is working with does not leave him much of a choice. If something is not a thing subsisting in itself, it must be an accident inhering in a thing subsisting in itself; he does not want to say that space is the former, so he is occasionally forced to say that it is the latter. If I am right, however, he really means neither. What he means is that the whole conceptual framework underlying the above distinction between things and accidents was bankrupted by Hume, and a new conceptual framework must replace it. The notion of an intentional object could be used effectively to introduce the new framework, but Kant lacks this resource. In its absence, he tries different strategies of expression, and the result is often confusing. To illustrate, I turn my attention now to the most typical of these (apparent) confusions. Given that the status of an intentional object is somewhat intermediate between that of an object and that of a representation, it is quite natural, if your language does not allow for reference to such entities, and if

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appearances are best understood (at least provisionally) as intentional objects, to characterize appearances by emphasizing sometimes their similarity to real objects, and sometimes their similarity to representations. This is exactly what happens to Kant, and, interestingly enough, he regards such shifts to emphasis as just that, shifts of emphasis, whereas his critics, who usually work with a philosophical language very similar to the one that made things so difficult for Kant, often conclude that some dramatic change has occurred in his philosophy. Take the Refutation of Idealism, for example. In the first edition, Kant says things like: In our system, on the other hand, these external things, namely matter, are in all their configurations and alterations nothing but mere appearances, that is, representations in us, of the reality of which we are immediately conscious. (A 371-2; my italics) these are merely appearances, that is, mere kinds of representation, which are never to be met with save in us, and the reality of which depends on immediate consciousness, just as does the consciousness of my own thoughts. (A 372; my italics) In the second edition, on the other hand, he says: All determination of time presupposes something permanent in perception. But this permanent cannot be an intuition in me [my italics]. For all grounds of determination of my existence which are to be met with in me are representations; and as representations themselves require a permanent distinct from them, in relation to which their change, and so my existence in the time wherein they change, may be determined. (B 275, as altered in B xxxix footnote) Now how can anybody in their right mind say that the move from the first to the second of the above formulations is 'one affecting the method of proof only'? (B xxxix) Was Kant crazy, or had his 'well-attested desire to appear consistent ... led him to use the rhetorical context of a preface to attempt to persuade his reader (or, for that matter, himself[!]) that there had been no change in his view when in fact there had been'?28 Reference to (self-)deception should be a last resort in doing the history of philosophy. And, in fact, no such reference is needed here if we accept the explanation I proposed above. According to this explanation, when Kant says 'appearances are only representations', he means that appearances have (provisionally) the same dependent metaphysical

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status as representations, and the reason why he says it that way is that the philosophical language he is accustomed to offers him no other way to say it. 29 On the other hand, he is struggling to say something different from what most of his critics understood. Thus, in the first edition Refutation, we also find the following statement: External objects (bodies), however, are mere appearances, and are therefore nothing but a species of my representations, the objects of which are something only through these representations. (A 370, my italics) Here the familiar claim is reiterated that appearances are only representations, but a new character enters the picture: the objects of the representations. If we read the whole section as a reformulation of Berkeleian subjectivism, the introduction of this new character simply makes no sense, but if I am right and the passage only has the semblance of Berkeleian subjectivism while trying to tell a whole new different story, then the new character introduced here should become the main character, and the fact that Kant introduces it in spite of the linguistic limitations he is fighting with is evidence of his genius. Within my approach, I can even explain the sense in which the second edition Refutation represents a change in 'the method of proof'. In the first edition, Kant was carried away by the improper statement that 'appearances are representations' and thought that our consciousness of representations was enough to prove the reality of appearances. In the second edition, he realized that our consciousness of representations of objects in space did not establish the reality of their objects, in the sense in which these (intentional) objects can be said to be real (which is also the sense in which objects simpliciter will be real after the Copernican Revolution has been completed), that is, as intentional objects of representations that count as knowledge-of-objects. Something more than the mere fact that we are conscious of them had to be proved of these representations, that is, that they have the property C. And one way to prove this is to argue that unless we had representations-of-objects-inspace with the property C we could not have the kind of consciousnessof-ourselves we apparently have. In other words, though the theory was still the same, the proof of the specific claim made in the Refutation had to be revised.

VI A moral In a recent article on the Refutation,30 Paul Guyer, after arguing for a radical difference between the two editions of the Refutation (and in

fact, an even more radical difference between the first edition Refutation and Kant's real 'intentions' on the matter, as they are supposedly made explicit in subsequent notes of his), concludes that Kant simply dropped the assumption that the epistemological status of being an 'appearance,' or known through one of our own forms of intuition, required the ontological status of being a 'representation,' an actual state or modification of the self, and thus he could exploit the possibility that we could know that something exists independently of us without knowing what it is like independently of us. It is not my intention here to challenge Guyer's proposal in any detail. I only want to point out that the two ontological possibilities mentioned by Guyer (that is, that something is 'a state or modification of the self' or that it 'exists independently of us') fall well within the conceptual framework that (if I am right) Kant was challenging. I have suggested in this essay that the best way to begin to understand Kant's appearances is as entities that neither are states or modifications of the self nor exist independently of it (or better, of experience). However, I think that this intermediate metaphysical status, and the conceptual shift it prepares us for, are just as widely misunderstood in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy as they were in Kant's time, and Guyer's statement quoted above is some indication of this. My general view of the Critique is that of a large work-in-progress, that needs to be rewritten once the philosophical language which its new and revolutionary perspective requires has been invented. 31 People like Brentano and Husserl did a lot to invent this new language, though they probably did not do all that was required; analytic philosophy, however, has devoted precious little attention to these efforts so far. Largely for this reason, analytic philosophy may still need its Copernican Revolution, and in the absence of such a revolution we may have the same problems understanding Kant which his contemporaries had.

Notes

* I thank Kent Baldner, Gordon Brittan and the referees of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy for their comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. 1. As Henry Allison points out in his Kant's Transcendental Idealism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press 1983), p. 28, there are two main problems with the 'Copernican Revolution'. One is the problem of understanding what revolution it is: the other is the problem of understanding what is Copernican about it. Here I am interested in the first problem (as is Allison). 2. For example, I think that in the na'ive conception knowledge is also a tool,

32 Immanuel Kant and a very useful one for getting aroundlin the world. But here I won't discuss this pragmatic dimension. 3. In this essay, I use 'experience' in an informal, colloquial sense, not in the technical Kantian sense of 'empirical knowledge'. 4. Such a specification is not essential here. But a natural way to begin to work towards it is the following: an experience e2 contradicts an experience el if a judgement made on the basis of e2 contradicts a judgement made on the basis of el' Note also that I am not in any way suggesting that these features of the experience of knowledge be all in some sense internal to the experience, that is, that one experiences them while having a cognitive experience. In fact I may never have a belief that I believe to be incorrigible, and this is perfectly compatible with the conjunction of the following: that I in fact do have cognitive experiences, and that I conceive of knowledge as incorrigible. 5. In the objectual construal characterized below (and adopted in this chapter), I can of course know an experience el of mine, but then one usually thinks that the experience e2 of knowing el is distinct from el' 6. In fact, Rolf George has recently claimed that 'reference' may be a better translation than 'knowledge' for Kant's Erkenntnis. See his 'Kant's sensationism', Synthese 47 (1981), 241. Other authors find it more appropriate to use the word 'cognition' to translate Erkenntnis, and this translation certainly fits both Kant's definition of Erkenntnis and grammar better than 'knowledge' does. For on the one hand, as the OED tells us, a cognition is (among other things) 'a product of the action of knowing', and that could very well be a (conscious) representation of an object (which is what Kant says an Erkenntnis is, at A 320/B 376). On the other, the translation 'knowledge' leaves us with no really good options for translating Kant's plural form Erkenntnisse. However, in this essay I will stick to using 'knowledge', for the following reasons. First, I am not concerned here with technical issues of translation; in particular, none of the points I will make depends on the translation of Erkenntnisse. Second, there is after all a strict connection between 'cognition' and 'knowledge', since 'cognition' is usually defined in terms of 'knowledge' (or 'knowing', as in the above quote from the OED), so whatever problems Kant may have concerning cognition(s) admit of an immediate reformulation in terms of 'knowledge'. And finally, 'knowledge' is (but 'cognition' is not) central to our philosophical language (and conceptual framework), so it is a better choice if our main purpose is that of emphasizing the contemporary relevance of Kant's problems. 7. In general, the knowledge relation is also taken to involve something else, that is, (at least) the awareness of some justification for the adequacy of the mirroring. But I can leave such further issues aside here. 8. I am not concerned here with the extent to which Hume himself was aware of this generalization of his objection. But I find it interesting to point out that his identification of perceptions and objects (for which see, for example, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 202) seems to be a natural consequence of the generalization in question. For if no experience ever reaches an object distinct from the experience itself, and if one still wants to think of the experience as establishing a relation, then it is natural to think of the relation as a relation to the experience itself. 9. A Treatise of Human Nature, p. 225. 10. Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 55.

Critical Assessments 33 11. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1950), p. 8. 12. ibid., p. 6. 13. The expression is W. V. O. Quine's, as are many of the ideas that follow about the logic of 'looking for' and 'wanting'. See his 'Quantifiers and propositional attitudes', in The Ways of Paradox (New York, N.Y.: Random House, 1966), pp. 183-94. 14. The word 'intermediate' is used in this sense by David Kaplan. See his 'Quantifying in', in Words and Objections: Essays on the Work of W. V. Quine, edited by D. Davidson and J. Hintikka (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1969), pp. 178-214. 15. 'Quantifiers and propositional attitudes', p. 183. 16. Passages like this one have suggested to a number of authors reflections similar to mine. Arthur Melnick, for example, in his Kant's Analogies of Experience (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1973), says that 'there is to be found in the Transcendental Deduction an analysis of the notion of an object (as essentially an epistemic notion) that in itself suffices to establish the point that an ontology cannot be a feature of the world itself, but must bring in reference to how a subject's experience is connected to his judgemental apparatus' (pp. 143-4) and that 'involved in the very concept of substance is that it is a way of organizing our experience' (p. 139). But I think that, to the extent to which Melnick and I are saying analogous things, my terminology makes things a little clearer, and in any case the role played by the concept of an object in organizing our experience is for me only part of what Kant wants to talk about. The other (and, I think, more important) part I discuss in the next section. 17. Essentially the same point made in this last quotation is made in the following passage, too:

If we enquire what new character relation to an object confers upon our representations, what dignity they thereby acquire, we find that it results only in subjecting the representations to a rule, and so in necessitating us to connect them in some specific manner: and conversely, that only in so far as our representations are necessitated in a certain order as regards their timerelations do they acquire objective meaning. (A 197/B 242-3) 18. Think, for example, of how Kant uses the word 'metaphysics'. Sometimes (as in B 395 footnote) the word refers to traditional metaphysics, which is proved to be impossible (at least as a science), and sometimes (as in A xx) it refers to transcendental philosophy, which of course Kant thinks is possible and is (going to become) a science. 19. To simplify the exposition, in this essay I am leaving aside the role that sensibility plays within the Kantian construal of knowledge. But note that a careful unpacking of the notion of connectedness mentioned here would have to characterize it as connectedness with some perception, as specified in the Second Postulate of Empirical Thought (A 218/B 266, A 225/B 272). 20. It may be useful to point out explicitly that I have no suggestion to offer here (and, I think, Kant has none in the Critique) as to how one is supposed to decide in concrete cases on the truth of statements like (15). This is an empirical question. What I am concerned with is the way we conceptualize the truth of such statements. 21. See his 'Things in themselves and appearances: intentionality and reality in Kant', Archiv fur Geschichte der Philosophie 61 (1979), 293-308; 'Intentional

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objects and Kantian appearances', Philosophical Topics 12 (1981), 9-37, and Representational Mind (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983). 22. 'Things in themselves', 302. A number of similar statements can be found elsewhere in Aquila's work. 23. That is, maybe all that we can do is remind ourselves critically of the necessity of the conceptual shift, without ever being able to see things the new way. This is what Kant seems to suggest when he talks about the 'natural and unavoidable dialectic of pure reason' (A 298/B 354), and claims that transcendental illusion can no more be prevented than we can prevent the sea appearing higher at the horizon than at the shore ... or ... than the astronomer can prevent the moon from appearing larger at its rising .... (A 297/B 354) 24. The reader may wonder what happens to things-in-themselves in this new perspective. Simply put, after the revolution a thin-in-itself becomes the (nonactual) object of an idea. I have explored this issue in some detail in my 'Identity, appearances, and things in themselves', Dialogue 23 (1984), 421-37. 25. A similar misperception is involved, I think, in Robert Howell's work. In his 'Kant's first-Critique theory of the transcendental object', Dialectica 35 (1931), 85-125, he correctly identifies Kant's concern as that of achieving de re knowledge via de dicto thought. But then he looks at this operation from what Kant would call the standpoint of transcendental realism: that is, in the terms I am using here, he looks at the operation in question as the (attempted) achievement of de re knowledge of an object in the sense of the old conceptual framework. When things are looked at that way, it is inevitable to conclude (as he does) that 'Kant does face a serious problem, which may well be insoluble within his own terms, of how to reconcile the de dicto character of the transcendentalobject theory with the fact that human beings do have de re knowledge of single, individuated outer objects' (110). What Howell fails to appreciate, in my opinion, is the fact that Kant is redefining the notion of what is to be de re, and that under the new definition he really has no such serious problem at all. 26. (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1963). 27. Ak. XXVIII.24. 28. The statement is Paul Guyer's, in his paper 'Kant's intentions in the refutation of idealism', The Philosophical Review 92 (1983), 329-83. See 331. 29. That Kant himself was somewhat aware of the limitations of his language is indicated by his pointing out that there are some key ambiguities in it. For example, he thinks that there is an ambiguity concerning the expression 'outside us' (and hence, I might add, the expression 'in us', too, which figures prominently in the passages quoted above from the Refutations of Idealism). The expression 'outside us' is thus unavoidably ambiguous in meaning, sometimes signifying what a thing-in-itself exists apart from us, and sometimes what belongs only to outer appearance. (A 373) Note also that I would offer a similar explanation for the cases in which Kant seems to fall into the opposite extreme. Take, for example, the following passage from Refiexionen 6323 (quoted by Guyer, 'Kant's intentions', 342):

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the actuality of this determination of [our] existence, [requires] an immediate consciousness of something outside me, which corresponds to these representations (and which does not exist merely in my representation (rather (as thing) in itself)). Again, I take it that in passages like this Kant is trying to make clear the objectual character of appearances, by contrasting them with representations, and once more feeling the need of something like the notion of an intentional object I am using. 30. 'Kant's Intentions', 377. 31. In my 'An epistemic theory of reference', The Journal of Philosophy 80 (1983), 785-805, I face the same problem of expression, not in a context of history of philosophy, but in the course of discussing contemporary issues in the philosophy of language.

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Kemp Smith's Commentary, however, the reader is led to suppose that Kant himself used the expression:

Copernicus' Role in Kant's Revolution Norwood Russell Hanson

In opposition to common sense I dare to imagine some movement of the Earth ... since mathematicians have not (yet) agreed with each other, I was moved to think out a different scheme ... by supposing the Earth to move, demonstrations more secure than those of my predecessors (could) be found for the revolutions of the ... spheres ... all (celestial) phenomena follow from this (supposition). Nicholas Copernicus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Preface and Dedication to Pope Paul IlL! Like Copernicus, Kant sought to explain the properties of observed phenomena by postulating a kind of activity in the observer. This is the 'Copernican Revolution'. None the less, in expositions of Kant's metaphysics the expressions 'Copernican Revolution' and 'Copernican Hypothesis' have come to assume a perhaps unwarranted role. Commentators and historians of philosophy suggest that Kant himself actually used these phrases and that there is one and only one meaning in Kant's mind for such language. 2 Though these distinguished Kantian scholars intimate both that Kant used the expression 'the Copernican Revolution' and also that he meant to compare his revolution with that of Copernicus in one and only one way,3 the following analysis aims to show that it is still worth enquiring whether this is an adequate account of the connections between Copernicus and Immanuel Kant. Nowhere in either edition of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft does the phrase 'the Copernican Revolution' occur. Nor does the expression 'Copernican Hypothesis' occur either. In his translation of the Kritik, Professor N. Kemp Smith renders 'mit den ersten Gedanken des Kopernicus' as 'Copernicus' primary hypothesis'. 4 But he is at least cautious enough to temper this mistranslation by adding the German as well. In

[Kant's] 'Copernican hypothesis' ... he claims [is] merely a philosophical extension of the method of positive science) .... [Upon] the 'Copernican hypothesis' ... Kant dwells at some length. Kant's comparison of his new hypothesis to that of Copernicus .... The apparently objective movements of the fixed stars. .. are mere appearances, due to the projection of our own motion into the heavens ... it is this doctrine and this doctrine alone to which Kant is referring . . . in thus comparing his critical procedure to that of Copernicus ... etc. (pp. 19-22, my italics) Compare S. Alexander: 'Kant himself signalized the revolution which he believed himself to be effecting, as a Copernican revolution'.5 Lindsay writes: 'This new way of conceiving the possibility of a priori knowledge Kant compares to the revolution brought about in astronomy by Copernicus.' Lindsay then goes on to quote Kant as saying 'Copernicus' primary hypothesis ... '.6 How these otherwise scholarly writers can so wantonly render Gedanken as 'hypothesis' is baffling to me, unless, of course, they are simply forcing this English word on Kant to strengthen their own general interpretations of his philosophy. But Carl J. Friedrich is more careful and more respectful of his native language, and of Kant's ability to write in it, than are the afore-mentioned Britons. Friedrich translates 'den ersten Gedanken des Kopernicus' correctly as 'the first thought of Copernicus'. Hence he shows no tendency to make Kant characterize his own philosophy as a 'Copernican Revolution' or a 'Copernican Hypothesis'. Friedrich lets Kant's references to Copernicus serve only to indicate Kant's dissatisfaction with a chaos of existing theories, and his decision to abandon them and make trial of another. 7 Now what exactly does Kant say? In the 1787 Preface to the second edition of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, we read: The example of mathematics and natural science, which by a single and sudden revolution have become what they now are, seem to me sufficiently remarkable to suggest our considering what may have been the essential features in the changed point of view by which they have so greatly benefitted. Their success should incline us, at least by way of experiment, to imitate their procedure .... We should then be proceeding precisely in accordance with the first thought of Copernicus. Failing of satisfactory progress in explaining the movements of the heavenly bodies on the supposition that they all revolved around the

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Immanuel Kant spectator, he tried whether he might not have better success if he made the spectator to revolve and the stars to remain at rest. A similar experiment can be tried in metaphysics. (B xv-xvii) Similarly, the fundamental laws of the motions of the heavenly bodies gave established certainty to what Copernicus had at first assumed only as an hypothesis, and at the same time yielded proof of the invisible force (the Newtonian attraction) which holds the universe together. The latter would have remained forever undiscovered if Copernicus had not dared ... to seek the observed movements, not in the heavenly bodies, but in the spectator. (Based on Kemp Smith's translation, B xxii, note.)

The two expressions 'Copernican Revolution' and 'Copernican Hypothesis' do not occur in indexes to the other two Critiques, and particularly not in the fully indexed edition of Kant by F. Meiner. In fact, the entire Kantian corpus makes no reference to Copernicus other than the two occurrences (quoted above) in the Vorrede to the second edition of the Kritik der rein en Vernunft, added six years after the completion of the first edition. The Kant-lexikon of R. Eisler, usually reliable on the first Kritik, reveals no further references to Copernicus anywhere. s This is not only a matter of Kantian philology. Reference to the 'Copernican Revolution' has carried the burden of the most important expositions of Kant's philosophy. That so much weight should for so long have been placed on so tiny a textual foundation may encourage further questions about interpretation. In any case, philosophers have a duty initially to read Kant's words as Kant wrote them: 'What did he say?' is prior to 'What did he mean?' Concerning Kant's references to Copernicus, these two questions have been thoroughly confounded. The origin of the expression of course lies in the Vorrede. Perhaps the mischief consists in using 'revolution' in the first sentence of the paragraph beginning at the bottom of B xv (quoted above). But the preceding discussion leaves no doubt that the 'revolution' referred to here has nothing whatever to do with Copernicus. The Vorrede is addressed to a discussion of the affinities and differences between mathematics, physics and metaphysics. The first two disciplines, after a period of groping (Herumtappen) certainly became sciences. They entered upon the sicheren Gang einer Wissenschaft as a result of the 'revolution'. When referring to mathematics (in B xi) the word 'revolution' is italicized (gesperrt').9 Kant does not say upon whom the light of mathematics suddenly broke (ging ein Licht auf). With physics, the world had to wait longer for its revolution. Only 150 years before Kant, Bacon had 'inspired fresh vigour in those who were already on the way to (the discovery)'

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(B xii). It was with Galileo, Torricelli and Stahl that a light broke upon all students of nature; 'so ging allen Naturforschern ein Licht auf' (B xiii). They all had the vision to cast old theories aside in order to test some bold new hypothesis. When (at B xvi) Kant refers back to 'the examples of mathematics and natural science which by a single and sudden revolution have become what they now are', he is not making any reference to Copernicus and his heliocentric doctrine per se, but rather to the successful foundation of experimental physics by the great scientists of the seventeenth century. In B xv, Kant asks whether a change in the method of metaphysics, corresponding to these revolutions in mathematics and natural science, might not end its random groping (see B xv, Herumtappen); whether or not this can be done can only be discovered by a trial (B xvi). Similarly Copernicus, when he found he could not achieve satisfactory results by assuming one hypothesis, made trial of (versuchte) another.!O In metaphysics, it is possible to make an analogous trial (auf ahnliche weise Versuchen). This much is the main point of Kant's argument. The name 'Copernicus' is brought in here only to illustrate the propriety of making trial of an untested hypothesis, particularly when extant theories seem fruitless. Any of a number of other scientists could, and in fact do, illustrate this point for Kant. Further parallels between Copernicus and himself are not central to Kant's exposition at this point; which is not to say that Kant never conceived of further, and perhaps more important, parallels. But whether or not this is so surpasses the letter of Kant's own writing, something one would never gather from the commentators quoted earlier. Consider further that in 1759 and in 1760, Kant lectured on mechanics. For this purpose he used Wolff's Elementa Mechanicae,u Appended to this work is a dissertation on scientific method, the 'Commentatio de Studio Matheseos Recte Instituendo'. Kant would have been very familiar with this tract. 12 In sections 309-11 of Wolff's dissertation, there is a discussion of the very point at issue - the uses of novel hypotheses as a means of scientific progress. The example given is the hypothesis of Copernicus together with its subsequent verification by Kepler and Newton. Kant's reference to Copernicus in the Vorrede may thus have been introduced with this passage in mind, and not necessarily as a more comprehensive reference to the effects of 'activating' the observer in astronomy and in epistemology. At least this possibility ought not to be dismissed out-of-hand in favour of the more orthodox exegesis. Note also an allusion which Kant makes (B xxii note) to a further parallel between De Revolutionibus and his own Kritik. There Kant argues that what he is setting out purely hypothetically in the Vorrede will be established 'apodeictically, not hypothetically' in the body of the Kritik. There is a very similar relation between the Preface of Copernicus'

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De Revolutionibus and the body of that treatise itself: where in the Praefatio Authoris the heliocentric principle is asserted only as a hypothesis, in the body of the work its use is taken for granted,13 I have so far been attempting to show (1) that in the main texts of both editions of the first Kritik, Kant never spoke of a 'Copernican Revolution' or even of a 'Copernican Hypothesis'; (2) that Kant was never concerned, even in the Preface to the second edition, to stress the doctrinal similarity between his own epistemological teachings and the astronomical theses of De Revolutionibus; (3) that Kant's main reason for referring to Copernicus in the 1787 Preface concerns his intended contrast between the hypothetical and the established (or demonstrated) stages of a scientific discipline and to point up the periodic need of new departures in science when old theories have lost their vitality; and finally (4) that in the Vorrede (with its elaborate historical parallels, so conspicuously absent in the present case) Kant's reference to Copernicus in B xvii may not stand in any primary relation to the main thrust of his argument. Now that this much has been said, we must take stock. Even if it is clear that Kant nowhere uses the expression 'Copernican Revolution', and that such reference as is made to Copernicus need not be viewed solely by the one interpretation which commentators have supposed, it still remains for us to enquire just what illumination the expression 'The Copernican Revolution' does shed on the main corpus of Kant's metaphysics. For even though they are wrong in suggesting that Kant explicitly made this comparison of his own philosophy with the astronomy of Copernicus, Kantian scholars are correct in assuming that there is a fruitful analogy between these two great works. Kant openly asserts a similarity between himself and Copernicus in but one respect; each of them made trial of an alternative hypothesis when existent theories proved unsatisfactory. The revolutions in thought with which Kant explicitly compares his own revolution have nothing specifically to do with Copernicus. But how are we to understand the last reference to Copernicus, quoted above, in B xxii note? A further analogy between Kant and Copernicus is implied here. It is this which to some extent justifies the tradition according to which commentators speak of 'Kant's Copernican Revolution'. What is implicit in this last reference suggests that the revolutions in mathematics and natural science of which Kant speaks, in expounding his own metaphysics, are not merely revolutions; they are revolutions of a quite special variety. These were not revolutions simply because a fresh hypothesis was substituted for prior theories. They were also a revolution in ways of thinking (Revolution der Denkart). The demonstration that every equilateral triangle is also equiangular must have been carried out initially by some geometer who discovered that it was useless merely to follow with his eyes what

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he saw in the triangle, or even to trace out the elements which are thought in the concept of 'equilateral triangle' by itself. That is, neither empirical observation of equilateral triangles nor an analysis of the concepts involved in speaking of such geometrical entities will serve to demonstrate any mathematical truth. What must be employed is rather what Kant calls 'the construction' of concepts; we must exhibit a priori the intuition corresponding to our concept (B 741). What this hypothetical ancient geometer discovered was that it was necessary to produce the figure of an equilateral triangle by means of what he himself thought into it. He thus exhibited a priori its equiangularity, as is in accordance with the geometrical concepts we now possess. To have had certain a priori knowledge the geometer must have attributed nothing to the equilateral triangle except what followed necessarily from what he injected into it in accordance with his geometrical concept, ie. its equiangularity (B xii). What Kant takes to be essential to this revolution is that the geometer's mind is not concerned just with the empirical object, some particular equilateral triangle; or even with the concept 'equilateral triangle' derived by abstraction from such objects. It is concerned rather with its own act of construction, with what is put into the figure in accordance with the concept. A priori knowledge in mathematics arises from the mind's awareness of its own special operations. Special difficulties arise when Kant tries to give a similar account of the genesis of natural science. Because here the revolution (once again a Revolution der Denkart) is the introduction of the experimental method. What is it to discover the experimental method as Galileo, Torricelli and Stahl are said by Kant to have done? They discovered that reason has insight only into what it produces in itself in accordance with its own plan (B xiii). Here again, a superficial inspection of objects will never give us a binding law of nature. But reason will never be satisfied with anything less than such a law. Reason confronts nature with its own ultimate principles, e.g. those set out in the Analogies, and with the experiment thought out in accordance with these principles. Reason is the judge who compels witnesses to answer questions which he himself formulates. The revolution whereby natural science ceased to be groping was due to the realization (by Bacon, Galileo, Torricelli and Stahl, presumably) that our researches into nature ought to conform to the questions and principles which the scientist's reason itself puts and applies to nature. So much Kant actually claims. The value of all this as a piece of history of science is, of course, extremely dubious. Galileo is struggling every moment for greater and greater objectivity: thus he dispenses with the subjective reactions to heat by inventing a publicly observable thermometer. And he attempts a similar shift of emphasis in the case of time, where he sought an effective pendulum-clock. To characterize the

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essence of such discoveries as Galileo's realization that his researches into nature had to conform to what his own reason put into nature is, to say the least, mildly shocking. Galileo never makes such a claim for himself; in fact, the case is quite the opposite. Similarly with Copernicus. This need not matter, of course; Kant may be telling us something about these great scientists which even they did not know. This is rather unusual as a technique in history of science. None the less, it must be granted that for Kant the revolutions in mathematics and physics had something in common, over and above their being disciplines in which bold new hypotheses took the place of older, unfruitful theories. In each case, the mind was somehow attending to what it itself had put into its objects. This doctrine is only implicit in the Preface to the second edition of Kant's Kritik (1787); it is not openly stated in the words which Kant actually uses. But in view of this doctrine, the special situation of metaphysics itself may now be considered. Mathematics and natural science had become what they were in Kant's day by a tremendously rapid advance, remarkable enough to make Kant reflect upon the essential character of this new way of forming conceptions. Can metaphysics imitate mathematics and physics in this manner? From the structure of the first Kritik, it seems clear that Kant is looking not merely for some sort of metaphysical revolution in the weaker sense, some new hypothesis which will extricate the philosopher from the chaos of previous epistemological theories. He is looking for a revolution which has the same fundamental character as that which he had implicitly outlined for mathematics and natural science. Before Kant, metaphysics had proceeded on the assumption that all knowledge must conform to objects (sich nach den Gegenstanden richten). But on this assumption all attempts to acquire a priori knowledge of objects (so necessary if physics and mathematics are to stand on what Kant felt to be a firm foundation), all such attempts must end in failure. Kant therefore suggests that we at least try (versuche) the hypothesis that objects must somehow conform to the structure of our knowledge. The proposed revolution in metaphysics therefore is to follow the line suggested by the revolutions in the methods of mathematics and physics. Not only will a new hypothesis be put to trial in place of the older enervated theories, but now we may consider that perhaps the mind, in all these cases, 'puts something into' its objects, imposes certain properties upon them necessarily. Here (B xvi) appears the first reference to Copernicus. He too swept aside older theories and tried a relatively new hypothesis. This Kant makes quite explicit. But submerged and implicit in this example may also be the obvious point that Copernicus sought to account for the properties of observed celestial phenomena by investing the observer with a certain activity,14 Kant thinks the metaphysician can make an

Critical Assessments 43

analogous experiment: 'In der Metaphysik kann man nun. . . es aus ahnliche Weise versuchen' (B xvi). Kant's thought is something like this: in explaining the movements of celestial bodies Copernicus rejected the natural assumption that the movement was in the stars themselves; he tried instead the view that this movement was in the spectator. The movement is 'put into' the stars by the spectator. That is the way Kant construes the Copernican Hypothesis, and his own philosophical parallel to it is definite, and important. But, and this is the real issue here, not all of the parallel is explicit in Kant's work. That Copernicus tried a new hypothesis in place of older theories is explicit in B xv-B xxii. But that Copernicus (like Kant) had hit on a hypothesis whose main point was to take what had been regarded as characteristics of the observed object and explained these in terms of the characteristics of the observer himself - this interpretation of Copernicus is not at all explicit in Kant's own exposition, Professors Paton and Kemp Smith notwithstanding. So Kant was urging that, like Copernicus, metaphysicians must make trial of a new hypothesis. Moreover, the new hypothesis is to be of a quite definite kind. In the light of all this, it appears that while we are justified in following the tradition of Kantian scholarship in saying that the Konigsberger effected a Copernican Revolution in metaphysics, we must, in the interests of scholarship, distinguish the explicit from the implicit features of Kant's own claim. We must certainly refuse to allow commentators to obliterate the distinction between what Kant said and what he 'must have meant' in their zeal to establish the latter. And, in fact, Kant's understanding of what Copernicus actually did can only be ascertained by comparing the texts of the De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium and the Kritik der reinen Vernunft.

Notes 1. Copernicus, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, Libri VI (Basel, 1566): Praefatio Authoris; from 'ac propemodum contra communem sensum' to 'illorum phaenomena indesequantur'. 2. Thus H. J. Paton writes: 'Kant compares his own philosophical revolution with that initiated by Copernicus.' Kant's Metaphysic of Experience (New York, 1936), vol. I, p. 75 (my italics). A. C. Ewing says: 'But Kant means that he resembles Copernicus in attributing to ourselves, and so classing as appearance, what his predecessors had attributed to reality.' A Short Commentary on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, 2nd end (London, 1950), p. 16 (my italics). 3. 'it is this doctrine and this doctrine alone', says N. Kemp Smith, 'A Commentary to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason' (London, 1918).

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Immanuel Kant

4. Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith (London, 1950), p. 22. 5. Hibbert Journal (1910) (my italics). 6. Kant (London, 1936), pp. 50-1. 7. C. J. Friedrich, The Philosophy of Kant (New York, 1949), xxvii. 8. R. Eisler, Kant-lexikon (Berlin, 1930). 9. Kemp Smith's translation, p. 19. 10. See Copernicus' own words at the head of this essay, and compare B xvi quoted above. 11. Part of the Elementa Matheseos Universae (Geneva, 1746). 12. See Erich Adickes, Kant als Naturforscher (Berlin, 1924-5), vol. I, p. lIn. 13. 'what I am saying may seem obscure here; nevertheless it will become clearer in the proper place'. Copernicus, De Revolutionibus, Dedication to Pope Paul III (my translation). In Copernicus' magnum opus we must, of course, distinguish the Dedication to Pope Paul III from the very first Foreword to the reader. The latter was almost certainly the mischievous work of Andreas Osiander, as is made clear beyond doubt in Gassendi's Life of Copernicus appended to his Tychonis Brahei (Paris, 1654). The Dedication, however, is indisputably by Copernicus himself; these were facts definitely established only in 1873, but hinted at in the mid-seventeenth century. Professor Kemp Smith mistakenly refers to the Osiander portion in the name of Copernicus, in order to show how the latter regarded his 'hypothesis'. The hypothesis-talk was Osiander's invention, calculated to save De Revolutionibus from an early Papal death. Copernicus' claims were really much stronger. 14. This also seems suspicious as a piece of history of science. De Revolutionibus . .. seeks primarily to show that, as a matter of physical geometry, all the data which gave rise to the astronomical computing system set out in Ptolemy's Almagest can equally well be accounted for (i.e. explained and predicted) by shifting the primary reference point of the ancient system from the Earth to the Sun. The geometry which resulted would be much tighter and more elegant, the introduction of ad hoc (i.e. unsystematic) hypotheses would be minimized, and one's physical imagination would be less offended. But Copernicus was essentially a medieval astronomer. He thought he was working within the old framework of ideas more effectively by making certain formal and systematic alterations. Almost certainly he was not aware of the full implications of his geometrico-physical modification. And Copernicus never expresses himself as I suspect Kant would have liked him to do, by stressing that his hypothesis consisted in 'investing the observer with a certain activity'.

3 Knowledge and Experience: An Examination of the Four Reflective 'Perspectives' in Kant's Critical Philosophy Stephen Palmquist

I The fundamental distinction

Kant's Critical philosophy is notorious for its terminological ambiguity and apparent inconsistency. The interpretative confusion that often results is at least a contributing factor to the conclusion of many commentators, such as Strawson, that large chunks of Kant's System (e.g. his transcendental idealism) are 'unintelligible' and 'incoherent'. 1 Yet I believe, with Kant, that if his works are approached with 'the patience and impartiality of a judge' (and perhaps even with 'the benevolent assistance of a fel!ow-worker'),2 rather than with a set of analytical tools with which to dissect his every sentence, then almost all of his theories can be understood in surprisingly simple and consistent terms. Accordingly, I shall take an initial step in this essay towards the substantiation of this supposition by interpreting and interrelating some of the fundamental , distinctions which serve to structure all three Critiques. The root distinction underlying directly or indirectly all others in Kant's Critical philosophy is that between 'knowledge' (Erkenntnis) and 'experience' (Erfahrung). Yet unfortunately, in spite of (or perhaps, because of) its ubiquity in Kant's writings, it tends to remain an obscure and uncriticized presupposition for both Kant and his many interpreters and critics. The main reason for this neglect seems to be that he invokes a variety of distinctions which define knowledge and experience more precisely, with the result that the more common terms naturally appear to be less technical and in no need of special treatment. The purpose of this essay will be to explicate the knowledge-experience distinction which is implicit in Kant's System by integrating it with the most important of these more obviously technical distinctions: first with his pure-empirical and subject-object distinctions, second with his a priori-a posteriori and

46

Immanuel Kant

analytic-synthetic distinctions, and third with his distinctions between empirical, transcendental, logical and practical reflection. . . An important limitation must be placed on the scop.e of thIS essa~ If its task is to be made practicable: I will be unable to gIVe an exhaustIVe account of anyone term or distinction. Consequently, the. ~etails of th.e arguments of Kant and his critics for and against the legItImacy of hIS usage will have to be largely neglected. I regard this as a ~ecessary limitation because - especially in light of Kant's own emphasIs on the 'architectonic unity' of his System - 3an interpreter can judge the extent of an argument's validity fairly only after they have an adequate understanding of the overall context into which it fits. Although t~is does not mean that carelessly general or even incorrect statements wIll be excusable it does mean that I will have to ignore or only briefly mention som~ minor ambiguitjes, and that the many meticulous studies which have been made on most of the relevant distinctions will be of less use than if I were focusing my attention more narrowly. But this limitation certainly has its advantages. For all too frequently, as Wolff points out, 'the literature on Kant has somewhat the air of a multitude of reports from the blind wise men who encountered the elephant. Each one tells of the p~rt on whic~ his hands happened. to fall,. b~t. a ,~ar~fu.l .reader might fall to recogmze the beast from theIr descnptlOns. LlIl~ltm.g the discussion to general considerations will not only decrease the hkehhoo? of falling into this predicament here, but should also increase t~e POSSIbility of providing a 'map' of the general contour of Kant's P?llosophy, the use of which can help us to avoid such one-sidedness when mvestJgating more specific aspects of his System in the future. The wide range of connotations which the terms 'knowledge' and 'experience' have in ordinary language might induce an. inte~pr~ter to regard any secondary distinctions with suspicion. They mIght mSlst th~t these distinctions must inevitably share the indistinct nature of the pnmary distinction from which they are derived, notwithstanding any intell~­ gibility they seem to have on their own. Such a proposal, however, IS unsound; for, as I shall attempt to demonstrate, Kant's own explanat~ons of his terms can be interpreted in a relatively clear and plausible fashIOn. Moreover, even though he does not say much about knowledg~ and experience as such, he does say enough to supply us with a suffiCIently coherent starting point. In ordinary use, 'experience' can refer generally to a subject's immediate encounter with an object. This 'immediate experience' is independent of the functions Kant calls 'determinant judgement' and 'reflective judgement', for in such experience the subject has neither det~rmi~ed the given object to be an object of knowledge nor reflected upon ItS epIstemological status. 5 Kant uses the word in this way when, for example, he begins the Introduction to the first Critique with the proclamation: 'There

Critical Assessments 47

can be no doubt that all our knowledge beings with experience.' Several

sente~ces la~er he adds that, although 'all our knowledge begins with

~xpenence, It does not follow that it all arises out of experience'. That IS, all kn~wledge must be part of someone's immediate experience in orde.r ~~r It actually.to be known at all;6 yet this does not preclude the possIbIlIty that certam aspects of our knowledge might be derived from some other source. In any case, Kant uses the word 'experience' in this ordinary, indeterminate and non-reflective sense throughout his Critical works. But in explaining how some knowledge is grounded in a source other than immediate experience, Kant develops another, less typical, meaning for 'experience'. He describes this more determinate type of experience as a concrete 'synthesis of perceptions'7 in which various 'objects of possible ~xperience'8 ar~ made actual objects of knowledge through the ~o-op.eratlOn ?f. ~he sub~ect's two main powers of cognitive judgement: mtult~ve sen~lbJllty (whIch produces sensation) and conceptual understandmg (which produces thought).9 This process, known also as determinant judgement, implies a differentiation between two kinds of knowledg~:l0 the validity. of 'empir.ical' knowledge is determinable only be appealm~ at som~ pomt t? sensIble experience,l1 while that of 'pure' knowledg~ IS determmable WIthout reference to sensibility, tei the extent that 'there is nothing that belongs to sensation' in it,12 Kant claims that empirical knowledge is tied so closely to experience that the two can, for us, be equated: 'Empirical knowledge is experience.'13 In this new sense. (deve.loped fully only in the second edition of the' first Critique), expenence IS no longer the immediate chronological starting point of all knowledge, but one of several 'species of knowledge' .14 Unlike empirical knowledge, pure knowledge is related only indirectly to experience: it arises out of the subject's abstract reflection on the general nature of his experience,,15) and is pure in virtue of its primary dependence on the subject rather than the object of knowledge. 16 But in order to engage in ~uc~ refle~tion, we must be consciously aware of our experience, not in ~ts Imme~late state, but as empirical knowledge; for experience in itself IS 'the ultImate unconditional given, within which all reflection arises' Y So far: Kant's use of the words 'knowledge' and 'experi,ence' seems to be relatively clear. The latter refers either to the original encounter between subject and object (i.e. 'immediate experience') which yields actual kno~led~e t.hrough determinant judgement, or to the 'empirical knowledge whIch IS so produced; and the former refers either to this same empirical knowledge, or to the knowledge which can be inferred from experience by reflecting in other, more abstract ways. But this acco~n~ of hi~ primary distinction will be of no use to the interpreter o?l~ If ~t proVIdes an adequate context for interpreting Kant's secondary dlstmctJons. In §II, therefore, I will introduce the four classes of knowl-

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edge which arise out of two of his secondary distinctions, after which I will examine in §III the types of reflection which lead to such knowledge. Finally, in §IV I will integrate the various results of this enquiry into a single picture, delineating the essential perspectival pattern which determines the form of Kant's Critical System. /

II Two secondary distinctions The knowledge-experience distinction is rarely discussed as such by either Kant or his commentators because, as mentioned above, experience (even though it has chronological priority in its immediate form) is defined in terms of knowledge. Despite the negligible attention it has been given, however, this distinction will turn 5lut to form the context in which all Kant's other distinctions are set. But before this can be fully demonstrated, a good deal more will have to be said about the 'knowledge' side of the distinction. In this section, therefore, I will specify how four basic types of knowledge arise out of the two most prevalent .of Kant's secondary distinctions, the a priori-a posteriori and the analyt1csynthetic, both of which are concerned not only with knowledge, but with the various ways reflective knowledge and immediate experience are related. On the surface, the bifurcation of knowledge into a priori and a posteriori types seems to be readily comprehensible. A posteriori k?ow~­ edge is knowledge derived directly from - or the truth of Wh1Ch 1S contingent upon - the meeting of subject and object in experience. A priori knowledge, on the other hand, is 'given' or 'innate' knowledge which is derived from a source - or the truth of which is - 'absolutely independent of all experience';18 hence it is both necessary19 and universa1.20 But upon closer investigation, two problems arise: first, how does this distinction differ from that between pure and empirical knowledge? and second, if 'all our knowledge begins with experience', then what sense is there in saying that a priori knowledge is somehow 'independent of all experience:? I will consider these questions in the following two paragraphs. ' Although Kant ordinarily uses the terms 'pure' and 'a priori', as well as the terms 'empirical' and 'a posteriori', interchangeably, they should not be regarded as mere synonyms,21 for he does occasionally stress a technical distinction between them. The pure-empirical distinction discriminates between knowledge which does (empirical) and does not (pure) depend directly on sensation, whereas th.e a. priori-a pos~eriori distinction discriminates between knowledge Wh1Ch 18 grounded m the subject's experience of an object (a posteriori) and that whi~h th.e s~bject brings to experience, which must therefore be grounded pnmanly m the

'I

i

49

subject itself (a priori). Presumably, knowledge could be a priori even though its expression might utilize terms which appeal to sensation;22 or it could be a posteriori even though its expression might utilize only terms which are pure. But such usage is of minimal importance, since the two pairs are almost always treated coextensively: empirical a posteriori knowledge is knowledge derivable from a subject's experience of an object (a posteriori) and requiring sensation (empirical), while pure a priori knowledge is knowledge brought to experience by the subject (a priori) and requiring no sensation (pure). 23 The status of a priori knowledge in relation to experience should become more evident when I relate the distinctions of this section to the various forms of reflection in §III. But for now several remarks ~an be added which should dispel some of the ambiguity shrouding the meaning of the word 'knowledge' in the phrase 'a priori knowledge'.24 Knowledge which arises a posteriori seems not to be troublesome because it is by definition based on experience. A priori knowledge, by contrast, 'which I must presuppose as being in me prior to objects being given to me',25 and which is therefore objectively valid 'antecedently to all experience' ,26 is rather more ambiguously called 'knowledge'. This ambiguity can be cleared up by recalling the distinction made in §I between immediate experience (which can lead to 'empirical knowledge') and reflective knowledge (which is known only if experienced, but which might be traceable to some other source). When this is stressed, both a post€riori and a priori knowledge can be regarded as abstractions from immediate experience - though, as will become evident in §III, they abstract in different directions. As such, they do not denote knowledge which is actually known apart from experience; rather, such titles refer to types of knowledge whose validity rests on more than just a subject's encounter with particular objects in e:cperience. Kant could have made his meaning less confusing either by not calling the determinate form of experience 'empirical knowledge', or by not using the word 'knowledge' for that which arises out of one's reflection on experience. Using the same word for both gives rise to uncertainty on the part of the reader as to which sense of the word 'knowledge' he intends when he uses the word without a qualifying adjectiveY Fortunately, once the choices are explicated, the context usually makes his intention sufficiently clear. . Kant also has a more general use for the a priori-a posteriori distinction which should be mentioned briefly at this point. Sometimes when he speaks loosely Kant equates all philosophical or 'metaphysical' knowledge with the a priori and all ordinary or 'physical' knowledge with the a posteriori. 28 Thus he says 'knowledge through reasOn and a priori knowledge are the same thing'. 29 (Elsewhere he treats the term 'transcende~tal' i.n a similarly loose way.30) Wolff rightly criticizes Kant's tendency to 1dentlfy 'the formal (space, time, categories) with the a priori and the

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Immanuel Kant

material (sensation, empirical concepts) with the a posteriori';31 but he goes too far when he adds that this causes Kant to 'be irresistibly drawn to assimilate all knowledge to a priori knowledge'. For Kant's loose usage of these terms is never more than a tendency: as we shall see, he .ordinarily is very careful to limit the a priori to certain specific sorts of philosophical knowledge. Moreover, this broad use of terms is itself quite -legitimate so long as it is intended only to refer to the place of Kant's three Critiques within the overall body of his Critical writings. Nevertheless, it is still a mistake to believe that in Kant's strict usage the a priori-a posteriori distinction .can be equated, as Paton suggests, with - the formal-~a~riall distinction. 3~ Since such loose use of technical terms is likely to lead to misunderstanding and equivocation, any interpreter should avoid it wherever possible. Instead of referring to the Critical philosopher as a 'transcendental philosopher', as Kant himself does,33 and assuming all his philosophical concerns to be limited to the a priori - both of which are legitimate only when speaking in very general terms - I shall henceforth treat 'a priori' and 'transcendental' in their strict , sensesr, gnd attempt to differentiate more precisely the various sorts of knowledge with which he is concerned. , The other \important secdndary distinction Kant makes between types of (reflective) knowledge is that between 'analytic' and 'synthetio' judgements. 34 Unfortunately, he describes this contrast in ~ wide variety of ways, which are difficult if not impossible to integrate into a single, consistent picture. Newton Garver, for instance, finds no less then 'twelve theories of analyticity contained in or suggested by Kant's discussion'p5 Moreoever, perhaps as a result of such variety, the nature and validity of this distinction have been a matter of considerable debate in recent years. Obviously, it would be inappropriate for me to embark on a detailed examination of this particular subject in a general discussion of this sort. Nevertheless, examining a selection of the most significant comments of both Kant and his critics will help differentiate Kant's version of the distinction from some of the un-Kantian versions which have recently been suggested. Probably the best known of Kant's descriptions of these terms is that in an analytic judgement the predicate is already 'contained in' the subject, while in a synthetic judgement the predicate 'lies outside' the subject. 36 A more illuminating, yet less frequently discussed, way Kant describes this distinction is to say that judgements can be determined to be analytic only by applying the laws of logic to the previously determined meanings of their terms, while judgements can be determined to be synthetic only 'under the condition that an intuition underlies the concept of their subject'. 37 As Allison says: 'Synthetic judgements assert [real] relations [of concepts'to objects], while analytic judgements merely a~~rt logical relations between concepts. '38 With these descriptions in ;.t\,,'

/

Analytic judgements

Synthetic judgements

Fig. 1

/

mind, we can use Kant's own pictorial representation of 'particular judgements' (according to which the subject is depicted as a square and the predicate as a cirde),39 to show how (e.g.) 'Yellow is a colour' and 'This table is yellow' are propositional representations of analytic and synthetic judgements, respectively (see fig. 1). ' Beck translates Kant's distinction into less metaphorical terms: if ' "X is A" implies logically "X is B", the judgement is analytic', but if B lis 'related to A by virtue of the fact that both are predicates of the same X', then"it is synthetic. 40 Synthetic propositions, then, are informative: they provide information about the subject which is not necessarily implied by the meanings of the words (e.g. this table would still be a table whatever the colour). Analytic propositions, on the other hand, are, strictly speaking, not informative: 41 the predicate provides only what can be inferred from the subject by means of the laws of logic. 42 Although this description of Kant's analytic-synthetic distinction is given predQminantly in terms of single, subject-predicate propositions, it is unfair to charge Kant with limiting his logic to such propositions. On the contrary, says Wolff, 'nothing could be further from the truth' .43 The great variety of applications Kant gives for his analytic-synthetic distinction 44 is evidence enough of his awareness of the complexity of propositional logic. Subject-predicate examples simply provide a manageable way of grasping the general characteristics of this distinction. Kant leaves no doubt as to how all this applies to empirical knowledge: 'Judgments of experience, as such, are one and all synthetic. '45 Only when we attempt to interpret such determinate judgements by reflectillg upon them does some knowledge come to be regarded as analytic. The bulk of the discussion of analytic-synthetic distinction by recent philosophers has suffered needlessly by neglecting the implications of this salient qualification. The result has been a running debate over whether the terms refer to a difference of kind or merely to one of degree. 46 The position Kant would adopt on this point becomes evident once his admittedly subtle distinction between immediate e~Berie~,p~; ~ ,ltt'· ,<','

""""';.':)

. J)1JD eJ /

"

).':,\\/'

51

52 Immanuel Kant knowledge is sharpened (as I am attempting to do in this essay): both views would be accorded a measure of validity. Kant himself uses the distinction primarily as a tool for organizing various forms of reflective knowledge according to their logical status. Thus, his distinction is clearly one between different kinds of knowledge. But, in order to find empirical examples of both analytic and synthetic knowledge, this t:igid distinction of kind would have to be reinterpreted in terms of varying\ degrees. The point of Kant's assertion that all judgements of experience are synthetic is simply to emphasize that '- in so' far as the contrast is used in his sense (see §III - the term 'analytir can apply only to certain forms of reflective knowledge, and never to non-reflective experience. It in no way disallows the legitimate formulation of a less restrictive, e.g. Fregian, sort of analytic-synthetic distinction in which the terms are not so mutually exclusive. 47 Something like Quine's version of the distinction in terms of blurred degrees would seem to be required to render it tenable for anyone whose philosophical perspective is limited exclusively to the empirical. Yet what Quine fails to recognize is that, by limiting his discussions to the implications of 'recalcitrant experience' ,48 he forfeits the chance to argue against those who, like Kant, regard the distinction as one of kind, because for them it refers not to experience but to reflective knowledge. The type of blunder that results is evident in the following example. After complaining that 'I do not know whether the statement "Everything green is extended" is analytic' ,49 Quine an~lyses the terms 'green' and 'extended'. His indecision is due to his convenient neglect of the term 'everything'. If 'everything' is taken to include such 'things' as ideas, attitudes (e.g. envy), etc., then the sentence is neither synthetic nor analytic, because it is false. But if it is restricted to 'sensible objects', then the sentence is analytic, because (at least, according to Kant 50) every sensible object must, upon reflection, be regarded as extended. The sentence Quine really ends up analysing would be more accurately expressed as 'Green is extended', which is indeed incoherent (and so neither analytic nor synthetic), because 'green' refers to a thing's quality and 'extension' to its quantity. His difficulty in determining the logical status of such sentences is a direct result of his refusal to adopt a perspective outside the 'periphery' of the empiricalY The most Kantian way of formulating an analytic-synthetic distinction in which both terms are applicable to experience would be to connect it with his distinction between analytic and synthetic methods of argumentation, which should be carefully distinguished from the contrast between analytic and synthetic knowledge. 52 In the former case the distinction applies to 'transcendental logic', while in the latter it applies to 'general logic' .53 A synthetic method begins with a set of premisses and attempts to determine the validity of some conclusion. An analytic method, con-

Critical Assessments

53

versely, begins with a conclusion and attempts to determine its validity by dissecting it into its logical constituents. 54 Ultimately, the two methods should yield reciprocal results. 55 The former investigates how a concept (e.g. 'empirical knowledge') arises, while the latter investigates how we can understand it once it has already arisen. (Of course, the epitome of this distinction is Kant's own employment of the synthetic method in the first Critique and the analytic method in the Prolegomena. 56) The notions of judgement and method arC; combined too indiscrimi~ nately in Edward Caird's assertion that 'all judgements are synthetic in the making and analytic when made' Y Had he considered more carefully the difference between judgement and method, Caird might have said something more like: 'All judgements regarded as "in the making" must be described according to a synthetic method; but when regarded as "made", they must be described according to an analytic method.' Or, if he intends to say something about judgement rather than method, then he could have expressed Kant's view by saying something more like: 'All judgements are synthetic in the making (i.e. in experience); but, upon reflection, some turn out to be analytic, while others remain synthetic.' Jonathan Bennett's empirically orientated version of the analytic-synthetic distinction is rather more adequate. He argues that 'to be able to say of a given sentence that it is [analytic] we must be ably to relate it . . . to an individual person propounding an argument about [some] situation'.58 Seen in the context of its underlying method, there would be 'an important difference of kind between the argument in which a sentence is up for possible revision of some sort and the argument in which it cannot be up for revision at all' .59 The former would occur in the context of a synthetic method, and the latter in the context of an analytic method. However, once sentences were regarded 'objectively' i.e. outside their methodological context - the distinction would revert again to one of degree. In any case, inasmuch as this way of using the distinction is not Kant's, I shall not pursue its implications any further. The main question. raised by Kant's introduction of the distinction between analytic and synthetic kinds of reflective knowledge is: how does he intend to integrate it with his distinction between a priori and a posteriori kinds of reflective knowledge? Some recent philosophers tend to equate the two distinctions (as well as that between 'pure' and 'empirical'); but such an oversimplified approach is not only inadequate,6o but obviously un-Kantian. If, then, the two distinctions are not equivalent, four possible classes of reflective knowledge arise out of their combination: knowledge by reflection might be classified as 'analytic a posteriori', 'analytic a priori', 'synthetic a priori' or 'synthetic a posteriori'. I shall conclude this section by examining briefly what each of these four classes would entail. To begin with, the impossibility of analytic a posteriori knowledge is

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Critical Assessments 55 )

generally considered to be 'quite evident':61 indeed, it is a nonsensical contradiction in terms if, as is often the case, 'analytic' is equated with 'a priori' (see n. 64). Kant himself seems to encourage this conclusion by saying: 'it would be absurd to fouJ?d an analytic judgment on experience. Since, in forming the judgment, I must not go outside my concept, there is no need to appeal to the testimony of experience in its support. '62 However, notwithstanding Kant's resulting lack of concern for classifying any knowledge as analytic a posteriori, some theorists do maintain that this class provides the best description of certain types of knowledge. 63 I shall discuss this possibility at some length in §III. Suffice it to say at ihis point that we should expect such knowledge, if it is possible, to have its validity grounded in some way in experience (a posteriori), and yet also to proceed by making inferences solely on the (analytic) basis of an application of the laws of logic to the concepts involved. The second class of reflective knowledge, the analytic a priori, is rather more clearly delineated by Kant. It includes any judgement which, given some previously understood meaning for the terms involved, can be reduced to a logical tautology.64 This type of analytic knowledge is what Kant has in mind when he makes such statements as: 'if the judgment is analytic ... its truth can always be adequately known in accordance with the principle of contradiction'. 65 The truth value of such knowledge is both independent of experience (a priori) and determinable solely by the application of logical laws to the concepts involved (analytic). The third class of reflective knowledge, the synthetic a priori, is by far the most important for Kant, at least in the first Critique. Indeed, he says in its Introduction that 'the proper problem of pure reason is contained in the question: How are a priori synthetic judgments possible?'66 It is a problem because it is not immediately evident how a judgement could be a priori without being analytic (see n. 64). Such knowledge would be valid independently of any particular experience (a priori), yet it would also supply new information about the concepts involved (synthetic) - information not deducible by means of formal logic. 67 This class of knowledge is of the utmost importance to the philosopher because the propositions composing it would be necessarily true without being in any sense trivial: just as the analytic laws of logic determine the general form of what a person can think coherently, so also these synthetic a priori judgements would determine the general form of what a person can experience coherently (i.e. of how a person can convert immediate experience into empirical knowledge). They could therefore be regarded as a solid foundation upon which not only empirical knowledge, but also a philosophical system of knowledge, could rest. Finally, synthetic a posteriori knowledge is the least troublesome (but also, for Kant, the least philosophically interesting) of the four classes of knowledge. All the knowledge arising out of such empirical factors

as scientific experimentation, psychological introspection, the citing of examples and appeals to 'common sense' falls into this class. Consequently, it is usually in this sense that the word 'knowledge' is intended when it is uttered in ordinary language. Such knowledge consists, quite simply, in judgements which both have their validity grounded in various facts of experience (a posteriori), and in which intuitive content is supplied to the concepts involved - content which is not logically implied by their conventional meanings (synthetic).

HI The four reflective perspectives The foregoing discussion of Kant's two secondary distinctions between types of knowledge and of the four classes to which they give rise has relied heavily on the (as yet unjustified) supposition that these divisions are intended by Kant as classifications only of knowledge by reflection, and not of immediate experience. In this section I propose to support and enlarge upon this claim by discussing four methods of reflection, or perspectives,68 which Kant says can be adopted in considering various objects of knowledge. These will include the empirical, transcendental, logical and practical perspectives, respectively. But first, it will be helpful to make, some general comments about Kant's use of the word 'reflection'. Reflection in general is the act of 'going back over different representations'.69 As the primary activity of the Critical philosopher, it must be carefully distinguished from both the 'comparison' involved in ordinary thinking and the 'abstraction' involved in logical analysis. These three types of act are similar inasmuch as they are all 'logical acts by which concepts are generated as to their form'. 70 But only through reflection can philosophical concepts be generated, for 'reflective judgement' is 'our critical faculty'. 7! The description 'going back over ... ' implies that the representations which give rise to various philosophical perspectives have already been 'gone over' once. This indeed is precisely what Kant intends to get across by his distinction between 'determinant judgement' and 'reflective judgement': 'Determinant judgement', interprets van de Pitte, 'is constitutive of the world of experience and is thus objectively valid. Reflective judgment, on the other hand, is merely an interpretiveJechnique which we employ in order to bring organic entities and systematic unities within our powers of comprehension. It thus carries only a subjective validity. '72 This distinction is directly parallel to that between immediate experience and reflective knowledge: for determinant judgment is the act by which immediate experience is converted into empirical knowledge; and reflective judgment is the act by which empirical knowledge

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becomes reflective knowledge. With this distinction clearly in mind, we can now proceed to discuss Kant's four Critical perspectives. In the first two Critiques Kant does not use the word 'reflection' as a technical term for the activity of pursuing an empirical perspective. The ,reason for this is not that he' disapproves of its use in such a context, but that he does not focus in any detail on the empirical perspective (until the third Critique, where, as J. J. Evans suggests, Kant's use of the term 'reflective judgement' is equivalent to his former use of the phrase 'empirical employment of pure reason' (i.e. empirical perspective).73 Of course, Kant does sometimes insert various empirical terms and arguments into the earlier Critiques, but these are presented more as byproducts of other perspectives than as constituents of an explicitly empirical system, such as that adopted by the physical scientist. 74 In distinguishing a transcendental from an empirical deduction, for example, he says that an 'empirical deduction ... shows the manner in which a concept is acquired through experience and through reflection upon experience'. 75 This explanation of what the empirical perspective entails in a specific case can serve as an epitome of the form it generally takes. A person who adopts an empirical perspective reflects upon particular experiences without attempting in any way to 'go beyond' their nature as immediate experiences. In empirical reflection there is no need to discriminate between the respective roles of the knowing subject and the known object, because the two are fused in experience. This continuity between immediate experience and knowledge resulting from empirical reflection is, no doubt, what leads Kant to make the (technically imprecise, but rhetorically effective) claim that 'empirical knowledge is experience' (see §I). Strictly speaking, empirical knowledge denotes only that synthetic a posteriori knowledge which arises out of empirical reflection on the objects of one's experience (i.e. on what Kant calls 'phenomena'76). Thus, empirical knowledge of 'cause', for instance, refers neither to the actual experience of some particular cause, nor to the ability to determine its subjective or objective ground; rather it consists in the ability to answer the question 'What is the cause of X?' by thinking and reasoning straightforwardly about one's experience from an empirical perspective. In everyday life - i.e. from the perspective of immediate experience we usually do not distinguish between our experience and our reflection on experience, since any type of reflection must itself be part of our experience in order to bring forth knowledge which is actually known (see §II). We could say, however, that reflective experience attempts to give elegance to its inevitably vulgar counterpart, non-reflective experience. In the case of empirical reflection, the transition from vulgarity to elegance is gradual, because we must always appeal exclusively to ordinary experience whenever we try to establish synthetic a posteriori

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knowledge. But in each of the other three types of reflection, to which I will now turn my attention, the qualitative distinction is rather more clear. Unlike the empirical perspective, the transcendental p,erspective plays a primary role in Kant's System. 77 Indeed, thea priori-a posteriori distinction itself first arises in this context. Unfortunately, the fundamental significance of the 'transcendental reflection' with which this new perspective is concerned is easily overlooked by the reader, because Kant waits until an Appendix in the middle of the Critique 78 to discuss its importance in detail. 79 The reason he waits until this point is that, in order to show how transcendental reflection reveals the errors of all past philosophers (see n. 79), he first has to have specified the doctrines which can be established by adopting his transcendental alternative. But this gives the misleading impression that transcendental reflection is more a convenient tool for the comparison of various treatments of specific philosophical issues. than an essential methodological tool for Critical reflection. Kant does give one of his clearest accounts of what the transcendental perspective entails in the Introduction to the first Critique: I entitle transcendental all knowledge which is occupied not so much with objects as with the mode of our knowledge of objects in so far as this mode of knowledge is to be possible a priori. A system of such concepts might be entitled transcendental philosophy.80 Kant elsewhere says his task as a transcendental philosopher is to 'enquire what are the a priori conditions upon which the possibility of experience rests, and which remain as its underlying ground when everything empirical is abstracted from appearances [i.e. from the objects of experiencel'.81 A transcendental perspective, then, presupposes the subject-object distinction: it attempts to determine what there is in the subject a priori which makes possible its knowledge of the objects it experiences. Because these conditions must be added to the object by the subject to produce such empirical knowledge, they are synthetic as well as being a priori. That the knowledge arising out of this radically epistemological perspective concerns only a set of synthetic a priori forms embedded in the subject is spelled out explicitly by Kant when he says, 'the word "transcendental" ... never means a reference of our knowledge to things, but only to the congnitive faculty'. 82 When Kant finally gets around to describing what transcendental reflection is, he says it is the act of determining 'in which facti1ty of knowledge [given representations] belong together subjectively - in the sensibility or in the understanding';83 in so doing one determines whether or note each representation is pure. Accordingly, such reflection is the necessary first step in adopting a transcendental perspective; for it would

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be impossible to abstract everything empirical from experience without first differentiating between what is pure and what is empirica1. 84 But in a broader sense, all the steps involved in determining the synthetic a priori forms of empirical knowledge can be regarded, without straying too far from Kant's intentions, as arising out of transcendental reflection. Thus, transcendental knowledge of 'cause', for instance, refers neither to the actual experience of some particular cause, nor to the ability to determine such a cause through empirical reflection; rather, it consists in the .ability to answer the question 'What is the status of causality in the general relation of a subject to an object?' by ref\ecting transcendentally on the synthetic a priori conditions for the possibility of experience. Two remaining points should be made concerning the transcendental perspective to help guard against possible misunderstanding. First, one common use of the word 'transcendental', according to which it refers to a special kind of consciousness, or to 'the grasping of things as they are in themselves' ,85 might lead to the mistake of confusing the transcendental perspective with the 'ivory-tower' perspective of the typical pre-Kantian metaphysician, according to which he supposes he can ascend reflectively to such heights that he attains a perfectly objective (or transcendent) view of reality. Kant leaves no doubt as to his rejection of this approach by devoting the bulk of the Dialectic to the task of disclosing the error inevitably bred by this 'logic of illusion' .86 Indeed, such error is precisely what he believes he can avoid by emphasizing the differences in the various perspectives which can be adopted legitimately in the quest for knowledge. By referring to the synthetic a priori as 'knowledge', he is not claiming to possess a special type of knowledge which is actually known independently of the limitations of experience; rather, like all knowledge, it can be known only by engaging in a certain kind of reflective experience. 87 This seems to be the point he is trying to make when, in response to a misunderstanding of his use of the word 'transcendental', he says it 'does not signify something passing beyond all experience but something that indeed precedes it a priori, but that is intended simply to make knowledge of experience possible'.88 When properly understood, adopting the transcendental perspective can be seen not only to be legitimate, but to be the 'duty' of the philosopher.89 By determining the epistemological foundations on which our awareness of experience is built,90 it reveals that human knowledge is inextricably tied to certain limits it cannot transcend. The second point is that Kant does not limit synthetic a priori knowledge to the philosopher. On the contrary, he says that 'in all theoretical sciences of reason synthetic a priori judgments are contained as principles'.91 But the adoption of a transcendental perspective in regard to such principles is nevertheless important (for the philosopher) because

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it is only through transcendental reflection that their status can be shown to be synthetic a priori. 92 The extent to which mathematicians, for example, know their principles to be synthetic a priori is the extent to which they have reflected transcendentally on their status. 'Transcendental knowledge', therefore, is the knowledge that a given proposition is synthetic a priori. Distinguishing between the empirical and transcendental perspectives is recognized by many recent commentators as being essential to an adequate understanding of Kant's Critical philosophy (see n. 68). Unfortunately, these commentators usually emphasize this distinction so much that another, equally important, distinction tends to be ignored. 93 Although it is true that most of the problems Kant tries to solve in the first Critique are, as Allison says, solved 'by means of the perspectival conception of the relation between the transcendental and the empirical' ,94 the perspectival conception of the relation between the logical and the practical is, as I shall demonstrate in the remainder of this section, just as important to the overall methodology of Kant's System. Immediately after introducing 'transcendental reflection' as a technical term, Kant contrasts it with 'logical reflection'. 95 He says at this point only that the latter 'is a mere act of comparison' which takes 'no account whatsoever of the faculty of knowledge to which the given representations belong'. That is, from a logical perspective, there is no need to determine whether the objects of reflection 'are noumena for the understanding, or are phenomena for sensibility' ,96 because all that matters is their compatibility with the laws of logic. 97 Logical reflection is like all types of reflection, however, in being ultimately dependent on the 'possibility of experience' .98 It is similar to empirical reflection in that it operates without distinguishing between the subject and object of experience; and it i's similar to transcendental reflection in that it seeks to establish a priori truths; but it is different from both in that it 'has nothing to do with the origin of knowledge, but only considers representations. .. according to the laws which the understanding employs when ... it relates them to one another'. 99 This means the aim of logical reflection is always analytic: it is concerned only with determining whether or not the representations in a given proposition are related in a form which can be reduced to a tautology.lOo The tools used in such reflection are those enumerated by what Kant calls 'pure general logic' ,101 and the goal towards which it works is the systematic delineation of the analytic a priori knowledge which is applicable to a specific science. 102 Just as the a priori-a posteriori distinction makes sense only if one engages in transcendental reflection, the analytic-synthetic distinction makes sense only if one engages in logical reflection (yet, once made, both distinctions relate to the classes of knowledge which arise in all four types of reflection); for as Schulze accurately declares, the latter

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'division is itself derived immediately from the principle of contradiction' .103 Kant is careful to point out that an accurate understanding of this distinction requires transcendental reflection as well, since general logic is unconcerned with the synthetic a priori. 104 But this in no way detracts from the need to stress the logical character of its analytic side in order to bring out the difference between it and various empirical versions of the distinction (such as Quine's). For Kant, the status of a proposition can be determined to be analytic only through logical reflection;105 therefore, any proposition which is considered (by means of transcendental reflection) to be verifiable by appealing to intuition or to any sort of synthesis is ipso facto logically synthetic. 106 If, for example, the question 'How do you know that all bachelors are unmarried?' is asked, one's knowledge could not be shown to be logically analytic by answering, 'Well, all the bachelors I've ever known, now that I think about it, have been unmarried, therefore ... ' (a la Quine), or even by answering 'Being a bachelor is always connected by linguistic convention 107 with being unmarried, therefore ... ' (a la Bird); the only way to show such knowledge to be logically analytic would be to answer 'If (given a previously agreed upon use of terms) I map that proposition on to the laws of logic, it eventually reduces to a tautology, therefore ... ' (a la Kant). Analytic truths might be employed in the context of an empirical argument (a la Bennett), but no one could know they are analytic without engaging in logical reflection. When the analytic-synthetic distinction is regarded in this way, borderline cases, such as 'An unprotected human being cannot survive prolonged exposure to a 100°C temperature' or 'Water boils at 100°C' or 'His mother did not die two weeks before he was born', 108 all turn out to be synthetic; for the necessity they possess holds only because the natural laws which limit our experience make their contradiction seem impossible. The inevitability of including some such empirical factors in any definition contributes to the inadequacy of 'deducible by definition' as a description of analytic a priori knowledge (see n. 41). This is the mistake made by Waismann when he argues that 'a statement is analytic if it can, by means of mere definitions, be turned into a truth of logic' .109 His example, 'All planets move around the sun', is actually logically synthetic: it can be 'turned into' an analytic 'truth of logic' only by taking up into the definitions of its terms various 'idiomatic (linguistic) operators' which are contingent upon empirical rather than logical verifiability. The fourth and final type of reflection is that which yields 'practical knowledge'l1O when a subject adopts a practical perspective. The best way to back up my proposal that practical reflection 111 should be regarded as the correlate of logical reflection in a way comparable to the transcendental-empirical correlation would be to show from Kant's own words that

Critical Assessments 61 it yields the one class of knowledge which has so far gone unmentioned in this section, the analytic a posteriori. But this alternative is precluded by his unfortunately broad understanding of a priori knowledge, according to which it refers not only to the knowledge yielded by transcendental or logical reflection, but to that which is necessary in any non-physical sense. 112 The matter is further complicated by the fact that, although he intends his practical philosophy to replace the traditional form of metaphysical reflection, he never makes it entirely clear just how the logical status of the knowledge yielded by these two types of reflection differs. I will therefore first examine the status of traditional metaphysical reflection, and then proceed to examine how Kant's practical perspective differs from it. As early as the Introduction to the first Critique Kant states unambiguously that 'metaphysics' ... ought to contain a priori synthetic knowledge. For its business is ... to extend our a priori knowledge. '113 He later adds that the metaphysician cannot obtain this goal 'by mere [or 'naked' (bloj3] reflection', but only by clothing it with 'inference' .11 4 Inference is required because 'the [metaphysical] concepts of reason ... are concerned with something to which all experience is subordinated, but which is never itself an object of experience' - namely, 'the unconditioned' .115 In itself, the unconditioned is, as Allison points out, 'an analytic principle, depicting what is contained in our concept of a thing in general' .116 Because it is a pure concept 'transcending the possibility of experience', Kant calls it an 'idea'.117 But when the metaphysician attempts to use such ideas synthetically to make inferences without first engaging in transcendental reflection, he is likely to assume that his synthetic a priori judgements apply directly to the unconditioned as if it were an intuitable object of ordinary experience. 118 The 'misinterpretation' of the 'concepts of reflection', 119 which characterizes this 'speculative perspective', 120 inevitably leads to the sort of ambiguity and illusion which Kant attempts to dispel in the Dialectic. 121 In each case the fallacy arising out of speculative reflection has the same essential character: because the metaphysician is unaware of the necessity of transcendental reflection, his reflection is patterned solely along the lines of empirical and logical reflection - that is, he tries to combine the a priori aspect of the logical perspective with the synthetic aspect of the empirical perspective to produce supposedly synthetic a priori knowledge. Kant not only argues in detail against the specific errors involved in the various sorts of speculative reflection; he also proposes an alternative to this traditional metaphysical perspective. Metaphysical reflection must, he maintains, be patterned primarily after transcendental reflection. Just as transcendental reflection searches for the concepts of pure theoretical reason, whose application is necessary for the possibility of natural experience, so also metaphysical reflection should search for the concepts

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of pure practical reason, whose application is necessary for the possibility of moral experience (see n. 128). (The former compose the 'metaphysics of nature' and the latter, the 'metaphysics of morals' .122) Kant names these practical concepts 'transcendental ideas' .123 Because such an idea is 'a necessary concept of reason to which no corresponding object can be given in sense-experience', he stresses that 'it remains a problem to which there is no solution' .124 Inasmuch as knowledge gained through transcendental reflection is synthetic a priori, Kant presumes (I believe, somewhat carelessly) that knowledge gained through legitimate practical reflection must also be a synthetic a priori, 'though only from a practical perspective '.125 However, he does not put nearly as much emphasis on the significance of the synthetic a priori status of practical knowledge as he does in the case of transcendental knowledge, nor does he provide any reasons for giving it this status. His apparent reason is to call attention to various similarities which do exist between the practical and transcendental perspectives. Yet there are also some major differences, which have to be ignored or underemphasized if one is to continue thinking of the two as yielding the same class of knowledge. 126 (Why else woul9 he have to add 'though only from a practical perspective'?) \ The terms 'synthetic' and 'a priori' both seem to take on significantly different meanings in Kant's description of the practical perspective. 'A priori' no longer denotes a principle which is a necessary and universal subjective condition for the possibility of experience; it now denotes an idea which is in the subject only because it is inferred from a certain type of immediate SUbjective experience,127 which plays no part in making experience in general (i.e. empirical knowledge) possible,128 and whose application to immediate experience is neither necessary nor universal. 129 As Kant himself says: 'No actual experience has ever been completely adequate to [an unconditioned idea], yet to it every actual experience belongs'130 - a fact which would seem to require the resulting knowledge to be not a priori but analytic, especially when it is considered together with his assertion that 'the criterion of the possibility of synthetic knowledge is never to be looked for save in experience, to which the object of an idea cannot belong'.131 Likewise, 'synthetic' no longer refers to knowledge whose truth is verified by appealing to some factual, intuitive content;1J2 it now refers to knowledge whose truth is dependent on its compatibility with various practical 'laws'.133 As Kant again says: 'in the practical perspective [Gebrauch des Verstandes], our sole concern is with the carrying out of rules'134 - a concern for the empirical instantiation of the principles embodied in action (i.e. the practical ideas) which would seem to be more a posteriori than synthetic, especially when it is considered together with his claim that 'the indispensable condition of all practical employment of reason' is that 'the idea of practical reason can

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always be given actually in concreto, although only in part'.135 If I am right in pointing out these differences, then, whenever Kant says 'X is synthetic a priori from a practical perspective alone', we can interpret this as meaning 'X is analytic a posteriori.' For the added factors in his broader meaning for 'a priori' are adequately covered by his strict use of 'analytic', and the added factors in his broader meaning for 'synthetic', by his strict use of 'a posteriori'. The explanation I would offer of why Kant neglects these differences is that - in keeping with his rationalist background - his ultimate goal is to defend rather than to destroy the traditional doctrines of metaphysics.136 He must have thought that to give a different status to practical knowledge would set it too far apart from that of traditional metaphysical knowledge; so instead, he altered the meanings of his terms and (supposedly) preserved the same status. In addition, as I suggested earlier, there is some similarity between transcendental and practical knowledge: just as the former makes experience in general possible, the latter can be regarded as making moral experience in particular possible (but see n. 128). Now these terminological changes may seem drastic, yet I do not believe they entail any substantial revision of the various theories Kant puts forward in his moral philosophy (although they do require some hitherto unorthodox interpretations of what he is saying at certain points). Instead, referring to the knowledge arising out of practical reflection as 'analytic a posteriori' clarifies its status by abiding more strictly than Kant himself does to the meanings he originally gives his terms. A detailed defence of these changes would be too lengthy at this point; but some of its noteworthy implications must be discussed. Kant explicitly compares the logical and practical perspectives when he says: 'like logic, practical philosophy does not concern itself with a particular sort of cases of practical activity but deals with the practice of free actions in general without reference to any case whatsoever. 137 Both types of reflection depend on certain laws, either 'of the understanding' or 'of the will'. Just as the highest principle of logical reflection is the law of contradiction,138 so also the highest principle of practical reflection is 'duty'139 or 'the categorical imperative' .140 In both cases the law is analytic in relation to other laws of its type because it can be used to test the validity of such subordinate laws, yet it cannot itself be verified by appealing to a higher law (see n. 42 above). The difference is that, whereas logical laws are necessary a priori for all thinking and are thereby equally applicable in principle to all experience, practical laws apply to what ought to be the case, a posteriori, in 'matters of conduct' ,141 and 'allow for conditions under which what should happen often does not' .142 Thus, for example, we call a man 'good' by judging the extent to which his behaviour, considered a posteriori, coincides analytically with the

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idea of 'perfect goodness' - i.e. the extent to which his behaviour is, as it were, 'contained in' that idea of perfection. Therefore, since the unconditioned ideas of reason must be presupposed to refer to the analytic totality of some empirical synthesis,143 our knowledge of them can be described most adequately as the analytic a posteriori counterpart of the analytic a priori knowledge gained through logical reflection. Interpreting the practical perspective in terms of analytic a posteriori knowledge does not imply that the 'ought' of practical reflection is determined by the empirical 'actions and conditions of the human volition' a view which Kant explicitly denies. 144 Rather, I am arguing that when, for example, Kant says our awareness of an ' "ought" expresses a possible action the ground of which cannot be anything but a mere concept', 14S the part he thinks makes such knowledge synthetic (i.e. its appeal to a 'possible action') actually makes it a posteriori, and the part he thinks makes it a priori (i.e. the fact that its 'ground' is a concept such as 'goodness', rather than an appearance of something good) actually makes it analytic. How else could a perspective be 'practical' except by proposing an analytical connection between an abstract concept and an a posteriori experience which ought to be subsumed under it? If Kant's practical perspective is to be regarded as yielding knowledge which is analytic and a posteriori, then what sense can be made of his assertion, quoted in §II, that 'it would be absurd to found an analytic judgment on experience'? Admittedly, this statement does imply that Kant saw no use for the label 'analytic a posteriori' to describe a class of knowledge. Such an attitude results from his tendency to limit the use of 'analytic' to the knowledge arising out of the logical perspective, and 'a posteriori' to the knowledge arising out of the empirical perspective. Had he considered the possibility of describing the knowledge produced by the practical perspective as analytic a posteriori, he could have reworded his rather extreme condemnation in such a way as to bring out its two essential points more clearly: first, that it would be absurd to found any logically analytic knowledge on experience (because it is a priori); and second, that the need to found practically analytic knowledge on experience makes it impossible ever to reach the 'absolute certainty' which is possible in some other types of reflection (so that in a sense it is absurd to regard it as 'knowledge'). Is not this latter assertion just what Kant is alluding to when he says he intends 'to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith'?146 Indeed it is. And when this is recognized, the audacious claim that practical reflection is concerned with the analytic a posteriori becomes rather more tame. Kant's whole point in the Dialectic of the first Critique is to demonstrate how the limitations imposed by transcendental reflection prevent the metaphysician from attaining knowledge through speculative reflection. In place of the latter he proposes the need for a reasoned faith

(Glaube)147 in the (analytical) ideas as subjectively necessary presuppositions of practical reflection. 148 An idea on its own always remains a 'problematic concept' .149 So we must believe it to be true even though it lies 'out beyond' the limits of the empirical perspective. ISO To do so is to view it 'as if' it were analytically applicable to all experience. lSI Viewing myself, for example, as if I am a free agent is the only way I can coherently explain my actions as being 'moral'. Such practical presuppositions, Kant says, do not 'extend' my knowledge in any way, for 'no synthetic proposition is made possible by conceding their reality' .152 But neither does the 'as if' in this context commit me to believe in a 'philosophical fiction' .153 On the contrary, it connotes that the transcendental limits of my experience make it impossible for me to know I am free, although I do have very good reasons for believing I am free: namely, that my (a posteriori) experience of morality in general must be presupposed to contain within it analytically the notion of freedom.ls4' Accordingly, the most accurate statement of Kant's position is that, whereas speculative reflection attempts to establish the synthetic a priori status of metaphysical knowledge-claims, practical reflection admits that their status cannot (and need not) be anything other than analytic a posteriori belief.

IV Summary of Kant's reflective method In the second edition Preface to the first Critique Kant stresses that his book 'is a treatise on the method' through which 'the procedure which has hitherto prevailed in metaphysics' can be revolutionized, 'and not a system of science itself'.155 If we interpret this claim broadly - and I am convinced we should it means Kant's main goal is not (as is commonly supposed) to establish a particular set of transcendental 'principles'. This is undoubtedly one of his most interesting and influential secondary aims; but, as de Vleeschauwer observes, Kant always tends to approach the subject with which he is concerned 'with the clearly avowed intention of showing how ... everything depends on method';ls6 so his main purpose must be to delineate the pattern of thinking which the philosopher must adopt in order to construct a coherent philosophical system. This pattern sets out the methods of enquiry, or reflective perspectives, according to which various classes of knowledge can be actualized. The extent to which one grasps the form of Kant's pattern, therefore, is likely to be directly proportional to the extent to which one understands the significance of any particular aspect or doctrine of his Critical System. In this essay I have attempted to uncover Kant's pattern by investigating the various ways in which he distinguishes between 'knowledge' and 'experience'. The results can be summarized as follows. 'Immediate

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experience' refers to an indeterminate, nonreflective encounter of subject and object in the ordinary world. 'Knowledge' refers to the results aimed at when a person chooses to assume one of four 'perspectives' on that experience by engaging in one of four corresponding types of 'reflection'. Empirical reflection is the attempt to determine what 'is true' about the objects of one's experience, but does not rely on the distinction between the subject and object of knowledge; its goal is to reach synthetic a posteriori knowledge. Transcendental reflection is the attempt to determine the conditions which 'must be true' in order for it to be possible for a subject to experience an object, and depends on clearly distinguishing between subject and object; its goal is to reach synthetic a priori knowledge. Logical reflection is the attempt to determine what 'must be true' because the logical laws of thought require it to be so, and abstracts completely from the subject-object distinction; its goal is to reach analytic a priori knowledge. Speculative reflection is the fallacious attempt to reach synthetic a priori knowledge of reality which extends beyond the limits set by transcendental reflection. It must be replaced by practical reflection, which is the attempt to determine what 'ought to be true' about both transcendent reality and experience in the light of the universal experience of duty, 157 and which depends on the subject-object distinction only indirectly through its relationship with transcendental reflection; Kant says its goal is to reach the synthetic a priori, but I have argued that what he really means by this is that its goal is to reach analytic a posteriori belief. The most effective way of showing forth the integrative coherence of this pattern would be to plot all these terms and their intricate relationships on to a single, schematic 'map' of Kant's Critical methodology. Without a doubt, the centre of this map must be occupied by immediate experience, since everything else we have discussed either stems from it or constitutes its ground.Following the model of the cross,158 we can plot on a horizontal line stretching out from experience in both directions the two classes of synthetic knowledge: to the right lies the a priori class and to the left the a posteriori. And on a vertical line, as it were, cutting into the synthetic line at the point where it meets experience, we can plot the two classes of analytic knowledge: above experience is the a posteriori belief in a reality which transcends experience, and below it is the abstract a priori knowledge of logic. By making an arrow out of the line segments joining each class of knowledge with experience, the nature of each type of reflection can be represented. Thus, in the case of transcendental and practical reflection, the arrow points towards experience, since each of these is an attempt to determine the ultimate principles which act as its ground in one way or another;159 and in the case of empirical and logical reflection the arrow continues in the direction of its counterpart, so that it points out from experience, since in both cases

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Analytic a posteriori belief in what ought to be for action

T

Practical reflection Synthetic a posteriori knowledge of what is in the object

Empirical reflection

1

Immediate experience

Transcendental reflection

4:

T

Synthetic a priori knowledge of what must be in the subject

Logical reflection

Analytic a priori knowledge of what must be for thought Fig. 2 Kant's four reflective perspectives 161 on experience

the flow of thought is out from the basis of experience (either by empirical reasoning or by logical abstraction).16o Putting these details together into a single picture gives us the map shown in fig. 2. Interpreting Kant's Critical philosophy in accordance with this map enables us more readily to detect the short-sightedness of many interpreters, such as Jaakko Hintikka, who accuses Kant of arguing that 'we as it were look at the world always from the same perspective', 162 or Allison, who also underestimates the importance of the other perspectives when he claims that 'transcendental reflection ... can be taken as equivalent to the critical method itself' .163 By the same token, it enables us readily to grasp the adequacy of certain ways of interpreting various aspects of Kant's System, such as Paton's reference to Kant's theoretical system as a 'metaphysic of experience'. Just as traditional metaphysics operates on the same axis as logic, but at the opposite pole,l64 so also Kant's transcendental criticism of metaphysics depends upon a determination of the 'metaphysic' at the opposite pole of the axis of the ordinary, expirical perspective on experience. This map of Kant's essential perspectival method makes it easier to determine how the three Critiques fit in to the overall Critical scheme,

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for it can be regarded as an analysis not only of the specific perspectives developed within each Critique, but also of the general perspectives, or standpoints assumed by each system. From the transcendental starting point of the first Critique, Kant proceeds counterclockwise to the practical standpoint in the second Critique. He then continues in the third Critique to an empirical standpoint. 165 The logical standpoint, though not itself a Critical one, forms the basis for the other three (see n. 158). The general picture of Kant's Critical System represented in fig. 2 is, of course, only a preliminary step towards a coherent interpretation of his philosophy. Fully substantiating my claim that Kant's philosophy is profoundly coherent (see §I) would necessitate applying this framework to innumerable problems and ambiguities which arise both in his writings and in those of his interpreters and critics. This is not the place to begin such an application; but I can at least suggest that it would be most suitable to proceed from here to an interpretation of the 'thorny' topics of the transcendental object (which would include notions such as the 'thing-in-itself', 'appearance', etc. )166 and the transcendental subject (i.e. the role of intuition, conceptualization, etc.). From there, it would need to be applied to a host of more specific problems; for it is only by constantly keeping in mind an interpretative framework for Kant's philosophy, such as the one I have offered in this chapter, that the interpreter's work on the many details of this System will perhaps enable it, as Kant hoped, to 'secure for itself the necessary elegance of statement'.167

Notes 1. P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1966), pp.38-42. 2. Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1781/1787; trans. N. Kemp Smith as Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd, 1929), p. A xxi. All references to this work are given in the traditional way, by citing the page numbers in the 'A' and/or 'B' editions. With one exception (see below), references to translations of other works by Kant will cite the pagination of the Berlin Academy edition. The translations used are listed below, together with the abbreviation to be used here, the original title and date, and the Academy volume number: Prolegomena: Prolegomena zu einer jeden kanftigen Metaphysik die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten konnen, 1783 (vol. 4); trans. L. W. Beck as Prologomena to Any Future Metaphysics (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1950). Grundlegung: Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, 1785 (vol. 4); trans. L. W. Beck as Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc., 1959). Kr. d. p. V.: Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, 1788 (vol. 5); trans. L. W. Beck as Critique of Practical Reason (Indianopolis, Indiana: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1956). Kr. d. V.: Kritik der Vrteilskraft, 1790 (vol. 5); trans. J. C. Meredith as Kant's Critique of Judgement (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1952). Entdeckung: Ober eine

69

Entdeckung nach der aile neue Kritik der rein en Vernunft durch eine altere entbehrlich gemacht werden soli, 1790 (vol. 8); trans. H. E. Allison as On a Discovery According to which Any New Critique of Pure Reason Has Been Made Superfluous by an Earlier One in The Kant-Eberhard Controversy (London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). Logik: Logik, ein Handbuch zu Vorlesungen, 1800 (vol. 9); trans. R. S. Hartman and W. Schwarz as Logic (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1974). Religionslehre: Vorlesungen aber die philosophische Religionslehre, based on lectures delivered in approximately 1783-4 (vol. 28.2/2); trans. A. W. Wood and G. M. Clark as Lectures on Philosophical Theology (London: Cornell University Press, 1978). The one exception mentioned above is Kant's Lectures on Ethics (London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1979), which is translated by L. Infield from the text of P. Menzer (Eine Vorlesung Kants aber Ethik, 1924); the Academy version of these lectures in vol. 27.1 is that of Collins, so I will cite the page numbers of the translation. 3. A 833/B 861. 4. R. P. Wolff, Introduction in R. P. Wolff (ed.), Kant (London: Macmillan, 1968), p. xix. 5. Kr. d. V., pp. 385-6. 6. B 1; ct. A 601/B 629. 7. A 701/B 729, B 161. 8. B 73. 9. A 50/B 74. I will not attempt in this essay to explain what Kant means by these 'terms, which he uses to describe the stages through which experience passes. Some of these stages would themselves be called 'experience' in ordinary language (e.g. conscious activity which is not focused on a given object, or the perception of an object which does not enter fully into conscious thought). But Kant would regard such 'experience' as 'merely subjective', and would give it some other name, such as 'imagination' or 'apprehension' (see, e.g., A 115-28). 10. That Kant replaces his initial explanation of this distinction with a clearer version in the second edition of the first Critique reveals his increasing awareness of the importance of specifying technical meanings for his primary distinction between knowledge and experience. 11. B 2-3; ct. A 2 and A 20/B 34. 12. A 20/B 34-A 211B 35; ct. A 50/B 74. Kant could have avoided using the word 'empirical' for both his pure-empirical and his empirical-transcendental (see §II~) disti?cti~ns simply by replacing it in the former case with 'impure'. AlternatIVely, It might have been even better for him to have identified pure knowledge with knowledge by reflection - i.e. with knowledge which arises out ?f thinking about ~xperience, whether or not is requires the intuition of an object III an actual expenence. The pure-empirical distinction would then dissolve into a contrast between non-reflective experience (empirical) and knowledge by reflection (pure), much like the one I shall develop in this chapter. Although any type of reflection would be regarded as yielding pure knowledge, different 'levels' of purity would have to be discerned (e.g. transcendental, empirical, etc.). However, since Kant does not use his terms in this manner, neither shall 1.

13. B 165-6; see also B 147 and B 218. 14. B xvii, A 157/B 196. 15. A 260/B 316-A 263/B 319. 16. B 5-6. Some reflective knowledge is, as we shall see in §III, neither pure nor empirical, but an 'admixture' of both (B 3).

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17. Kenneth T. Gallagher, 'Kant and Husserl on the synthetic a priori', KantStudien 63 (1972), 248-9. 18. B 2-3. 19. A posteriori knowledge can also be called 'necessary', but only when the necessity is derived to some extent from our experience of the laws of nature. For example, it happens to be a necessary truth that human beings cannot survive prolonged exposure'to temperatures above, say, 100°C; but this fact has only a posteriori necessity because its truth is discoverable only by reflecting on the structure of the natural world, and not on the laws of thought. 20. B 3-4. 21. As," for example, in H. A. Prichard, Kant's Theory of Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909), p. 4 n. 22. B 3, A 14/B 28-A 15/B 29. ~23. B x, B 4-5, A 92/B 124-A 93/B 125. 24. Rikizo Nakashima recognizes this ambiguity in Kant's Doctrine of the 'Thing in Itself' (New Haven, Conn.: Price, Lee & Atkins Co., 1989), but he regards it as a reason for denying the validity of Kant's overall Critical approach. Robert Pippin is one of the few interpreters of Kant who recognizes the importance of actually clarifying Kant's meaning. After stating 'it is not so clear just what this kind of formal knowledge is' (Kant's Theory of Form (London: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 20), he presents an exhaustive account of Kant's theory of form which helps clarify this ambiguity in detail (see, e.g., ibid., pp. 91, 94-5). He explains at one point that 'A priori does not mean "not derived from experience" but "known without appeal to experience" , ibid., p. 102). 25. B xvii; see also B xviii, B xxiii, A 128-9. 26. A 159/B 198. 27. E.g. A 12/B 26. 28. E.g. Kr. d. U., pp. 174, 475. 29. Kr. d. p. V., p. 12; see also Kr. d. U., pp. 167-8. 30. E.g. A 56/B 80-A 47/B 81. 31. R. P. Wolff, Kant's Theory of Mental Activity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 304. 32. H. J. Paton, The Categorical Imperative 6 (London: Hutchinson, 1967), p. 61. 33. E.g. Kr. d. U., p. 213. 34. Although these terms are 'as old as Euclid' (H. J. Paton, Kant's Metaphysic of Experience, vol. 1 (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1936), p. 130n.), and although Kant's usage was largely influenced by his predecessors, his peculiar formulation of this distinction is certainly original. It should also be noted that, according to Kant, 'knowledge' always' reveals itself in the form of 'judgements'. When he speaks, for example, of 'analytic judgements', he must be taken to mean roughly the same thing as when he speaks of 'analytic knowledge' (d. A 6/B 10 and A 1511B 191). Thus, although Wolff may be grammatically correct in pointing out that' "analytic" and "synthetic" are adjectives which modify the noun "judgment", while "a priori" and "a posteriori" are adverbs which modify the verb "know" and its cognates' (Kant's Theory, p. 113n.), the two sets of terms nevertheless have the same field of application. The empirical connotations of the word 'judgement' should not, as we shall see below, mislead us into limiting the analytic-synthetic distinction to the field of empirical judgements. 35. 'Analyticity and grammar', in L. W. Beck (ed.), Kant Studies Today (La Salle, Ill.: The Open Court Publishing Co., 1969), p. 245. 36. A 6/B 10; ct. Entdeckung, p. 232.

Critical Assessments 71 37. Entdeckung, p. 241; see also Allison, The Kant-Eberhard Controversy, p. 60. 38. Allison, The Kant-Eberhard Controversy, p. 54. 39. Logik, p. 103 (§21). 40. Lewis White Beck, 'Can Kant's synthetic judgments be made analytic?', in R. P. Wolff (ed.), Kant, pp. 5, 10; ct. A 8. 41. This holds, of course, only as long as the meanings of the words involved are already understood (see D. W. Hamlyn, 'Analytic and synthetic statements', in P. Edwards (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 1 (London: Collier MacMillan Publishers, 1967), pp. 108-9 and R. G. Swinburne, 'Analyticity, necessity, and apriority', Mind 84 (1975), pp. 266-7, 231). For someone who does not known what 'yellow' means, the proposition 'Yellow is a colour' would be informative; but, as will become evident shortly, it would then be synthetic for that person. Thus, as Garver rightly concludes, 'the clarification achieved through analytic propositions consists in presenting immediate inference possibilities pertaining to some word which expresses the concept that is being clarified' (,Analyticity and grammar', p. 266; see also S. Korner, Kant (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1955), p. 19). The inevitable existence of human ignorance renders inadequate those contemporary accounts of analytic knowledge in which it is equated with 'deducible from definition' (Beck, 'Can Kant's?', p. 19; d. Friedrich Waismann, 'Analytic-synthetic', Analysis 10.2 (r;>ecember 1949), 31). For as Beck aptly insists, Kant regards definition as 'a sUfficient, but ... not a necessary, condition for analytic judgments' because it 'f€iquires a completeness and precision that is often an unattainable ideal; yet its absence does not jeopardize the analytic judgments already made' ('Kant's theory of definition', in Wolff, Kant, p. 34). Therefore, 'a judgment logically implied by a definition is analytic, [yet] analytical judgments are not necessarily or even usually known or justified from definitions' (ibid., p. 36). 42. Although it is in virtue of the laws of formal logic that the informative content of analytic judgements is reducible to nothing (A 151/B 190; cf. Beck 'Can Kant's?', 19), it should be stressed that the analytic-synthetic distinction in general 'is not one of formal logic, for formal logic abstracts from the meaning of all terms' (ibid., pp. 10-11). This is the point Arnulf Zweig is making when he urges it is wrong to say 'that analytic judgments are deducible from the principle [of contradiction] alone': for the latter is intended by Kant 'as a rule to be used in testing a judgement and not as a premise from which other propositions are to be derived' ('ErUiuterung and Erweiterung in Kant's Theory of Analyticity', in Gerhard Funke (ed.), Akten des 4. lnternationalen KantKongresses Mainz, 6.-10.April 1974, vol. 2 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1974), p. 167). However, too much emphasis on the 'transcendental, non-logical nature of the analytic-synthetic distinction' (as in Allison, The Kant-Eberhard Controversy, p. 59; see also pp. 46-75) can be misleading, since, as I shall argue in § III, logical reflection is also a necessary requirement for the determination of analyticity in its Kantian sense. The distinction itself arises out of the relation between the transcendental and the logical, so it cannot accurately be described in terms of one or the other on its own. 43. Wolff, Kant's Theory, p. 188. 44. An exhaustive account of this variety is given by Hartman and Schwarz in their Translator's Introduction to Kant's Logic, pp. xxii-cxv. 45. B 11. 46. The debate was first formulated in these terms by W. V. Quine, who argued that in the analytic-synthetic distinction the entire 'difference is only one

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of degree' (Two dogmas of empiricism, Philosophical Review 60 (1951), 43). Subsequent arguments for and against this position have been too numerous to list here. 47. See G. Frege, The Foundations of Arithmetic, trans. J. L. Austin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1950), §§87-90. 48. Quine, 'Two dogmas of empiricism', 40. 49. ibid., 31. 50. A 7/B 11. 51. Quine, 'Two dogmas of empiricism', 40. 52. Prolegomena, p. 276 n.; A 337/B 395 n.; d. Charles Corr, 'Analytic and synthetic method in Kant', in Pierre Laberge et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the Ottawa Congress on Kant in the Anglo-American and Continental Traditions Held October 10-14, 1974 (Ottawa: The University of Ottawa Press, 1976), pp. 382-90. 53. See Hartman and Schwarz, Logic, p. xxvi. 54. See Logik, p. 149 (§117). 55. Cf. A. C. Ewing, A Short Commentary on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason 2 (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1950), p. 40 and Beck, 'Definition', p. 35. 56. Prolegomena, p. 263. 57. The Critical Philosophy of Immanuel Kant,2 vol. 1 (Glasgow: James Maclehouse and Sons, 1909), p. 269. 58. 'Analytic-synthetic', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 59 (1958-9), 185. 59. ibid., p. 188. Garver adopts a similar position when he says: 'whether a judgment is analytic or not depends upon the perspective or intention of the person making the judgment ... [Therefore] a proposition might be analytic to one person and synthetic to another person' ('Analyticity and grammar', p. 253; see also Newton Garver, 'The variability of the analytic', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 31 (1971), 409-14). 60. Graham H. Bird, 'Analytic and synthetic', Philosophical Quarterly 11 (1961), 227f. 61. T. N. Pelegrinis, Kant's Concepts of the Categorical Imperative and the Will (Zeno Booksellers and Publishers, 1980), pp. 182-3. 62. B 11; d. Prolegomena, p. 268. 63. Hartman· and Schwarz describe the 'analytic a posteriori' in terms of qualities which 'are part of the experience of the thing', but not ' "contained in" the concept' (Logic, pp. l-li). And Cameron suggests the proposition 'I have experience' as a possible candidate for this status ('God, Kant, and the transcendental object', in Funke (ed.), Akten des 4. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, vol. 2, pp. 353-4; see also Joseph C. McLelland, 'Philosophy and theology - a family affair (Karl and Heinrich Barth)', in H. M. Runscheidt (ed.), Footnotes to a Theology (Waterloo: Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion, 1974), pp.34-42. 64. Graham Bird is right when, in arguing against the common tendency to treat 'analytic' and 'a priori' as synonymous terms, he insists that 'analytic truths have something which synthetic [and some a priori] truths lack, namely something that mediates the bearing of ... facts on their truth' ('Analytic and synthetic', 234). But when he supposes this 'something' to be 'that analytic statements owe their truth to linguistic conventions ... [which] are adopted or rejected often as a result of the recognition of certain facts' (ibid., p. 235), he reveals that the analytic-synthetic contrast with which he is dealing is of the empirical type, discussed above. If, on the other hand, the distinction is regarded as one of reflective knowledge, two differences from Bird's account emerge. First, it turns

Critical Assessments 73 out that all knowledge, whether synthetic or analytic, depends on linguistic conventions. The importance of recognizing this fact is brought out by Schulze, one of Kant's closest disciples, when he explains that 'if one wishes to decide about a judgment, one must in each case know previously what should be thought under the subject as well as the predicate' (Selections from Schulze's Review of the Second Volume of the 'Philosophisches Magazin', trans. in Allison, The Kant-Eberhard Controversy, p. 175; d. Entdeckung, p. 232). And second, the mediating factor which truly distinguishes between analytic and synthetic (and so also between analytic and a priori) is that the former alone is wholly dependent for its validity (given the linguistic conventions) on the laws of logic. 65. A 1511B 190; d. Prolegomena, p. 267. 66. B 19. Roger Scruton's paraphrase of this question ('How can I come to know the world through pure reflection, without recourse to experience?' (Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 19) is misleading for two reasons: first, because (as we shall see in §IlI) all forms of reflection are related in one way or another to experience; and second, because synthetic a priori knowledge is concerned not with the world as such, but with the knowing subject. Prichard's paraphrase is more appropriate: 'How is it possible that the mind is able, in virtue of its own powers, to make universal and necessary judgments which anticipate its experience of objects?' (Kant's Theory of Knowledge, p. 33; d. p. 19; see also Allison, The Kant-Eberhard Controversy, p. 2). 67. Cf. W. Stegmliller, 'Towards a rational reconstruction of Kant's metaphysics of experience - Part I: Kant's riddle of experience', Ratio 9 (1967-8), 10 and Korner, Kant, pp. 22-7. 68. Although there is no direct equivalent for the word 'perspective' in Kant's terminology, I will use it in this essay as a technical term to encompass the meanings of a variety of expressions, such as 'point of view' (Denkart or Seiten betrachtet or Absicht or Beziehung; B xix, B xixn, B xxi, A 823/B 851), 'standpoint' (Gesichtspunkte or Standpunkte; B xixn, A 26/B 42), 'relation' (Verhiiltnis, A 280/B 336), and 'employment of the understanding' (Verstandesgebrauch, A 180/B 223, A 260/B 316). To adopt a certain perspective will simply mean to take up that method of reflection in the search for knowledge (A 2601B 316A 263/B 319). In the recent literature on Kant the central importance of the notion of perspective has been stressed by a number of interpreters (especially: Graham Bird, Kant's Theory of Knowledge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962); Gerold Prauss, Kant und das Problem der Dinge an sich (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1974); Henry Allison, 'Kant's transcendental humanism', The Monist 55 (1971), 182-207; Allison, 'Kant's refutation of idealism', Dialectica 30 (1976), 223-53; Allison, 'The non-spatiality of things in themselves for Kant', Philosophy 14 (1976), 313-21; Allison, 'Things in themselves, noumena, and the transcendental object', Dialectica 32 (1978), 41-76; and Pippin, Kant's Theory of Form), although the word itself is used only occasionally and untechnically (e.g. Allison, 'Humanism', 188, 194, 203; Allison, Controversy, p. 74; Allison, 'Refutation', 227-8; Allison, 'Transcendental object', 55; Pippin, Kant's Theory of Form, pp. 126n, 165, 168, 196, 198; see also A. C. Genova, 'Kant's complex problem of reflective judgment', Review of Metaphysics 23 (1970), 452; and Richard F. Grabau, 'Kant's concept of the thing in itself: an interpretation', Review of Metaphysics 16 (1963), 778). The problem to which the notion is most commonly (indeed, sometimes exclusively, e.g. in Pippin, Kant's Theory of Form) applied is that of the relation between the 'appearance' and the 'thing-in-itself', which I discuss in some detail in 'Six perspectives on the object in Kant's theory of knowledge', Dialectica 40 (1986).

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69. Logik, p. 94 (§6). 70. ibid. 71. Kr. d. V., p. 408; cf. p. 395; see also Fredrick P. van de Pitte, 'Is Kant's distinction between reflective and determinant judgment valid?', in Funke (ed.), Akten des 4. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, vol. 2, pp. 446, 451. 72. ibid., p. 445. Kant does not intend to degrade reflective judgement by calling it subjective, but only to distinguish between its 'inner' character and the 'outer' character of ordinary experience. Unfortunately, van de Pitte tries to blur Kant's distinction by arguing that determinant judgement depends on reflective judgement (ibid., p. 450). A theory of determinant judgement is indeed a product of reflective judgement; but this does not require philosophers to be aware of the possibility of reflection before they engage in determinant judgements (see below). 73. 'The empirical employment of pure reason', in Laberge, Proceedings of the Ottawa Congress, p. 483; see also Genova, 'Kant's complex problem', 457 and n. 68 above. 74. B 152; see also Kr. d. p. V., p. 139, and Grundlegung, p. 390. 75. A 85/B 117. 76. A 248-9/B 306. 77. A 11/B 25-A 12IB 26; cf. Paton, Kant's Metaphysic, pp. 226-30 and Ewing, Short Commentary, p. 29. 78. A 260IB 316-A 292/B 349. 79. In stressing the significance of transcendental reflection, Allison goes so far as to say it 'can be taken as equivalent to the critical method itself. Consequently ... the errors of all non-critical philosophers are traceable to a failure to engage in transcendental reflection' (,Transcendental object', 45). He neglects to point out, however, that this common failure is itself a direct c~r:se­ quence of failing to draw the distinction between the transcendental and empmcal perspectives in general - a distinction which he does draw in 'Humanism'. Kant himself makes this clear in the very title of the Appendix, which states that 'The amphiboly of the concepts of reflection' arises 'from the confusion of the empirical with the transcendental perspective [Verstandesgebrauchsl' (A 260/B 316; see also A 289/B 345-6). 80. A 11-12/B 25; cf. A 146/B 185 and A 157/B 196-A 158/B 197. 81. A 96. Propositions which claim to be transcendent are, as Ewing puts it, 'proved by showing that if they were not true of objects, these objects could not be experienced by us' (Short Commentary, p. 26). I discuss this method of proof by reference to the possibility of experience, which is now called 'transcendental argument', in two articles: 'Faith as Kant's key to the justification of transcendental reflection', Heythrop Journal XXV (1984), 448-52, and 'The radical unknowability of Kant's thing in itself', Cogito III (1985), 101-15. 82. Prolegomena, p. 293; cf. A 50IB 74-A 51/B 75. 83. A 2611B 317. 84. A 56/B 80-A 57/B 81. 85. Asher Moore, 'Composition', The Monist 55 (1971), 163. 86. A 293/B 349. 87. Such reflective experience contains certain aspects which can be traced back to a non-empirical source. In itself - i.e. before the philosopher actually comes to know it in transcendental reflection - the knowledge revealed in this 'tracing back' is not really 'knowledge' at all, but the necessary condition for the possibility of both reflective and determinant judgement, which every knowing subject naturally follows unconsciously.

Critical Assessments 75 88. Prolegomena, p. 373 n. 89. A 263/B 319. Unfortunately, aside from simply explaining what he means by 'transcendental', and arguing for the validity of various synthetic a priori knowledge-claims, Kant never gives a detailed explanation of how human beings are able to achieve such knowledge. This has made it easier for some philosophers to reject its legitimacy; but W. H. Walsh defends its possibility admirably, in my opinion, in Kant's Criticism of Metaphysics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1975), pp. 249-59. 90. A 156/B 195. 91. B14. 92. Cf. A 56/B 81 and A 260IB 316-A 2611B 317. 93. See, e.g. Bird, Kant's Theory, pp. 36-51, 140-8 and Allison, 'Humanism', p. 194. 94. ibid., p. 203; but see A 150IB 189-A 152IB 191. 95. A 262IB 31S-9. The neglect of the crucial difference between these two perspectives is one of the central contentions of Kant's polemic with Eberhard. See, e.g., Entdeckung, pp. 193-4. 96. A 269/B 325. 97. A 150IB 189-A 152/B 191. 9S. A 156/B 195. 99. A 56/B SO. 100. Cf. Zweig, 'Erlauterung and Erweiterung', in Akten des 4. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, pp. 169-70. 101. A 54/B 78. 102. A 52/B 76. 103. See Allison, The Kant-Eberhard Controversy, p. 174; Pippin, Kant's Theory of Form, pp. 98-9. 104. Entdeckung, pp. 242-5. 105. Douglas Odegard, 'Kant's use of "analytic judgment" " Kant-Studien 61 (1970), 336. 106. Entdeckung, pp. 244-5; Schulze, in Allison, The Kant-Eberhard Controversy, p. 171. Thus, Ursula Neemann is correct to say 'that the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions rests for Kant on two different kinds of real acts of cognition' ('Analytic and synthetic propositions in Kant and Bolzano', Ratio 12 (1970-1), 8-9). 107. Because logical reflection is ultimately rooted in experience (A 156/B 195), it is, of course, dependent on linguistic conventions (see nn. 41 and 64). But any analysis of these conventions as such is empirical, and has no part in determining a proposition's logical status as analytic or synthetic. Accordingly, Morris Weitz's assertion that a statement is analytic if 'it is a statement which [merely] expresses part of the everyday usage of the term[sl' ('Analytic statements', Mind 63 (1954), 492) is merely a variant of Quine's empirical perspective on the distinction (see §I1). 108. Weitz, 'Analytic statements', 493-4. 109. 'Analytic-synthetic', Analysis 10.2 (1949), 31. 110. Religionslehre, p. 1012 (p. 42 in the English translation). 111. This seems to be a legitimate name for this type of philosophical enquiry, even though Kant never to my knowledge describes the practical perspective in terms of 'reflection'. For he does connect the metaphysical perspective in general with reflection (A 310IB 366-7), and he frequently uses phrases which are equivalent to 'practical perspective' (e.g. B xxi, A 328IB 384; cf. n. 68 above). 112. See, e.g., A 633/B 661. Cf. §II above.

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113. B 18; d. Prolegomena, pp. 273-4. 114. A 310/B 366. 115. A 311IB 367. 116. Allison, 'Refutation', 237-8; d. A 571/B 599-A 573/B 601. Unfortunately, Kant is by no means univocal in his recognition of this fact. 117. A 320IB 377, A 326/B 382-A 327/B 383. 118. A 269IB 325-A 270/B 326, B 410, A 634IB 662-A 635/B 663. 119. A 280IB 336. 120. A 641IB 669. 121. A 297/B 354-A 298/B 355. 122. Grundlegung, p. 388. 123. A 327IB 383-4. 124. A 327IB 383-A 328/B 384. 125. B xxi; see also A 308/B 364 and A 663/B 691. 126. Kant himself lists"three such differences, which should have been enough to convince him of the need to classify practical knowledge with a different status: (1) 'A transcendental deduction cannot ... be effected' in respect to practical ideas; (2) rather than constituting empirical knowledge, they serve merely 'for the guidance of the empirical perspective'; and (3) their validity, though objective, is 'indeterminate' rather than determinate (A 663IB 691; see also A 669/B 697-A 670/B 698). 127. A 311IB 367-8. 128. Although it could be said that the knowledge yielded by practical reflection makes moral experience possible, it could be more accurate to say it makes moral experience coherent, or rational, by providing its justification, and that it consists in principles which ought to be followed universally. 129. Grundlegung, p. 388; see also A 802/B 830. 130. A 3111B 367. 131. A 602IB 630. Cf. Allison, 'Refutation', 237-8. 132. Allison, Controversy, pp. 72-3. 133. Grundlegung, p. 388. 134. A 328/B 384-5, my italics. 135. A 328IB 385-6. 136. B xxiv-xxxi. 137. Lectures on Ethics, pp. 2-3. In A 648/B 676 Kant again emphasizes their similarity by saying the unity produced by the ideas functions as 'a logical principle' and that it is 'necessary ... subjectively and logically, as method, but [not] objectively'. We must not interpret 'logical' too technically in this context, however, lest the distinction between the logical and practical perspectives be obscured by their similarity. An effective way of clarifying their relationship is to note that, whereas the understanding is the faculty of both empirical and transcendental reflection, reason is, as Wolff puts it, 'the faculty both of logic and of ethical judgment' (Kant'S Theory, p. 204). Accordingly, understanding yields primarily synthetic forms of knowledge, while reason yields primarily analytic forms (see, e.g, A 796/B 824). 138. A 150/B 189. 139. Grundlegung, p. 397; Kr. d. p. V., p. 32. 140. Grundlegung, p. 420; Kr. d. p. V., p. 21. 141. A 547IB 575. 142. Kant, Grundlegung, p. 388. 143. A 673IB 701; Kr. d. p. V., pp. 132, 134. 144. Grundlegung, p. 390; cf. A 547/B 575-A 548/B 576.

Critical Assessments 77 145. A 547/B 575. 146. B xxx. 147. A 824/B 852. 148. I discuss Kant's notion of faith in detail in my article, 'Faith as Kant's key', Heythrop Journal XXV (1984). 149. A 417/B 445 n. 150. A 797/B 825. 151. A 670IB 698-A 6751B 703. 152. Kr. d. p. v., p. 134. Statements such as this by Kant point up the inadequacy of labelling the product of practical reflection 'synthetic a priori'. 153. Eva Schaper, 'The K:;mtian thing-in-itself as a philosophical fiction', Philosophical Quarterly 16 (1966), 233. 154. Cf. A 674/B 702-A 6751B 703 and Kr. d. p. V., pp. 132, 134. 155. B xxii. 156. Herman-J. de Vleeschauwer, The Development of Kantian Thought, trans. A. R. C. Duncan (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd, 1962), p. 19. 157. A 672/B 700-A 673/B 701. 158. I have examined the logical structure of this model, and discussed more thoroughly the role it plays in Kant's System, in my article, 'The architectonic form of Kant's Copernican Revolution', Metaphilosophy 17 (1986). 159. That it is appropriate to locate logic below experience with the arrow of reflection pointing down towards it is intimated by Kant when he says logic always comes 'last of all' in the actual formulation (as opposed to the logical structure) of any science (A 52/B 76). 160. That it is appropriate for synthetic a priori knowledge to 'point to' experience in this way is clearly implied by a metaphor of Kant's, according to which 'pure a priori concepts ... must be in a position to show a certificate of birth other than that of descent from experiences' (A 86/B 119, my italics). 161. The 'perspective' in each case is the purposeful turning in experience towards one type of reflection or another. As such, it is, as it were, the meeting point of reflective and non-reflective experience and can be represented by a short line attached to each arrow. 162. ' "Dinge an sich" revisited', in Akten des 4. lnternationalen Kant-Kongresses, vol. 3 (1975), 94. 163. 'Transcendental object', p. 45. Of course, Kant himself often seems to underestimate the philosophical potential of the empirical perspective. By contrast,most philosophers would now agree that the only way they could fulfil Kant's hope (B viif.) of making philosophy (excluding logic) into a 'science' (at least, the way this term is used today) would be to adopt some type of empirical perspective - such as, perhaps, some version of verificiationism or linguistic analysis. Moreover, in all fairness to Allison, it is technically only the transcendental and practical perspectives which attempt to get back to the underlying roots of experience and which should thereby be described as 'Critical'. The other two are used by Kant mainly (but see above in text) as contrasts to help clarify the scope of the Critical perspectives; nevertheless, their role in this regard is essential to a coherent understanding of Kant's overall method. (Incidentally, this explains why, much to the dismay of Husserl and numerous others, Kant was satisfied with a fairly uncritical view of logic 'as self-sufficiently grounded in its apriority' (Debabrata Sinha, 'Phenomenology, vis-a.-vis Kant and neopositivism, on the issue of the apriori', Archiv fUr Geschichte der Philosophie 53 (1971), 49): Kant would not deny the legitimacy of investigating the foundations of

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and the justification for logical reflection, but such a task is secondary to the transcendental and practical tasks of the Critical philosopher.) 164. See A 6541B 682-A 6551B 683. Traditionally, metaphysicians regarded logic as applicable directly to experience, and therefore used it to make 'empirical-like' inferences about the transcendental reality. This would be plotted on to our map of Kant's methodology by reversing both vertical arrows. Thus, after adopting a transcendental perspective to mark out the metaphysical limits of experience, Kant had to turn traditional metaphysics on its head to preserve its valid elements. 165. Since 'judgement' for Kant is primarily an empirical activity (see Evans, 'The empirical employment', in Proceedings of the Ottawa Congress, p. 480 and Genova, 'Kant's complex problem', 457), a 'critique of judgement' is not so much a 'critique' in the strict sense (see n. 163 above), as an attempt to unite the two strictly Critical standpoints in a common, third standpoint (viz. the empirical) (A 155/B 194-A 156/B 195). As such, any class of experiences which involve judgement - not just the aesthetic and teleological - could have been chosen for this task. 166. I have applied my interpretative framework to this first area in my article, 'Six perspectives', Dialectica 40 (1986). 167. B xliv.

4 Kant's Notion of Transcendental Presupposition in the First Critique A. C. Genova

Recent attention to issues connected with so-called epistemological foundationalism has led to a resuscitation and reconstruction of Kant's notion of transcendental argument (T A) as a possible device by which foundational principles might be given an adequate epistemic justification. This recourse to T As has become controversial in its own right. The reconsideration of TAs has focused on four interrelated issues: (1) what Kant meant by a TA; (2) whether there are or could be any valid TAs; (3) if valid T As are possible, whether their validity requires the assumption of some version of a verification principle; and (4) whether there is some unique, logical form of argument that certifies a legitimate T A as a form of argument distinct from other forms of argument.! In this essay I shall discuss the relation between transcendental argument and transcendental presupposition. I shall argue that the notion of presupposition is the key to understanding Kant's rather cryptic formulation of a TA and that, consequently, an analysis of transcendental presupposition is a prerequisite to any relevant criticism of TAs with respect to their validity or logical form.

I

Issues related to epistemological foundationalism have been among those traditionally construed as definitive of the discipline of epistemology. The central questions of this discipline concern the analysis and justification of knowledge-claims; and when this justification involves claims with an imputed universality of scope and modality of necessity - that is to say, claims that have the epistemic status of fundamental principles - then the view that such principles admit of epistemic justification is epistemological foundationalism. This implies that there is a systematic epistemology

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that can delineate the foundations of the sciences, morality and art by legitimizing universal standards of rationality and objectivity for these disciplines and adjudicating their conceptual claims. Such principles can be construed as a body of core propositions that characterize or constitute a conceptual scheme with respect to a specified domain of objects. It is generally acknowledged that the relevant domain may be a real domain (like Kant's theoretic manifold of empirical objects or his practical manifold of actions and ends) or an ideal domain (a system of formal objects as in pure mathematics or logic). Of course, what might be called the epistemic force of such principles is itself a question of some controversy. Some philosophers relativize such schemes to variable contexts so that with respect to a successor context a different scheme applies, and sometimes they argue that there are alternative schemes for a given context. Others contend that the conceptual core is unique and invariable in relation to the specified context and even that the specified context is invariable. The former way of talking corresponds to what has been called 'modest foundationalism'; the latter, to 'immodest foundationalism'. What is clear is that Kant, with respect to the domain of possible experience, for example, was an immodest foundationalist. The central problem with epistemological foundationalism - especially with the so-called immodest kind - has to do with how foundational principles can be epistemically warranted in a way that has a reasonable chance of being convincing to an epistemological sceptic. An appeal to self-evidence has obvious shortcomings. Reliance on empirical derivation will not do because the point of foundationalism is that all empirical determinations presuppose the conceptual scheme. Logical deduction seems inappropriate as well, because if the principles were deducible from higher premisses then presumably they would not be foundational after all, and the problem of justification would simply re~emerge at the level of the supporting premisses. Are such principles merely conventional maxims expressive of alternative linguistic frameworks and selected, as needed, just in so far as they serve as successful instruments for our understanding of the world? But it can be shown that to invoke this option of pragmatic justification involves the countenancing of semantic rules in the framework's metalanguage, thus implying more fundamental concepts that are independent of the resulting framework and accordingly require justification in their own right. Confronted with these and similar difficulties, some contemporary philosophers, reminiscent of some earlier existentialist thinkers, apparently concluding that a rational solution to the problem of epistemic justification is hopeless, have adopted a non-rational one. Thus Richard Rorty argues that systematic epistemology is an impossible discipline, based on a fundamentally mistaken correspondence theory of truth and a pseudo-model of knowledge as the mirror of nature, to be replaced by

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the 'successor subject' of hermeneutics that equates truth with 'social coherentism' and seeks edification and self-expression through inter-paradigmatic conversation. 2 And Stanley Cavell, thinking that the standards of the epistemological sceptic are impossibly high, argues that the typical stance of the philosophical foundationalist occurs in a 'nonclaim context' - an artificial context in which no real claim is involved - and aside from the putative knowledge established by the certified procedures of science, there is no persuasive rational procedure to justify the general possibility of knowledge itself, and hence we must recognize that our general relation to the world is not a cognitive one but rather one of 'acceptance' and 'acknowledgement'. 3 These recent theses deserve detailed examination, but with respect to my present concerns it may be enough to note that they seriously compromise our traditional intuitions concerning both philosophical and scientific objectivity. Before a serious reconsideration of the nature of transcendental inference, it would be premature to forgo the possibility of a public, discursive account of the justification of foundational principles. Another group of contemporary philosophers, rather than abjuring epistemology as a possible discipline, no longer take so-called foundational questions seriously and instead espouse what they call 'naturalized epistemology'.4 For these epistemological naturalists problems about the justification of epistemic claims become translated into proposals for the justification of empirical knowledge in terms of the actual conceptual processes that characterize scientific enquiry and the reconstruction of the tacit paradigmatic models that underlie the history of scientific progress. But to limit epistemology to an account of the actual conceptual practices of scientists and then merely legitimize empirical claims with referei1ce to those standards still leaves open questions about the epistemic justification of the conceptual practices of science that serve as the standards. Moreover, since the epistemological naturalists typically interpret the notion of justified belief in terms of beliefs produced by some reliable causal process, their analyses appear to involve a serious conflation of the causal processes that produce belief as a psychological event with the normative practices of justification that ground true or epistemologically warranted beliefs. It is in this recent and contemporary context that the attempts to revive Kant's transcendental style of argument have emerged. T As are particularly promising in connection with foundational questions because the general idea of a TA is basically that of a self-referential, antisceptical style of argument whereby one tries to give epistemic justification to certain core propositions or primitive concepts by showing that they are necessary presuppositions for the possibility of meaningful discourse in relation to a specified domain of objects, so that sceptical attempts to deny these principles presuppose the principles as a condition

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of meaning, and, hence, such denials are self-defeating or disingenuous. This general formulation, although comparatively clear in the abstract, is not very helpful and can even be ~isleading. It is not very helpful because it is compatible with interpretations of T As that either are irrelevant to the central problem of epistemological foundationalism or are based on an illegitimate paradigm of a T A; and of course to that extent, they are not Kantian. Interpretations of T As are irrelevant when they construe a T A on the model of conditional proof, i.e. as a hypothetical argument that is relativized to a variable context so that there are alternative conceptual schemes presupposed by a given context dependent upon different possible interpretations of the context. s Such formulations are relatively uncontroversial because the purported T A has epistemic force only on condition that one accepts a particular interpretation of the context. But the central foundational problem concerns the justification of a unique, invariable conceptual core that is necessarily presupposed for all possible interpretations of the context. On the other hand, interpretations of a TA are illegitimate when they represent the argument as requiring a dubious verificationist premiss for its validity. It is then made to appear that all T As face an uncompromising dilemma: if a T A is to be valid, it must invoke a dubious verification principle and therefore is probably unsound; otherwise, the TA is invalid with respect to what it is supposed to prove. 6 The point is that on this analysis the purpose of a Kantian-modelled T A is correctly construed as that of establishing the so-called objectivity thesis, viz. that the categorial features of the conceptual scheme are not merely necessary presuppositions for meaning but also objectively valid. But then, because an illegitimate paradigm of a TA is employed, it is thought that the objectivity thesis requires a verificationist premiss. Without this premiss the paradigm under analysis will fail to refute the epistemological sceptic. At best it will only prove that the sceptic, like the rest of us, must think in conformity with a certain conceptual scheme for meaningful utterance, but not that it is true that objects exist independently and actually have properties corresponding to the categorial features of the scheme or that we know this to be the case. If so, the sceptic would be free to concede the subjective necessity of the scheme while still insisting that its objective necessity has not and cannot be demonstrated. Now I agree that a gratuitous verification principle would be a dubious premiss indeed, especially since the whole point of a Kantian TA directed to objectivity is to establish its conclusion quite apart from any verificationist premiss. On the contrary, an appropriately qualified version of a verification principle is a consequence, not a premiss, of the argument. But it is not the case that the absence of such a premiss, on that account, would necessarily make a T A invalid with respect to the objectivity thesis and be sufficient only to establish subjective necessity. To think so is to

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confuse what Kant called a metaphysical deduction with his transcendental deduction. To be sure, a metaphysical deduction is one kind of T A, but it does not have the burden of proving the objectivity thesis. Its task is the prior task of identifying and justifying the system of categories as an exhaustive and exclusive set of primitive concepts that correspond to the priori logical functions of judgement and that in turn function as necessary principles of synthesis for the empirical manifold of intuition. It does not prove, nor is it designed to prove, that the categorial concepts have objective validity in the sense required for the objectivity thesis. Its purpose, if you will, is to establish a subjectivity thesis or to yield, as Kant says, 'the transcendental clue to the discovery of all pure concepts of the understanding' (A 67/B 92-A 83/B 109). If so, these purely formal concepts are components of a unique conceptual scheme that satisfies Kant's logical requirements for the uniquely a priori, viz. 'unrestricted universality and unqualified necessity' (B 4). We would then have a unique, invariable core, but, after all, it consists only of concepts, not objects. But what right do we have to construe this core as constitutive of real objects in the world? Even if these categories are the necessary modes of the way we perceive, think and make judgements, why should we be obligated to think that the objects themselves are constituted in accordance with the subjective necessity of these categories? These sceptical questions are Kant's (A 85/B 117-A 911B 123, A 94/B 127, B 160, B 167-8, A 765/B 793). They express the central problem of his subsequent transcendental deduction, viz. providing a proof of the objectivity thesis. Thus, it is this second kind of Kantian T A - a transcendental deduction - that is the appropriate paradigm for an objective T A; and it should be clear that it must ground the objective relevance of the categories on some basis other than some verification principle whose presence would make the argument a blatant petitio. Consequently, if one's paradigm of a TA is an argument, in whatever guise,_that is acknowledged to be directed to the objectivity thesis but whose epistemic force is insufficient for objectivity just in virtue of the absence of a verificationist premiss, then such verificationist attacks on TAs are employing an illegitimate paradigm that is analogous to a metaphysical rather than a transcendental deduction. Finally, the general formulation of a TA with which I began this discussion can be misleading because the refutational context of responding to the epistemological sceptic is very conformable to the logical form of indirect proof, and this has led several critics to think that TAs must have this reductio form if they are to be genuine T As. 7 I have no serious objection to this general way of characterizing the logical form of some TAs, especially since most of the recent examples - Strawson's arguments for a public world of spatio-temporal material objects, Shoemaker's arguments about pain, Malcolm's arguments for the inconceivability of mech-

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anism, Hampshire's isolation of the presuppositions of language, etc. do occur in this refutational context. But I have argued elsewhere that legitimate T As having a logically indirect form are actually derivative from and presuppose a more fundamental form of TA that does not have the form of indirect proof. 8 The upshot is that once a TA proves the objectivity thesis, the refutation of the sceptic is easily accommodated by a shorthand indirect proof; but without the more fundamental objective T A the derivative indirect proof will not suffice on its own. As Kant says, in such proofs 'the game played by [empirical] idealism has been turned against itself' (B 276). Perhaps the best example of an indirect T A for Kant is found in the second edition Refutation of Idealism (B 275). But we are reminded explicitly by Kant that such indirect proofs will not suffice on their own because transcendental proofs (deductions) 'must never be apagogical, but always ostensive' where the latter is 'that which combines with the conviction of its truth insight into the sources of its truth' and where the former, 'while it can indeed yield certainty, cannot enable us to comprehend truth in connection with the grounds of its possibility' (A 789/B 817). Kant calls the apagogical 'an extremely easy mode of proof' because rather than 'reviewing the whole series of grounds that can lead us to the truth of a proposition by means of a complete insight into its possibility' we need only exhibit the overt logical form of contradiction (A 790/B 818-A 794/B 822). Confronted with a paradigm that typically manifests this indirect form, critics like Stroud, Gram and Walker not surprisingly find the argument insufficient to establish the objectivity thesis. In summary, the fact is that within the broad formulation of a T A there are four distinct transcendental styles of argument, each with a different purpose and structure. I label the first kind a hypothetical deduction, which is directed to justifying a particular conceptual framework as a necessary presupposition of some contingent interpretation of the domain of possible experience. The second is (to borrow from Kant) a metaphysical deduction, which provides an a priori justification of a unique conceptual scheme that is a necessary presupposition of all possible contingent interpretations of experience. The third - the kind for which Kant is notorious - is a transcendental deduction, which provides an a priori justification for the objective validity of a unique conceptual scheme. This is the argument that attempts to establish the objectivity thesis, viz. that there cannot be anything satisfying our requirements for experience without it also being the case that at least part of this is experience of objects and events which exist independently of the perceiver and conform to the specifications of the categorial scheme. The fourth kind of TA is a transcendental refutation, which has the form of a reductio and the purpose of refuting sceptical challenges to a preestablished scheme or one of its necessary conditions a scheme that

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typically admits of independent justification via a hypothetical, metaphysical or transcendental deduction. I have been arguing that the only legitimate paradigm of a TA is a transcendental deduction and that it is only this kind of argument that has relevance to the central problem of epistemological foundationalism. Accordingly, in the next section, I shall essentially use the abbreviation T A as synonymous with 'transcendental deduction'. For similar reasons to those reviewed above, it is also this kind of argument that must be the primary analysandum with respect to the recent issues concerning the validity and logical form of TAs. Other paradigms are inappropriate because they either represent irrelevant kinds of TAs or represent as complete what is actually an incomplete stage or derivation from a complex argument that is taken out of context and, consequently, cannot serve as a basis for generalizations about the nature of TAs. In the sequel I shall argue that, with respect to a TA construed as a Kantian transcendental deduction, it is Kant's notion of transcendental presupposition that makes a TA a unique form of argument.

II

Let us first take account of Kant's general criteria for TAs and then sketch the general form that these criteria, as well as other relevant considerations, suggest for Kant's central TA in the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant's basic criteria are threefold. First, there is the requirement that TAs always involve rational justification (Rechtfertigung) of a right or warrant with respect to a claim (Anspruch) - a question of right (quid juris) concerning the employment of certain a priori synthetic principles; and this is contrasted to contingent and problematical derivations that establish a claim on the basis of factual evidence - a question of fact (quid facti) that concerns how we actually come to possess a certain concept (A 85/B 117). This rules out what Kant called an 'empirical deduction'. It also rules out some versions of what I have called a hypothetical deduction and poses serious questions involving naturalistic fallacy issues for the recent epistemological naturalists. Second, there is the apagogical-ostensive distinction already alluded to and which rules out the mode of indirect proof as the primary form for a TA (A 789/ B 817). Stated positively, this limitation comes to this: a TA must include premisses that directly appeal to and overtly manifest the exempli cation of transcendental principles in possible experience; and this requirement that there be at least one epistemic premiss having reference to possible experience is precisely what Kant means by calling this form of proof 'ostensive' and 'direct (A 790/B 818). Third, Kant says that a transcendental proposition (what is proved to have objective validity and be a

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necessary presupposition for the possibility of experience) is always a principle (Grundsatz) , never a theorem (Lehrsatz) , because 'it has the peculiar character that it makes possible the very experience which is its own ground of proof, and that in this experience it must always itself be presupposed [vorausgesetzt],; and further, such principles are established 'not however directly from concepts alone, but always only indirectly through relation of these concepts to something altogether contingent, namely, possible experience' (A 737/B 765). Now the puzzling issues relating to the logical form of a TA derive essentially from the third-mentioned criterion - the principle-theorem distinction. What exactly is Kant ruling out here, and what are the implications for the general form of a TA? The criterion has at least two crucial and equally controversial, interrelated components: (1) the idea that a T A is somehow significantly different from the standard deductive proof of what Kant calls a theorem because the justified transcendental principles are 'presupposed' by the premisses and (2) the idea that the transcendental principles which are proved by the T A have a modality of necessity while the epistemic premisses are 'altogether contingent'. Indeed, in my judgement, it is precisely these two aspects that make a T A transcendental, viz. that the conclusion somehow expresses a modality of necessity, but only in relation to what is contingent (possible experience), and that the transcendental principles expressed in the conclusion are presupposed, in some way, for the possibility of the epistemic premisses. Kant's principle-theorem criterion has led some philosophers to argue that a TA must be some unique, non-inductive, non-deductive form of argument - or perhaps that the premisses must 'presuppose' the conclusion in some way or other that makes saying that a conclusion of a TA is deductively entailed either flatly false or not quite right. 9 This puzzle has generated arguments designed to show that Kant's criteria fail to distinguish distinctively transcendental from deductive proofs and, moreover, that no possible argument can satisfy Kant's criteria and succeed in doing what a TA is supposed to do.1° After all, if the argument is not deductive, then how can it have the epistemic force Kant claims for it? But if it is deductive, how can the a priori synthetic principles be entailed? If the premisses were empirical, the conclusion could not be non-trivially a priori; if the premisses were analytic, the conclusion could not be synthetic; and the premisses could not contain an a priori synthetic component, because that there is such a connection is presumably what is supposed to be proved. Besides this difficulty associated with the modality of a TA, there is the related difficulty associated with the postulated presuppositional connection between the premisses and the conclusion of a T A. The difficulty has to do with what it can possibly mean to say that in a T A a transcendental principle is a presupposition of its own ground of proof.

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The problem is that there appears to be no satisfactory interpretation of this notion as a logical relation between propositions that will serve as the form of such an argument. Let P designate the epistemic premiss(es) and Q the transcendental principle. Then what does it mean, in this context, to say that P presupposes Q? I shall rely here on the collective insight of recent criticsY 'P presupposes Q' cannot mean (as Arthur Pap thought in his The A Priori in Physical Theory) simply 'Q is a necessary condition for P', i.e. 'P implies Q' no matter how one reads 'implies'. If 'implies' means 'materially implies', then 'P' would presuppose any true proposition, and any false proposition would presuppose Q - not at all what transcendentalists have in mind. On the other hand, if 'implies' means 'logically entails' and this is synonymous with 'presupposes', then a TA would be a straightforward deduction from premisses (proof of a theorem) and would have no distinctive logical form at all. Further, the previously discussed problem of modality would arise. Besides, since the Q in a TA is supposed to be an a priori principle (one which is necessarily true independent of empirical considerations), it must remain true regardless of the true value of P; but in the locution 'P logically entails Q' we affirm the truth of Q only on the condition that P is true. Nor can 'P presupposes Q' mean 'Q is a necessary condition for the truth or falsity of P', as Strawson's analysis, in his Introduction to Logical Theory, suggests. If this means 'P or not P materially implies Q', then, again, it would still be the case that every true proposition would be transcendentally presupposed; and moreover, since 'P or not P' is a tautology, it is vacuous to say that it has necessary conditions because it is invariably true. Alternatively, if Strawson's interpretation means' P or not P logically entails Q', then' Q' would also have to be analytic (a tautology) because tautologies entail only tautologies hardly the character Kant wanted for a transcendental principle. Finally Strawson's criterion cannot be rendered 'P and not P entail Q' because then, since 'P and not P' has the form of a contradiction, any proposition whatsoever would be presupposed. In any event, the non-equivalence of presupposition and entailment, as far as I am concerned, was satisfactorily established by John Austin: if 'John's children are bald' presupposes 'John has children', then, unlike entailment (pace Russell), it is the case that 'John's children are bald' and 'John's children are not bald' alike presuppose 'John has children', and it is not the case that the negation of 'John has children' presupposes 'John's children are not bald. '12 For entailment, if 'The cat is on the mat' entails 'The mat is under the cat', then it is the case that 'The mat is not under the cat' entails 'The cat is not on the mat', and it is not the case that both 'The cat is on the mat' and 'The cat is not on the mat' alike entail 'The mat is under the cat.' If we are to make any progress on the problems of modality and

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presupposition in T As, it is necessary to fill in what I would call K~nt's transcendental context. Let us assume with Kant that the relevant domain for his transcendental principles is possible experience. Then Kant's TA must show that a certain conceptual scheme possessing certain categorial features applies objectively to and is logically presupposed by the domain of possible experience. That is to say, the argument must show that, with respect to this specified domain, certain concepts are objectively primitive, i.e. are non-trivially instantiated whenever any other concept is instantiated, or that certain propositions are objective core propositions, i.e. are true whenever any other propostion is true or false. Because the domain is possible experience and Kant requires the proof to be 'ostensive', we have already seen that the proof must contain at least one epistemic premiss that expresses one's consciousness or awareness of subjective experience. As Gram correctly points out, this premiss must express Kant's 'weak' sense of experience - experience as the SUbjective apprehension of appearances prior to any necessary synthesis in accordance with rules and which corresponds to his weak sense of an object as the intentional content prior to necessary categorial synthesis (A 91/B 123) - not his 'strong' sense of experience as the synthetic connection of appearances in so far as this synthesis is necessary and grounded on the transcendental notion of an object as 'that in the concept of which the manifold of intuitions is united' (B 127).13 The premiss set must express the weak sense of experience because otherwise the T A would be circular; and the conclusion must refer to the principles that ground the strong sense of experience because otherwise it would lack objective validity. But Gram is wrong in thinking that this condition for a valid T A can never be satisfied because there is an unbridgeable gap between the SUbjective validity of the premisses and the supposed objective validity of the conclusion. To think that this is the case, as I argued above, is due to the employment of an illegitimate paradigm for the testing of TAs. At any rate, the strategy of a TA is to show that in order to account for experience in the weak sense (something that is presumably conceded on all sides) it is necessary to presuppose experience in the strong sense. In addition to the required epistemic premiss( es), the premiss set will contain other premisses - perhaps some propositions already proved by the preceding metaphysical deduction, some analytic propositions and some uncontested empirical generalizations. It is generally acknowledged that a conceptual scheme must provide criteria for reference and predication so that the objects of the specified domain can be identified and something can be said about them concerning their properties and relations. 14 In other words, the scheme must provide criteria specifying what is to count as an object in the domain, how to individuate a distinct object from all others in the domain, how

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to differentiate objects from their properties and relations, and sometimes how to distinguish the subject of experience from the experience of the subject. These criteria are formulated as fundamental principles or rules that constitute the logical structure of the scheme. I take it that, for Kant, the criteria for individuation are provided by the concept of space and time (the a priori forms of intuition), while the criteria for the identification and interrelation of the objects of the domain are provided by his system of categories. Of course, the justification of the objective validity of the forms of intuition and the categorial concepts - respectively the sensible and intellectual conditions of representation - is not completed until the problem of application is resolved (what Kant deals with in his discussion of schematism in the first Critique and his analogous treatment of the 'typik' of practical reason in the second Critique) because, with respect to any conceptual scheme, one will need some procedure by which the purely formal framework can be related to the concrete, material domain. And finally, a transcendental consequence of the argument will be that there is a mutual reflexivity between the schematized categories (the principles) and the relevant domain, because, just as the principles are presupposed for the intelligibility of the domain, there is no justified procedure for the employment of the principles beyond the scope of the domain. Thus a complete TA is a very complex argument involving at least five stages: (1) the identification of the relevant manifold, (2) the justification (metaphysical deduction) of the conceptual scheme as an a priori presupposition, (3) the justification of the objective validity of the scheme, (4) the application of the scheme to the manifold and (5) the limitation of the principles to the specified domain this last feature being the consequence that I earlier suggested can be construed as a qualified version of a verification principle because cognitive meaning, for Kant, thereby becomes tied to possible empirical verification. A careful reading of Kant's criteria will show that, just as Kant rules out indirect proof as the primary vehicle of transcendental inference, he equally does not rule out the deductive form of argument for T As. I contend that the conclusion of a T A is logically entailed by the premisses and that, therefore, a TA has a deductive form. What makes a TA unique is not its non-deductive form but the fact that it is a very special kind of deductive argument, viz. one that proves that transcendental principles are objectively valid, necessary presuppositions for the truth of the epistemic premisses that ground the deductive proof. The truth of the conclusion makes possible the very argument that justifies it. This is why TAs are seen as self-referential,15 Kants theorem-principle distinction does not distinguish deductive proof from some unique, nondeductive form of proof; nor does it require that in the proof of a principle the premisses are related to the conclusion by the relation of

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presupposition rather than entailment. I contend that the primary, entailed conclusion of the proof is some proposition to the effect that certain principles are objectively valid presuppositions for the possibility of experience. To be sure, there is a relation of presupposition between these justified presuppositions and the epistemic premisses, and the TA is designed to show deductively that this is the case. It is also true, of course, that Kant construes the transcendental principles as having a modality of necessity - they express a priori synthetic propositions. But the entailed conclusion of the T A is not it,self an explicitly modal proposition in the context of the argument. Given this primary conclusion, the argument can then be extended so as to detach the transcendental principles. Since the conclusion affirms (in part) that the principles are necessary conditions for the possibility of experience, this can be reformulated as saying, 'If experience is possible, then ... ', where ' ... ' is a placeholder for a statement consisting of the conjunction of the principles. Then, with the assertion 'Experience is possible' (because it is actual), the principles follow. I am arguing that the TA's conclusion - the proposition that expresses the objectivity thesis - states what is the case, not what necessarily is the case. There is a definite sense in which it is correct to say: that these principles (or any principles, for that matter) are objectively constitutive for human experience is, after all, something that could have been otherwise. The argument cannot establish the logical impossibility of all other alternatives; it can only show what is the case for human cognition. Given the sensible nature of human intuition, the discursive nature of human cognition and the general descriptions of experience expressed in the epistemic premisses, the conclusion is entailed. In the context of the argument the relevant issue of modality concerns the transcendental principles, not the claim to the effect that they are transcendental principles. This becomes clearer if we consider how this modality comes about in a transcendental context like Kant's. Since the categorial propositions at issue are universal principles having existential import with respect to the objects of the contingent domain, they cannot be true in virtue of their analyticity but must be synthetic. But if true, neither can they be a posteriori statements, because they express conditions to which all a posteriori statements about objects in the relevant domain must conform. Consequently, with respect to what is true within the domain that presupposes the conceptual scheme, these statements are a priori. Thus the principles are a priori synthetic statements, and that is the only way that sense can be made of this modality in the transcendental context. This is the point of Kant's specification that in a TA the proved principle is necessary, but only in relation to what is contingent. On the one hand, the argument shows that the objective possibility of a certain kind of logical connection - an a priori synthetic connection - follows

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from the epistemic premiss set precisely because the sensible and intellectual conditions for representation (and, therefore, possible experience) are the source of the x that grounds and mediates the subject-predicate tie in an a priori synthetic proposition (A 766/B 794, A 782/B 10). On the other hand, the argument shows that the objective, synthetic unity that results from categorial synthesis in accordance with rules is a presupposition for the epistemic presmiss set that describes possible experience. That I am aware of a succession of experiences as experiences and as experiences of a certain kind and as all belonging to me presupposes the general condition under which experiences can be united in one selfconsciousness (B 133) - 'the analytic unity of apperception is possible only under the presupposition of a certain synthetic unity' (B 133-4). Am I suggesting that the conclusion of a TA is contingent? This would be paradoxical indeed, because, if contingent, must it not then be empirical? And if empirical, then an empirical justification of transcendental principles (precluded by Kant's first criterion) would seem legitimate after all. But this way of formulating the problem is already confused. It can be disambiguated only be keeping in mind how the real modalities applicable to factual knowledge are generated in Kant's transcendental context. It is only in this special context that the distinctions between analytic and synthetic, concept and intuition, appearances and things-in-themselves, the 'ought' and the 'is', mechanism and teleology, real possibility, actuality and necessity, etc. are meaningful, all of which are due to the 'peculiarities of our cognitive faculties' - the fact that human intuition is sensible and human understanding is discursive. 16 Thus the modality of an a priori synthetic proposition is both a function of its relation to the specified domain of objects and the given character of the cognition in virtue of which these objects are apprehended. Questions about real or objective modality (not merely logical modality), taken in abstraction from Kant's transcendental context, lack significance. This is why critics and commentators have often been puzzled about the status of the propositional content of the Critique itself, especially that found in Kant's Transcendental Logic. The conclusion of a T A is a component of what Kant calls 'transcendental knowledge' - knowledge about the preconditions of knowledge. In Kant's words, 'Not all cognition a priori must be called transcendental, but instead only that by means of which we recognize that and how certain ideas (perceptions and concepts) are a priori applied and possible.'17 We would probably call this 'metaphilosophical' knowledge today, but this second-order knowledge about the precondition (presuppositions) for the possibility of human experience cannot be a priori synthetic in the relevant sense in which the justified principles themselves are shown to have this modality in a TA. The point of the TA is to demonstrate, for the domain of possible experience, 'that and how' the objective validity of principles

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with this modality is a transcendental presupposition for the domain. And part of the point of the transcendental context of the Critique itself is that the notion of modality, in abstraction from this context, is a purely logical notion. To construe it as more than that is to confuse logic with fact - an error Kant attributes to Leibniz and other rationalists. So from the perspective of Kant's transcendental context it is correct to say both that (1) transcendental knowledge (including the conclusion of a TA) is 'contingent' in the sense that, from the standpoint of all'possible worlds, it is logically possible that the conceptual scheme could have been otherwise than it is but not that it is a posteriori and that (2) such knowledge is 'a priori' or even 'a priori synthetic' in the sense that, from the standpoint of the actual world, it expresses what is preconditional with respect to possible factual knowledge but not that it is thereby exempt from the need to justify its objectivity. In any event, it is not the case that a conclusion of a T A (if it is construed as a priori synthetic) is a modal statement in the logical context of the T A. It is not a statement with 'It is necessary that ... ' as a prefix. Its a priori modality derives from Kant's transcendental context, not from the premiss set of the TA. The relevant reason why transcendental principles (Kant's Axioms, Anticipations, Analogies and Postulates) are not the primary conclusions of TAs is not that they would then have an unwarranted modality in the logical context of T As but that the first order of business for a T A is to establish a second-order truth about the principles. Kant's principle-theorem criterion means no more than this: (1) the conclusion of a T A, unlike the proof of a theorem, is not merely a deductive consequence but a deductive consequence that expresses something that makes possible the truth of its premisses; (2) such conclusions, unlike theorems, must be based on at least one epistemic premiss - 'not directly through concepts alone but indirectly through relation of these concepts to something altogether contingent, namely, possible experience' because the TA must appeal to the actual exemplification and employment of the principles in possible experience; and (3) the principles are not derived analytically from higher principles of the same kind with prior epistemic authority because there are none, but theorems are so derived from higher-order theorems or axioms. If what I have argued is correct, the problems concerning the modality of the conclusion and the purportedly unique presuppositional relation between premisses and conclusion in a TA are not to the point. To say that a conclusion asserts that certain other propositions (in relation to a specified domain) have a modality of necessity is not to say that the conclusion itself is a modal proposition. Similarly, to say that certain foundational principles are presupposed by the premisses of an argument that justifies the principles is not to say that the conclusion of the argu-

Critical Assessments 93 ment is itself related to the premisses by the relation of presupposition rather than entailment. Although we have seen that a T A is a complex affair and therefore the analysis of abstract expressions like 'P presupposes Q' can hardly suffice for the clarification of the notion of transcendental presupposition, nevertheless, I suppose that the upshot of my position can be stated as follows: if, once more, P designates the premiss set and Q a transcendental principle, I reject the idea that the general, logical form of a TA is best conveyed by 'P presupposes Q.' I say that this more appropriately designates the form of the primary conclusion and that the paradigmatic form is better represented as 'P entails "P presupposes Q." , If so, then if Q is a presupposition for P, this does not entail that the primary conclusion of the TA, viz. 'P presupposes Q', is itself a presupposition for P. It could only entail this if the truth of the presupposition Q entailed that P presupposes Q. But, clearly, to say that the truth of a presupposition entails the statement expressing its presuppositional relation is counterintuitive for our use of 'presupposition'. 'John has children' does not entail' "John's children are bald" presupposes "John has children." ,

HI The argument of the preceding section supports the thesis that the key to understanding Kant's transcendental style of argument is the relation of transcendental presupposition. It is this that gives a TA its selfreferentiality when the argument is treated as a valid sequence of statements in the formal mode, and it is this that grounds the reflexivity between possible experience and transcendental principles when the argument is treated in terms of what the argument is about in the material mode. Of course, the epistemic force of the argument rests on the fact that the justification is meant to hold for all possible interpretations of human experience (within the transcendental prameters of sensible intuition and discursive understanding) and pertains to an invariable conceptual core. It is not then a hypothetical deduction that achieves its epistemic force in reference to particular interpretations of experience correlated with variable or alternative conceptual schemes. In order to complete my analysis of Kantian presupposition, it is necessary for me to say something more about presupposition as a relation between statements and then relate Kant's notion of presupposition to what I have called his transcendental context. In the context of the analysis of arguments, it is fashionable to treat presupposition as a relation applicable to sentences, statements or propositions in the formal mode, not as a relation that applies to what these

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linguistic and conceptual items are about. Presuppositions typically function as preconditions for the truth value, meaning, existence or successful assertion of sentences where this depends on the kind of presupposition purported to be involved. I suppose that the central question concerning presuppositions concerns whether there are any. For example, Russell maintained that a proper analysis of so-called presuppositional sentences would show that this notion is expendable because the presumed presuppositional relation is no more than logical entailment. If one argued, with Strawson, that 'The King of France is wise' presupposes (not entails) that the King of France exists (because otherwise 'The King of France is wise' would have no truth value and therefore would not achieve statementhood), Russell would counter that part of the meaning of 'the King of France is wise' includes the assertion that the King of France exists. Any meaningful sentence already has its truth value, and, consequently, cases of so-called presuppositional failure , are simply cases of false statements requiring no special accommodation. Frege, of course, also adopted the presuppositional account for sentences containing names or singular referring expressions, but felt that presuppositional failure was a defect endemic to natural languages - something that simply would not occur in an ideal canonical notation where the conditions for wellformed formulae would rule out the occurrence of singular expressions that might fail in reference. Many contemporary linguists and semanticists, although agreeing that a provision must be made for the role of presupposition in natural language, reject the notion that presuppositional failure is a defect of natural language rather than being due simply to the limitations on our knowledge of the world. 18 In my judgement attempts to dispense with any distinct notion of presupposition become plausible to the degree that the analysis of language is abstracted from the contextual background in which language as an activity occurs. I mean that if sentences are treated exclusively in terms of their propositional content and construed as symbolic representations that already convey meaning, then the conditions for meaningfulness and the conditions for statementhood become identified. If a sentence is meaningful through its conformance to a set of minimal rules that determine what is to count as a sentence in the language, then the sentence is a statement that expresses a proposition, i.e. has a truth value. But if, instead, like Frege, Strawson, Austin, Grice or Searle, the analysis of language treats sentences as signs of linguistic acts that occur in the contextual setting of natural language now construed as an institutional fact, then the condition for statementhood will be stronger than the abstracted conditions for meaningfulness; or alternatively, meaning conditions will not include considerations of illocutionary and perlocutionary force, the conditions for the performance of speech acts, etc. It is in this context, I contend, that the notion of presupposition becomes

Critical Assessments 95 particularly prominent, because the relation of presupposition obtains only with reference to some contextual background, conventional or otherwise. Accordingly, in the linguistic context, presuppositionalists typically divide into two groups: semantic presuppositionalists and pragmatic presuppositionalists. Presuppositions are generally seen as implied propositions which certain sentences are not primarily about but the truth of which is, in some sense, a precondition for the utterance of those sentences; and one central theme that runs through the literature is that the presuppositional component is a dimension of meaning that is distinct from the kind of semantic content that constitutes the typical domain of truth-conditional semantics. 19 Semantic presuppositionalists analyse presupposition in the linguistic context of the syntactic and semantic rules of a natural language and treat the problem of presupposition as part of the broader problem of explaining the compositionality of sentence meaning. 20 From this perspective, as Kantz says, presupposition is a semantic property of a sentence that applies to the Fregean senses of certain declarative sentences - a necessary condition for the statementhood of certain sentences, viz. the condition of successful reference and a semantic presuppositionalist like Katz attempts to relegate all legitimate cases of presupposition under the heading of Fregean existential presuppositions. Pragmatic presuppositionalists typically construe presuppositions either as preparatory conditions for speech acts (following Austin and Searle) or as conventional as conversational implicatures (following Grice). 2! Here the presuppositional context is or is part of the external institutional or social overlay in which natural language exists, and presupposition is interpreted as a necessary condition for successful communication. Searle delineates necessary conditions for utterance acts, the propositional acts of reference and predication, and illocutionary acts - input-output conditions, propositional content conditions, sincerity conditions, preparatory conditions, meaning conditions, and so on. Grice's notion of an implicature can be grasped by saying that if a speaker's utterance of P licenses the inference that Q even though Q expresses content beyond what the speaker actually said, then the speaker has implicated that Q and Q is an implicature of P. Such implicatures occur in virtue of certain lexical items and grammatical constructions in P that contribute to its conventional meaning in the context of a language game or in virtue of certain particularized and generalized conversational contexts in which the participants co-operatively observe maxims of discourse. Examples of conventional presupposition would involve certain particles like 'even' or 'also' and certain factive verbs like 'realizes', 'remembers' or 'knows'. Thus, 'Even Carter likes Reagan' presupposes that others like Reagan; and 'Carter remembers that he lost the election' presupposes that Carter

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lost the election. Presumably, existential presuppositions that accompany quantifiers would also fall into this class. On the other hand, a conversational implicature is exemplified by saying that 'Carter criticized Reagan for his radical cut in social programmes' presupposes that Reagan made a radical cut in social programmes, or by subjunctive conditionals which are said to presuppose the falsity of their antecedent clauses. The range of linguistic phenomena associated with the semantic and pragmatic accounts of presupposition resist rigid classification and criterial precision. Controversy concerning the existence and character of presupposition as a component of sentence meaning persists among linguists, philosophers and mathematicians. The reason for this, I think, is that very diverse phenomena have been labelled 'presuppositions' depending upon the context of analysis and the philosophical orientation of particular advocates. What is relatively clear is that those who subscribe to the legitimacy of this notion do seem to adopt, in some sense or other, a 'use' theory of meaning that addresses the question of meaning in terms of some broader context that provides the basis and criteria for the role of presupposition in natural language. If so, then the notion of presupposition is primarily tied to a contextual background. This is why neither the relation of material implication nor logical entailment is sufficient in itself to capture the logical character of presupposition. The well-known logical behaviour of these relations is quite perspicuous when expressed as 'P implies Q' or 'P logically entails Q' because they do not depend, at least in the same variable and indefinite way that presupposition does, on contextual background. When one is asked what 'P presupposes Q' means, the question begs for a context. The presuppositional context might be specified in terms of the formal semantic and syntactic rules for a natural language, the regularities that informally govern a particular language game, the pragmatic maxims that guide successful communication, or the conceptual framework that embodies the preconditions for knowledge. Presuppositions are inherently contextual. A second common feature of presuppositional occurrence is that the logical behaviour of a presupposition will depend on what it is that the presupposition is a presupposition for. Meaning? Truth? Truth value? Successful assertion? The existence of something? If we do not specify that in virtue of which one statement presupposes another, any attempt to explicate the logical behaviour of a presupposition will be futile. Once again this points to the uselessness of the paradigm 'P presupposes Q' taken in abstraction from its context and without any specification about what is at stake. For example, with respect to the existential presupposition expressed in the claim that 'John's children are bald' presupposes that John has children, it is true that 'John's children are not bald' has the same presupposition; but with respect to the sincerity condition for

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speech acts expressed by the claim that my saying 'The cat is on the mat' presupposes that I believe it is; it is not true that my saying 'The cat is not on the mat' still presupposes that I believe it is. Presuppositional failure in the first case results in a lack of truth value; in the second case we simply have infelicity with respect to assertion. In other words, all presuppositions carry a relevance condition. That is to say, unless we know what it is that is relevant to the presuppositional relation, the function of the presupposition remains opaque. A third feature of presupposition is its non-equivalence with implication. For reasons already discussed, we have seen that 'presupposes' cannot be synonymous with 'implies' in either the material or the logical sense. But this is not to say that if P presupposes Q, then P cannot imply Q. It seems clear that a presupposition is a necessary condition for that which presupposes it - either a material or a logical necessary condition. I think that all presuppositions are material necessary conditions, and some presuppositions are logical necessary conditions. It is tempting to say that the presupposition is logically entailed when it derives from the meaning of certain lexical or syntactic elements in the presupposing sentence, while it is only materially implied when it derives from criteria related to a broader contextual background. Thus it would seem to be logically inconsistent to say 'Even Carter likes Reagan, and nobody else does.' But to say 'The King of France is wise, and he doesn't exist' is, as Strawson says, a different kind of absurdity. If the presupposition relevant to the latter example were entailed, then its falsity would entail the falsity of 'The King of France is wise', contrary to the presuppositionist claim that this sentence would merely lack truth value. Finally, the most-pronounced characteristic of presupposition is that it grounds the real possibility of what it is a presupposition for. It makes possible whatever corresponds to the content expressed in its relevance condition, and it does this on the basis of criteria generated in its presuppositional context. Of course, it is also the case that any deductive conclusion, as a necessary condition for the truth of its premisses, 'makes possible' the truth of the premisses in the sense of that which must be true if something else is to be true. Similarly, the premisses 'make possible' the truth of the conclusion in the sense of that which is sufficient for the deduction of the conclusion. 'Makes possible' like 'logically prior', is equivocal. Presuppositions are logically prior to what presupposes them and make possible what is presuppositionally relevant in a much stronger sense than what is conveyed merely by their status as necessary conditions. They make something possible in virtue of their status as real as something which must already be the case if what preconditions presupposes them is to be the case. They are logically prior not merely with respect to their truth-conditional relation to what presupposes them

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but in the sense that they constitute the foundation for the possibility and compositionality of that which presupposes them. In short, presuppositions are principles. Now Kant's TA is not an inductive generalization grounded on the pervasiveness of spatial-temporal and categorial features. It is not an argument based on our psychological inability to imagine a different scheme with different conditions. It is not an Aristotelian intuition of an essential connection between objects and categorial features. It is not a relativized or conditional argument applicable to some postulated or conventional interpretation of experience. It is not a deductive argument based on higher cognitive principles that possess higher epistemic authority. It is not a case of pragmatic abduction concerned with how well a given conceptual scheme 'fits' an already cognized system of facts. It is deductive argument that attempts to establish the irreducible and nonderivative conditions for its own possibility that has applicability to any possible human experience, and, consequently, it must justify the original legitimacy of objectively valid first principles from within a framework that presupposes the principles, and that is why it is called 'transcendental'. So the transcendental principles are the presuppositions, and the presuppositional context, for Kant, is the epistemological (not linguistic) context in which knowledge claims are normatively justified. But it is not merely an epistemological context in which particular empirical claims are warranted, but a transcendental context in which the preconditions for the very possibility of such claims are justified. If so, then the relevance condition associated with these presuppositions will pertain to the existence, meaning, truth value and assertability of any affirmative or negative epistemic premiss that describes any aspect of experience. The objectively valid principles will be constitutive of and foundational for the possibility and compositionality of any epistemic description. Still, this description of the argument only tells us that but not how it proves the objectivity thesis. It is still vulnerable to the sceptical charge that at best it can only prove that the foundational scheme is subjectively necessary, not objectively valid. In that case, it would be merely an elaborate, conceptual smoke screen for a metaphysical deduction. How does it demonstrate that independent objects exist and actually conform to the requirements of the categorial scheme? Note that this sceptical challenge construes the problem in terms of proving that a subjectively necessary conceptual apparatus corresponds to the characteristics of utterly distinct, pre-existent objects. If the TA is to succeed, Kant needs a way to replace this paradigm of metaphysical realism with a paradigm in which this formulation of the sceptical challenge makes no sense. What the argument needs is a way of making a logical connection between the cognitive conditions of knowledge and the concept of an object in general. It needs to show that there can be no consideration of objects

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independent of the conditions of our knowing them. And what is crucial to see is that this requirement cannot be merely a postulate or assumption that is then imposed on the sceptical paradigm but rather must be a constituent of an entirely different epistemological paradigm. If this can be provided, then the kind of epistemological gap between subjective necessity and objective validity that worries the metaphysical realist will be closed. For Kant the required paradigm is provided by the fundamental orientation of the Critical Philosophy, viz. what Kant called the Copernican Revolution in Philosophy (B xvi-B xviii/A 126). This metaphor corresponds to what I have called Kant's transcendental context, and it is precisely what serves as the presuppositional context for a T A. It is this epistemological context that yields the criteria for transcendental presupposition. The point is that the Copernican paradigm provides a new criterion of objectivity. What is to be construed as an object of knowledge is no longer something that is given independently of our cognitive activity. It is not such objects that are given, but only 'representations' (Vorstellungen), which then must be submitted to the epistemological test of whether or not they can be 'referred to an object', i.e. can be connected with each other in certain ways in accordance with necessary rules applied by the activity of judgement. This move is analogous to Wittgenstein's replacement of word-world connections with word-word connections. Thus Kant's picture is not one of an epistemological isomorphism between categorial concepts and distinct things-inthemselves. When representations represent an object (in contrast to being merely subjective), there is not thereby some correspondence between representations and some non-epistemic, transcendent entities, but instead a determinable nexus between the representations and other representations in accordance with universally shared rules. So the object referred to in Kant's 'reference to an object' is an epistemological resultant - an epistemic product of the activity of intelligence - and that is why Kant can say that an object is 'that in the concept of which the manifold of intuition is united'. Kant's transcendental context entails the principle that, from a philosophical point of view, questions concerning the possibility, conditions, and limitations of knowledge are logically prior to any determination of the existence and nature of the objects known. As Kant interprets it, this principle, when applied to human cognition, involves two interrelated facets: the first is a philosophical prescription concerning method that stipulates that what is to be construed as an object of knowledge will be a function of what results from a prior analysis of the epistemological conditions of human cognition; the second is apparently an empirical generalization, but nevertheless is so well established that Kant treats it as uncontestable (B 146), viz. that, unlike what he calls an 'intuitive

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understanding', human cognition is conditioned by sensibility, and, consequently, the content of experience will consist of objects in so far as they appear, not objects independent of the conditions of cognition. On the other hand, given the fact that human cognition has this character, it is an analytic truth (the 'first principle' of understanding) that such cognition must proceed by combining representations into a synthetic unity under concepts (B 139, B 145); i.e. it involves the application of discursive concepts to an empirically given content. Now these statements, as well as the general Copernican framework in terms of which they make sense, mayor may not appear as explicit premisses in a Kantian TA. The important point is that they constitute the general fabric of the trancendental context without which the argument could not demonstrate the status of transcendental principles as objectively valid presuppositions. Kant's transcendental context provides the following criterion for transcendental presupposition: given the nature of human cognition and our Copernican paradigm of objectivity, what is it that must be acknowledged as a necessary condition that functions as a pre-established foundation that makes possible and accounts for any empirical descriptions of the content of experience? The answer: the schematized principles of the categorial scheme that function as the universally normative rules for the synthesis of representations in general. Subjective descriptions of experience are possible only if objective judgements of experience are possible. And each transcendental principle - because of its universal scope, its logically unique function with respect to the kind of synthesis it grounds and its status as a cognitive principle (Grundsatz) of the highest epistemic authority - will be sui generis. This is what Kant meant by the rarely noticed additional criterion for transcendental proofs, viz. 'that only one proof can be found for each transcendental principle' (A 787/B 815). I have argued that the primary vehicle of transcendental inference is neither an indirect proof nor a non-deductive proof. It is a deductive argument having a self-referential character that is designed to establish (1) the relation between a priori synthetic connection and possible experience, (2) the objective validity of the transcendental principles and (3) their status as transcendental presuppositions for the possibility of experience. Kant's strategy is to show that it is not possible to account for the experience we do have without it also being the case that our experiences at least sometimes refer to real objects that conform to the categorial scheme (previously identified in the metaphysical deduction) and exist in a single objective spatio-temporal world. I have also maintained that this thesis - the objectivity thesis - is vulnerable to the challenge of the epistemological sceptic only if we ignore the transcendental context of the argument that derives from Kant's Copernican paradigm. But within this transcendental context the TA can succeed in making an identifi-

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cation between the formal unity of the concept of an object in general and the formal unity of any object that can possibly fall under this concept. As Kant says, 'The conditions of the possibility of experience in general are likewise conditions of the possibility of objects of experience, and for this reason they have objective validity in a synthetic a priori judgment' (A 158/B 197). In the light of this, if sceptics still persist, in this context, with their claim that the argument shows only subjective necessity, then they are either disingenuous or have missed the point. For Kant has shown that it literally no longer makes sense to ask whether or not there are external objects that really correspond to the scheme. It is not as if there are or might be utterly distinct 'objects' that might be recalcitrant to the imposition of the categorial scheme. The invariable conceptual core is not justified in relation to some postulated system of things-in-themselves having an onto logically independent status, but it is the conceptual core that grounds our notion of an independent object. As we have seen, to argue on the basis of the mere logical possibility that things could have been different from what they are is beside the point. That there might be unknowable objects in some other possible world is irrelevant. What would count against Kant's argument is the possibility that objects might not conform and yet still be objects in our world or in any world possible for us. But if the formal principles are the norms for objectivity, then what counts as an object for us is identical with what counts as a possible object for us. The sceptic needs to show that there might be real objects in our world that are unknowable, and needs to do this while assuming an invariable conceptual scheme that entails the opposite. Thus the sceptic's claim that the TA has demonstrated only what we must believe (not what we can know) employs a non-epistemic notion of an object and sets systematically unsatisfiable conditions on the use of 'know'. If so, then the validity of Kant's TA does not depend on any verificationist premiss to the effect that we can know that utterly distinct objects exist and conform to the categorial scheme. To interpret Kant's argument as one that establishes a unique categorial scheme as a necessary subjective apparatus which is then somehow imposed on things-in-themselves is to transform Kant's argument into a transcendental sUbjectivism which must then bridge the gap between necessary concepts and independent entities. It is to construe Kant's scheme as a system of innate ideas that characterizes individual minds and makes contact with reality only in virtue of some kind of ontological guarantee or pre-established harmony - an interpretation that Kant explicitly warns us against in his 'Outcome of the Deduction of the Categories of the Understanding' (B 166-8). To offset this, Kant employs a biological analogue to characterize his transcendental idealism (empirical realism) as a system of 'the epigenesis of pure reason'. The point is

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simply that an object is an epigenetic product of the use of intelligence just in so far as this use conforms to the universal criteria that ground the objectivity of judgements in general. Many recent critics who fault Kant for his failure to prove the objectivity thesis either confuse his transcendental deduction with his metaphysical deduction or misinterpret his doctrine as a form of what I have called transcendental subjectivism. They want some ontological guarantee, over and above the conclusion of his central TA, that objects exist and conform to the framework as a matter of fact. But given the transcendental context of the argument, the notion of 'fact' makes sense only as an epistemological function of the framework. Such objections therefore play on a non-epistemic notion of an object that transcends the possibility of any determination in the argument and as such invoke the very doctrine - transcendental realism - to which Kant's whole Copernican paradigm is an alternative. The realist metaphysics in these objections would need a defence in its own right at an entirely different level. That is fair philosophical game, and I do not deny that the paradigm of metaphysical realism can be defended, but this would take entirely different kinds of argument from most of those that have been mounted against the immodest epistemological foundationalists.

Notes 1. This study was supported by University of Kansas General Research Allocation #3059-20-0038. All quotations from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason are taken from the Norman Kemp Smith translation (London, 1956). 2. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979). 3. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). 4. Examples include: Jay Rosenberg, 'Transcendental arguments revisited', Journal of Philosophy 72 (1975), 621-2; W. V. Quine, 'Epistemology naturalized' and 'Natural kinds', in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969); Alvin Goldman, 'Discrimination and perceptual knowledge', Journal of Philosophy 73 (1976), 771-91; Alvin Goldman, 'What is justified belief?', in G. Pappas (ed.), Justification and Knowledge (Boston: Reidel, 1979), pp. 1-23; and Hilary Kornblith, 'Beyond foundationalism and the coherence theory', Journal of Philosophy 72 (1980), 597-612. 5. See, e.g., Stephan Korner, 'The impossibility of transcendental deductions', in L. W. Beck (ed.), Kant Studies Today (La Salle, Ill: Open Court, 1969), pp. 230-49; Richard Rorty, 'Verificationism and transcendental arguments', Nous (1971), 3-14; and Rosenberg, 'Transcendental arguments revisited'. 6. See Barry STroud, 'Transcendental arguments', Journal of Philosophy 65 (1968), 241-56; Judith Thomson, 'Private languages', American Philosophical Quarterly 1 (1964), 20-31; M. S. Gram, 'Must transcendental arguments be spurious?', Kant-Studien 65 (1974), 304-17; and Ralph C. S. Walker, Kant, The

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Arguments of the Philosophers{ ed. Ted Honderich (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 130. I 7. For example, Stroud, in 'Transcendental arguments', argues that if Strawson's argument for the continued existence of material objects is straightforwardly deductive (not indirect), then it is not a transcendental proof (p. 247); see also M. S. Gram, 'Transcendental arguments', Nous 5 (1971): 15-26; and Henry Ruf, 'Transcendental logic: an essay on critical metaphysics', Man & World 2 (1969), 38-64. 8. 'Transcendental form', Southwestern Journal of Philosophy 11 (1980), 25-34. 9. Besides Stroud, Gram and Ruf, see Patricia Crawford, 'Kant's theory of philosophical proof', Kant-Studien 62 (1961-2), 257-68; Martin Kalin, 'What makes an argument transcendental ?' Idealistic Studies 7 (1977), 172-84; and T. E. Wilkerson, 'Transcendental arguments', Philosophical Quarterly 20 (1970), 200-12. 10. Gram, especially his 'Must transcendental arguments be spurious?', 315-16. 11. This 'collective insight' is essentially a composite of the various objections set forth by Gram, Crawford and Ruf, but I do not attribute to them my formulation of the composite. 12. John Austin, How to Do Things with Words (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 49-50. 13. Gram, 'Must transcendental arguments be spurious?', 316. 14. See Korner, 'The impossibility of transcendental deductions'. I have followed Korner's general description of the requirements for a conceptual scheme. 15. For an excellent discussion that emphasizes this aspect of self-referentiality, see RUdiger BUbner, 'Kant's transcendental argument and the problem of deduction', Review of Metaphysics 25 (1975), 453-67. 16. Critique of Judgement, 'Dialectic of the teleological judgment', secs. 76 and 77, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951), pp. 249-58. 17. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, sec. 13, remark 3; and the first Critique (A 71). 18. Jerrold J. Katz, 'A solution to the projection problem for presupposition', in Choon-Kyu Oh and David A. Dinneen (eds.), Syntax and Semantics, vol. 2, Presupposition (New York: Academic Press), pp. 91-126. My characterization of the way the semantic presuppositionalist sees his contrast to Russell is basically taken from Katz. 19. See Lauri Karttunen and Stanley Peters, 'Conventional implicature', in Oh and Dineen, (eds.), Syntax and Semantics, vol 2, Presupposition, pp. 1-3. 20. Katz, 'A solution to the projection problem for presupposition', p. 91. 21. See Karttunen and Peters, 'Conventional implicature'; and H. P. Grice, 'Logic and conversation', text of William James Lecture at Harvard University (unpublished manuscript, 1968), excerpted in D. Davidson and G. Harmon (eds.), The Logic of Grammar (Encino, Calif.: Dickenson, 1975), pp. 64-75.

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5 Kant's Paralogisms Patricia Kitcher

Most philosophers know that Kant devoted a chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason to criticizing his predecessors' views about our knowledge of the soul (or self or mind). Since the self is an intrinsically important topic and absolutely central to Kant's philosophy, it is both surprising and lamentable that we still have no clear and persuasive account of the 'Paralogisms of Pure Reason'.1 I hope to provide an interpretation of the central arguments of this chapter which both explains Kant's objections to 'Rational Psychology' and reveals some of the insights and difficulties of his own position on the self and self-knowledge. The key to this interpretation is the claim that the discussions of the Paralogisms chapter depend on and complement the account of the self defended in the Transcendental Deduction. I think previous studies have failed to come to grips with this chapter because they have not recognized the extent to which Kant's remarks offer caveats about his own theory of the self as well as criticisms of the views of others.

I The Paraiogisms: a first look

The 'Paralogisms of Pure Reason' is the only chapter of the Dialetic which Kant rewrote for the second edition of the Critique. Kant's 'Paralogisms' are certain arguments about the self or soul which he attributes to 'Rational Psychologists', probably Descartes and Leibniz and their followers.2 I will consider only the first three Paralogisms, which concern the substance, simplicity and persistence of the soul and which are substantially the same in both editions. The Fourth Paralogism in A offers a defence of Transcendental Idealism which Kant wisely rethought and relocated in the second edition. Since I think this material was misplaced in the original, I will not discuss it or the cursory reflections about

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materialism with which Kant filled the vacant slot in the second edition. Like Kant's own, my discussion will focus on the First Paralogism. Once we have finally achieved an understanding of Kant's treatment of that argument, it will be a relatively easy matter to disentangle his discussions of the other Paralogisms. Kant's official account of his critique of Rational Psychology is not very helpful. Both editions claim that the First Paralogism exemplifies the fallacy found in all the Paralogisms, ambiguous middle. 3 That, the representation of which is the absolute subject of our judgments and cannot therefore be employed as determination of another thing, is substance. I, as a thinking being, am the absolute subject of all my possible judgments, and this representation of myself cannot be employed as predicate of any other thing. Therefore I, as a thinking being (soul), am substance. (A 348 (compare B 410-11» In the first edition this point is elaborated by the suggestion that terms are used 'transcendentally' in the major premiss and 'empirically' in the minor premiss and conclusion (A 420-3). When Kant talks about the category ['substance' and related terms] being used 'transcendentally' in the major premiss, he means that it is being used in independence from any conditions which would enable us to tell whether objects we encounter fall under this concept. 4 The category is used 'empirically' if it is used by reference to a 'schema' which somehow enables us to tell which objects fall under it. This is not the appropriate forum to tackle the difficult questions of what providing a schema for a category, or an ordinary concept, amounts to or explains. s The following relatively uncontroversial point will enable us to understand Kant's criticism. At a number of places Kant says that the 'pure' category is just the empirical category without its schema (A 241-2, A 242-3/B 300-1, A 248/B305). Or, reversing the point, Kant regards the 'schematized' category as including a (needed) further specification of the 'pure' category. Thus empirical substances would be a subset of transcendental substances, empirical subjects a subset of transcendental subjects, and so forth. The argument is invalid because although all transcendental subjects might be transcendnental substances, that in no way guarantees that a particular empirical subject must also belong to the subset of empirical substances. While Kant's criticism of ambiguous middle through a confusion of empirical and transcendental concepts is superficially clear, his position becomes murky as we probe more deeply. In the second edition he elaborates the charge of ambiguous middle by claiming that the minor premiss involves a peculiar use of terminology (B 411a). Whether the

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major premiss employs transcendental concepts and the minor involves empirical concepts or vice versa, the argument would still be invalid by virtue of ambiguous middle. Moreover, either way, Kant's diagnosis of the error of this Paralogism would accord perfectly with the general moral of the Dialectic that non-trivial metaphysical errors are always the result of mixing transcendental and empirical assertions. Nevertheless Kant's unheralded reversal on how the error occurs is puzzling. Besides the confusion about how exactly the transcendental-empirical mix-up occurs, Kant's analysis is seriously inadequate because it provides no justification for his other general claim about the illusions of the Dialetic. Dialectical illusions are supposed to be 'natural', 'inevitable', 'unavoidable' and still capable of entrapping 'even the wisest of men' even after their illusory character has been exposed (A 298/B 355, A 339/B 397). One could dismiss this advertisement for the Dialectic as hyperbole, which to some extent it is. (While the Ontological argument may be subtle and slippery, it is hard to see this piece of reasoning as something that naturally occurs to most people.) Nevertheless there is no question that we are strongly motivated to reason about the self, and Kant genuinely seems to believe that such reasoning involves special difficulties which make it unusually prone to error (A 398-9, B 411-12a, B 422). To fulfil the stated mission of the Dilatectic, and even to justify his own interest in these arguments, Kant needs to explain why these particular arguments are so attractive and so treacherous. Thus far Kant has provided only a confusing account of why we draw the conclusion given the premisses, viz. because we fail to notice or understand the ambiguous terminology. But why accept the premisses? 1 think Kant regards the major premiss as acceptable, because it states a commonly accepted definition of 'substance'. He mentions this definition several times prior to the Paralogisms chapter, without providing any explanation or defence (B 149, B 288, A 241/B 300). The fact that this definition also occurs in the writings of Leibniz, also without explanation or defence, suggests that it enjoyed some currency at this time. 6 The view that Kant regards the major premiss as acceptable because it states a definition is further supported by a criticism which is suggested in A and emphasized in B: the Paralogisms err by parading tautologies as substantive truths (B 407-8; see also below, pp. 108, 114). I think this explains why Kant believes that philosophers, if not the ordinary person, would find the major premiss of this argument, and the major premiss of the Third Paralogism, acceptable (see below, p. 117). What about the minor premiss? The crucial interpretative fact about this chapter is that Kant endorses, on some reading, the minor premisses (and conclusions) of all three Paralogisms (A 349, A 350, A354, A 356, A 363, A 365). If we can figure out the basis of Kant's own support for these claims, that should provide needed clues about why he regards

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these arguments as compelling and important. Presumably it will also shed some light on the empirical or transcendental status of the minor premisses. Finally, an understanding of the significance of the minor premisses for Kant should give us some insights about any interesting or 'unavoidable' mistakes that these arguments might contain. In the first edition Kant endorses the First Paralogism'S minor premiss in an unequivocal but somewhat confusing statement: Now in all our thought the'!' is the subject (in which thoughts inhere only as determinations) [and this 'I' cannot be employed as the determination of another thing]. (A 349 [my parentheses and brackets]) This is a rather odd passage, because the minor premiss is a rather odd claim. The quotes around'!, in the first phrase suggest that Kant's claim concerns the representation'!'. This reading is supported by the fact that the major and minor premisses both appear to be about representations. (See above, p. 105). However, the phrase I put in parentheses appears to be part of a claim that thoughts (themselves) are modifications of, or belong to, an I (itself). Finally, the bracketed clause seems to confiate talk of representations and talk of things. While this passage seems quite muddled, much of the confusion can be dispelled if we recall that in the Transcendental Deduction Kant often expresses the claim that all my judgements must be attributed to me, or more generally that any judgement must be attributed to a self, as the claim that the representation '1 think' can be attached to all my judgements. (See especially B 131.) While this mode of expression may court confusion, the claims are materially equivalent: if and only if for any judgement, 1, it must be possible to attribute that judgement to some subject, then it must be possible (for someone) to construct a true sentence 'I think (that) 1.'7 What happens in the passage at A 349 and in the presentation of the Paralogism is that Kant combines these two ways of putting the point in one sentence: '1 ... am the absolute subject of all my possible judgements ... this representation ['I think'] cannot be employed as the predicate ... ' (A 348). In the first edition of the Deduction, Kant makes the claim that all judgements must be attributed to a self in the material mode (A 107, A 116, A 122, etc); the formulation in terms of the representation 'I think' is dominant only in the second edition. 1 think Kant adopts the second formulation in the later edition precisely because it enables him to provide a partial explanation of why we mistakenly believe that the self is a substance. One of his simpler points about the First Paralogism is that we confuse the fact that this representation, 'I think', could be an invariant feature of all judgements with the notion that the self is perpetually intuitable (A 350).

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I have interpreted the minor premiss and A 349 as claiming that all thoughts must be attributed to a self and that different thoughts must be attributed to a common self by appealing back to the Transcendental Deduction. However, this appeal is necessary only to sort out the apparent representation-object confusion. s There is ample evidence in the text of the Paralogisms chapter to support the basic interpretation. At A 350 Kant reiterates the point that different thoughts belong to a common I four times: ' "I" [is] the common subject in which it [all thought] inheres', 'The "I" is indeed in all thoughts', '[the "I"] is the constant logical subject of thought', 'in it [consciousness] all our perceptions must be found'. The puzzling feature about interpreting Kant's endorsement of the minor premiss does not arise in reading Kant, at least at this superficial level, but in figuring out why commentators have passed over this obvious interpretation. Jonathan Bennett suggests the solution as he relegates this point to a subsidiary role in his treatment of the First Paralogism: the claim that all my judgements are mine is true but trivia1. 9 Kant's own remarks in the second edition versions of the Transcendental Deduction and the Paralogisms chapter encourage this attitude, because he describes the claim that all my judgements are mine as 'identical', 'analytic' (B 135, B407; see below, p. 114). If any proposition is analytic, 'all my judgements are mine' is analytic. However, what Kant endorses at A 349 and A 350 is not the minor premiss itself, 'I am the subject of my judgements', but a related synthetic claim, 'different judgements belong to a common subject'. If the latter claim is true, then the former claim will not only be true (by definition), but true of actual subjects and judgements. Still one might wonder about Kant's interest in the synthetic claim, unless one recalls that Hume attacked this very claim with ingenious if an inconvincing argumentation and that the rejection of this claim has disastrous consequences, not just for his own theory, but for virtually any epistemological theory. I think that Bennett, and others, have failed to pursue the obvious interpretation of Kant's endorsement of the minor premiss because, wrongly believing that Kant was unaware of Hume's attack on personal identity, they have not seen the claim that I am the subject of all my judgements as relating to any interesting issues. In explaining how Kant came to be aware of some of Hume's discussions in the Treatise by reading excerpts in James Beattie's Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, Norman Kemp Smith claims that Beattie makes no mention of Hume's views on the self.!O But Kemp Smith is simply wrong about this. Beattie lambasts Hume's denial of the self, in his usual fashion, by quoting substantial pieces of the text and then chipping away at them with a blunt instrument. l1 Further, Johan Tetens describes Hume's position and offers a reply to it in his Philosophische

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Versuche aber die menschliche Natur und Ihre Entwicklung. 12 Hence I think there is no doubt that Kant was aware of Hume's criticisms of personal identity. Once this point is granted, Kant's insistence that different mental states must be attributed to a unified self can be taken at face value, and understood as a declaration of an anti-Humean position on the self. The fact that Kant does not mention Hume by name in this chapter should not give us pause: Hume's name does not appear in the discussion of causation in the Second Analogy either. Although reading the discussion of the First Paralogism against the background of Hume's attack on personal identity casts some light on Kant's remarks, serious questions remain. Kant affirms a doctrine Hume rejects, but without offering any counter-arguments to Hume's attack. Further, in the absence of any argumentation about why Hume is wrong, it is difficult to know precisely what Kant means to assert in claiming that different mental states belong to a common subject. One possible interpretation is clearly incorrect. Although Kant supports the Rational Psychologists against Hume on this point, he does not mean by this claim what they mean by it, namely, that different thoughts belong to a simple substance. Nor does he make his claim on the same basis that they make theirs, namely, the evidence of introspection. (For the attribution of these positions, see A 345/B 403; for Kant's rejection of them, see A 347/B 408.) Viewed on its own, the First Paralogism presents a peculiar philosophical position. Kant seems to be denying Hume's scepticism about the self by endorsing a doctrine he attributes to the Rational Psychologists, while denying both their interpretation of this doctrine and their reasons for holding it. Unless Kant is guilty both of begging the question and indulging in obscurantism, he must believe that the reader will be able to follow this discussion by recalling earlier material attacking the Humean position and explaining his own conception of the self. As virtually all commentators have noted, Kant identifies the I of the Paralogisms chapter with the I of apperception. (See, e.g., A 400/B 409.) This suggests that the place to look for the missing background material for the first Paralogism is the Transcendental Deduction, where the principle of the unity of apperception is introduced and defended. Since this part of the Critique is notoriously difficult, it would be a lengthy undertaking to present and defend a detailed interpretation of Kant's theory of apperception and its relation to Hume's attack on the self, which, in any case, I have already done elsewhere. 13 Instead, the next section will very briefly summarize Kant's reply to Hume and his own positive views about apperception as the latter emerge from the Transcendental Deduction. Bringing together the various points of this section, I have made the following argument: (1) the key to understanding the significance of the

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First Paralogism is to understand Kant's support of its minor premiss: (2) at a superficial level we may understand Kant's support for this premiss as support for the claim that different judgements are to be attributed to a common subject; (3) since Hume denied this claim, it is reasonable to assume that Kant's endorsement of it amounts to a rejection of Hume's views about personal identity; (4) thus to move beyond a superficial reading of Kant's support of the minor premiss to a deeper understanding of what exactly Kant finds valuable and difficult in the First Paralogism, we need to know exactly what he affirms in rebutting Hume; (5) since this material is not contained in the Paralogisms chapter, we need to go back to the Transcendental Deduction of apperception. If this argument is correct, then with a clear picture of Kant's reply to Hume in hand, we should be able to return to the First Paralogism and answer the various questions about the argument which this section has left dangling. It will turn out that this material will also enable us to work out quite complete accounts of the other two Paralogisms as well.

H The results of the Subjective Deduction In a previous paper I have argued for four theses about Kant's remarks about the self in the Transcendental Deduction and their relation to Hume's celebrated denial of personal identity. The first claim was that the legitimate task of that aspect of the Deduction which Kant describes as the 'Subjective Deduction' (A xvii) is to provide a characterization of the necessary properties of a subject in response to Hume's attack on the self. My second point was that Kant is in complete agreement with Hume about the failure of introspection to divulge a continuing self. He makes this point very clearly in both editions of the Deduction and he reiterates it in the Paralogisms chapter, twice in A and once in B. (See A 107, B 133-4, A 350, A 381, B 413. ) My third thesis concerned the interpretation of Hume's denial of any real or necessary connection among mental states which would ground the practice of attributing them to a common subject. I argued that what Hume denies is any relation of existential dependence among mental states. This interpretation formed the backdrop for my fourth and most crucial thesis, that Kant successfully meets Hume's challenge by showing that we cannot attribute mental states Uudgements or intuitions) at all unless we acknowledge a relation of existential dependence among them. The linchpin of Kant's argument is the claim that we cannot attribute any content to judgements or intuitions unless we regard those states as part of an interdependent system of states. When Kant talks about the relation of 'synthesis' among mental states, at least part of what he means is that mental states occurring at different times depend on each other for their

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contents (and so for their existence as mental states). As a corollary to this fourth claim I maintained that one thesis Kant marks by the phrase 'transcendental unity of apperception' is the thesis that a necessary condition of the possibility of [attributing] judgemental experience is that mental states occurring at different times are [regarded as] part of an informationally interdependent system of states. 14 In briefest compass the result of the Subjective Deduction is to establish the transcendental unity of apperception so understood.

HI Understanding the First Paralogism In section I we encountered a number of puzzles in the way Kant handles the First Paralogism, which I restate for easy reference: That, the representation of which is the absolute subject of our judgments and cannot therefore be employed as determination of another thing, is substance. I, as a thinking being, am the absolute subject of all my possible judgments, and this representation of myself cannot be employed as predicate of any other thing. Therefore I, as a thinking being (soul), am substance. The major puzzle concerns why Kant supports the minor premiss of this argument and what he takes it to mean. However, there are other puzzling features of Kant's treatment. Why does he believe that the root problem is a transcendental-empirical mix-up, even though he cannot seem to figure out how this mix-up occurs? Why does Kant believe this argument to be compelling to everyone? Or anyone? What interesting mistakes does the argument involve? These questions can all be given quite straightforward answers in the light of Kant's theory of apperception from the Subjective Deduction. I will start with Kant's support for the minor premiss. Like Descartes, Kant believes that any mental state, a fortiori any judgement, must be attributed to a self, which we can call the 'subject of the judgement'. Unlike Descartes, Kant conceives of this self not as a simple substance, but only as a system of informationally interdependent states. And unlike Descartes, Kant believes in the self because he has reflected on the necessary conditions for the possibility of judgemental experience. Thus, given the background of the Subjective Deduction, we can understand how Kant interprets the first clause of the minor premiss and why he supports it: it means that any possible judgement must be regarded as belonging to an I [to me or to another], that is, to a system of interdependent states; he supports this claim on the basis of his own argument

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from the Subjective Deduction. The second clause is more difficult, because Kant never says why the 'I' cannot occur as a predicate. Further he himself points out that any concept can occur in either the subject or the predicate position in a sentence. (See A 349, B 128-9, A 242-3/B 300-1.) I conjecture that Kant throws in the second clause simply because of its occurrence in the standardly accepted definition of 'substance' from which he draws the major premiss. (Another, complementary, possibility is that Kant uses this definition because it presents substances as somehow basic and he wants to build at least a verbal bridge between the Paralogisms chapter and his introductory remarks about reason's need for ultimates.) In any case, I think all Kant is really serious about in this premiss is the claim that we must attribute all judgements to a self, since he explicitly rejects the claim of the second clause. IS How do the Rational Psychologists err? Kant's ultimate diagnosis of the error is the same in both editions - and it involves both the representation '1' and Is themselves: 'From all this it is evident that Rational Psychology owes its origin simply to misunderstanding. The unity of consciousness ... is here mistaken for the intuition of subject as object, and the category of substance is then applied to it' (B 421-2; compare A 402). Given Kant's own account of the self and our self-knowledge it is fairly easy to understand one way he thinks the Rationalists have been led astray. We do not have an intuition of a self, but in conceiving of mental states we must think of them as belonging to a continuing interdependent system; hence we talk about a continuing consciousness or I, and we use the representation'!'. The problem is that the Rational Psychologists recognize that we use the representation 'I' without clearly understanding how this practice arises, so they assume it must rest on the deliverances of inner sense. Since there is, in fact, no inner intuition of a self, we do not perceive the self as an attribute, a complex or a series. The Rationalist Psychologists go astray because they expect to find an intuition of the self and so mistake the absence of any intuition for the intuition of something with remarkable properties: 'in what we entitle "soul" everything is in continual flux and there is nothing abiding except (if we must so express ourselves) the "I", which is simple solely because its representation has no content, and therefore no manifold [of intuitions], and for this reason seems to represent, or (to use a more correct word) denote, a simple object; (A 381-2). Since my primary concern is to illuminate what Kant took to be the errors of Rational Psychology and thereby to illuminate his own views about the self and self-knowledge, I will not try to offer a comprehensive assessment of the historical justice of this criticism. However, I will note that this particular criticism seems more appropriate against Descartes. Leibniz says quite clearly that we think of ourselves as being 'of substance, of the simple ... of the immaterial' 'by the knowledge of neces-

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sary truths and by their abstractions [that enable us to rise to] reflective acts, which enable us to think of what is called l' .16 Whatever these reflective acts are supposed to be, Leibniz seems to be ruling out simple introspection as the basis of these beliefs about the self. Conversely, Descartes seems to be guilty of something very like the error Kant describes in the following passage: 'when I consider the mind. . . I cannot distinguish in myself any parts, but apprehend myself to be clearly one and entire' Y Regardless of Kant's historical accuracy, I think he has pointed out an important source of confusion about the mind. We have various beliefs about the mind and mental states. The Cartesian picture, which represents us as directly aware of thoughts and thinking, provides a seductive explanation for the source of those beliefs which leads us to overestimate our epistemic situation with respect to the mind. We think we know more than we do about the mind and we think of our knowledge as resting on direct evidence. The explanation is seductive because the Cartesian 'source of evidence' about the mental can never provide any counter-evidence to our preconceived notions, because it presents no 'manifold of intuition' [data] at all. Kant tries to prevent these confusions by bluntly pointing out that we have no knowledge of the thing which thinks 'through awareness or through reasoning' (A 355, my translation) .18 Given the background material of the Subjective Deduction we are in a position to understand why Kant thinks the Paralogism involves a confusion between transcendental and empirical claims. The first step is to realize that Kant uses 'transcendental' ambiguously. In describing a claim as 'transcendental' Kant sometimes means that concepts are used without regard to the conditions under which they apply to spatio-temporal objects, e.g. in the introduction to the Dialectic (A 296/B 351; above, pp. 105-6). Let us call this sense 'transcendentah'. Kant also describes a claim and its constituent representations and their referents as 'transcendental' if the claim has a special epistemological status, viz. if it can be established as asserting a necessary condition for the possibility of judgemental experience (e.g. A 11-12/B 25). I shall tag this sense 'transcendentab' .19 Exactly what the Subjective Deduction shows is that the claim that all judgements have subjects [belong to an interconnected system of states] asserts a necessary condition on the possibility of judgemental experience. Hence, in the Paralogisms, Kant refers to the subject of judgement as 'transcendentab' (A 346/B 404, A 340; see also B 411 and B 411a). As he points out, the difficulty is that in order to infer that the self is an empirical substance, the minor premiss would have to be asserted on the basis of empirical intuition, presumably the perceiving through inner sense of a permanent self (A 403-4), and it lacks this kind of empirical support; it is a transcendentab claim. Hence, in proffering the minor premiss as support for the conclusion, 'this

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syllogism ... puts forward the constant logical subject of thought [the transcendentallY2 established system of interdependent states] as being knowledge of the real subject [an empirical substance] ... [and so palms] off upon us what is mere pretence of new insight' (A 350). Since one way to describe this mis-step would be as a result of confusing transcendenta12 and empirical claims, Kant's ambiguous usage provides a verbal victory for the doctrine that all metaphysical errors rest on empiricaltranscendental! confusions. Since the diagnosis of a transcendental-empirical mix-up is simply the product of a verbal sleight of hand, what is the real error in this reasoning? That is, what mistake does one make in confounding empirical and transcendenta12 claims? Kant's analysis of this error is refreshingly straightforward and philosophically important. The goal of the Subjective Deduction was to show that thinking beings must have a highly abstract property if judgemental experience is to be possible: the states of such beings must be contentually interconnected. The mistake comes in thinking that this type of analysis provides information about what sort of thing a thinking being is. The analysis, then of the consciousness of myself in thought in general, yields nothing whatsoever towards the knowledge of myself as object. The logical exposition of thought in general has been mistaken for a metaphysical determination of the object. (B 409) Kant's point is put even more clearly at A 398: If anyone propounds to me the question, 'What is the constitution of a thing which thinks?' I have no a priori knowledge. wherewith to reply. For the answer has to be synthetic - an analytic answer will perhaps explain what is meant by thought, but beyond this cannot yield any knowledge of that upon which this thought depends for its possibility ... intuition [would be] required; and owing to the highly general character of the problem, intuition has been left entirely out of account. Similarly no one can answer in all its generality the question, 'What must a thing be, to be movable?'

What Kant has realized is that the kind of analysis he has provided of the necessary properties of subjects of judgements furnishes no serious clues about what the soul is like. He describes this analysis as 'conceptual analysis' (cf. A 399, A 400) - hence his second edition claims that the principle of apperception and the minor premiss are analytic, and hence the criticism that the Paralogisms present tautologies masquerading as substantive truths (B 135, B 407-8). I am not sure that Kant's project

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in the Subjective Deduction is best described as one of conceptual analysis.20 He tries to uncover the general properties that beings must have for them to have what we understand as judgemental experience. Perhaps this is a deep sort of conceptual analysis. In any case, the important point is that Kant clearly recognizes that the sort of abstract description of the thinking process he laboured to produce is not the royal road to knowledge about the nature of thinking things. This is an important insight. With the aid of reflecting on the differences between the 'hardware' and 'software' in computers, it has re-emerged in recent years as the principle that function does not determine form and now serves as a fundamental methodological assumption behind philosophical accounts of mentality.2! Kant seems genuinely surprised and impressed by his discovery: 'Suspicion is thus thrown on the view, which at first seemed to me so plausible, that we can form judgments about the nature of the thinking being, and can do so from concepts alone' (A 399). When we turn to the Second Paralogism I will argue that Leibniz seems to take the false step from a highly abstract description to a claim about constitution just described. As far as I know, however, neither Leibniz nor his followers provides anything like the argument for imputing mental states to a transcendenta12 subject which stands behind the acceptability of a properly interpreted version of the First Paralogism's minor premiss. 22 (See A 350.) Hence I regard this Paralogism as very much Kant's own Paralogism, because the crucial minor premiss derives from his own work on the self. Moreover I suspect that Kant came to understand the general problem of moving from certain kinds of abstract descriptions to substantive descriptions by reflecting on the kind of analysis of the necessary conditions for thought and judgemental experience that he himself had defended and by noting similarities between these analyses and some of the work of his predecessors. In any case, many of Kant's general warnings about moving from 'conceptual analysis' to substantive claims about the self, and his remarks in the First Paralogism, are better understood as caveats about his own position than as criticisms of his predecessors. One error that the First Paralogism warns us against is moving from the claim that we must regard different judgements as belonging to a common subject [i.e. a continuing interconnected sequence of states] to the claim that 'the soul is substance', unless the latter claim 'does not carry us a single step further', i.e. unless we intend the conclusion of the Paralogism to assert no more than the minor premiss itself (A 350; see also A 365). The view that this is a caution to his readers is further confirmed by the fact that similar warnings appear in the Transcendental Deduction itself in B, e.g. 'in the synthetic original unity of apperception, I am conscious of myself, not as I appear to myself, nor as I am in myself, but only that I am (B 157) .... The "I think" expresses the act of determining my existence. Existence is already given

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thereby, but the mode in which I am to determine this existence . is not thereby given' (B lS7-8a). There is a further reason behind Kant's conviction that the First Paralogism is rooted in transcendental-empirical confusions. As I noted in section I, Kant vacillates about how to classify the minor premiss. I think this vacillation reflects genuine perplexity. We have already seen why Kant suggests a transcendental status for this claim in the second edition (B 411a) and why he sometimes describes the subject of judgement as 'transcendentaIz' in the first edition. Yet he also describes this claim as 'empirical' - in the second edition - on the grounds that it imputes existence (B 157a and B 422a). He has some difficulty expressing this point because he lacks the crucial concepts 'theoretical entity' and 'functional description', but he gets the idea across: The '1 think' expresses an indeterminate empirical intuition, i.e. perception .... [It] signifies only something real that is given, given indeed to thought in general, and so not as appearance, nor as thing in itself (noumenon), but as something which actually exists. (B 423a) Thus Kant regards the minor premiss as both empirical and transcendental2' Small wonder that he thinks it is extraordinarily easy to fall into thinking that this premiss is 'empirical', in the sense that it rests on awareness of an I, or that he thinks this argument has a wickedly ambiguous middle term. Kant is obviously dissatisfied with his own grasp of the status of the minor premiss. He goes to some lengths to point out that his doctrine of apperception is not in conflict with the critical tenet that empirical claims must be based on sensory experience. For, even though the perception which brings forth the 'I think' is 'indeterminate', i.e. any mental state will do, some actual mental state must take place before it can be imputed to an I (B 422-3a). Thus although we have no intuition of an I, the empirical claim that there is a subject of judgement does not rest on conceptual analysis alone; it also rests on an intuition of some mental state. Still Kant has problems reconciling the results of the Subjective Deduction with his other views. Indeed, he denies that the 'existence' involved is the same as the category 'existence'. 23 I conjecture that what is bothering Kant at this point is the conflict between his doctrine that all experience must be subsumed under the categories and the fact that he himself has been led into talking about a mere something (A 400), which can be placed under no category because we do not know its constitution. Let me now sum up Kant's analysis of the First Paralogism. He regards this argument as compelling because he thinks we will accept the major premiss as a definition and that we should accept the minor premiss on

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the basis of his own argument from the Subjective Deduction. What the Subjective Deduction establishes is that we must attribute mental states to a common self, i.e. to a contentually interconnected system of states, if judgemental experience is to be possible. Hence, the minor premiss is a transcendentab claim, '1' is a transcendental 2 representation, and 'Is' are transcendental 2 subjects. Confusion sets in because we do not know how to handle the minor premiss. Our mishandling can happen in two different ways. We may not recognize the actual support for the claim at all and we assume that, since the claim imputes existence, it is simply an empirical claim resting on intuition. We then expect to find an intuition of the self, and the absence of such an intuition leads us to peculiar views about what inner sense is disclosing. The alternative mistake is that although we recognize that the minor premiss derives its support from analyses of the abstract properties of the mind required for judgemental experience, we do not recognize the limitations of these analyses. We believe that these analyses can support descriptions of the nature of a mind. Both these confusions can lead us to believe that we can move beyond the minor premiss and assert that the self is a substance. In fact, this conclusion can be maintained only if it merely restates the minor premiss interpreted to mean that there is a transcendental2 subject of judgement. The mistakes involved in this reasoning about the self are hardly jejune. The Rational Psychologists, and others, have erred by virtue of their failure to grasp two quite surprising limitations on our self-knowledge: despite its 'proximity' to us, we have no direct acquaintance with the thing that thinks; even though we can provide abstract descriptions of some necessary features of minds if judgemental experience is to be possible, we cannot move from this level of description to a description of the stuff of which thinking things are made. Given the number and subtlety of the difficulties Kant reveals as besetting his own and others' reflections about this argument, his contention that it can befuddle even a very astute thinker seems quite well supported.

IV The Third Paralogism

Because there are many similarities between the First and Third Paralogisms I will discuss the Paralogisms out of order, treating the Third Paralogism next. That which is conscious of the numerical identity of itself at different times is in so far a person. Now the soul is conscious, etc. Therefore it is a person. (A 361)

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The topic of the Third Paralogism is the identity of the self through time. Like Hume, Kant construes identity as requiring some permanent element which persists throughout whatever changes occur in the enduring thing (A 361-2). Since Kant characterizes whatever is permanently available to perception as a 'substance', the First and Third Paralogisms appear to cover exactly the same territory. Oddly enough, I think Kant's message in the Third Paralogism is very clear in the text - if the text is read in the light of the Subjective Deduction. 24 Not only are the topics of the First and Third Paralogisms similar, but I think Kant regards the major and minor premisses of the latter argument as having exactly the same kind of support as their counterparts in the First Paralogism. The major premiss is put forward because it states a definition of 'person' employed by Leibniz and by Christian Wolff, as well as by Locke. 25 In the light of Kant's view that we are not aware of a self through inner sense, he cannot support the minor premiss if it is interpreted to mean that each of us is aware of a reoccurring self at different times. Once again, however, the argumentation of the Subjective Deduction provides an explanation for the acceptability of this claim. In effect Kant has argued that to recognize mental states as mental states we must acknowledge them as belonging to an interconnected system of mental states, an 1. Therefore to acknowledge one of the mental states of which I am conscious as a mental state I must recognize it as belonging to an interconnected system of states. Which system? The obvious suggestion is that I attribute it to a system which also includes other mental states of which I remember being conscious. Presumably Kant believes that we actually attribute mental states to an I somewhat automatically or through verbal training (and that we are not terribly clear about what this I is at any level of description). The role of the SU,bjective Deduction is to show that we must acknowledge present mental states as belonging to a system which includes mental states occurring at different times. Hence we must be conscious of [or, better, cognizant of] the identity of the I at different times. What errors are likely to infect reasoning based on these premisses in addition to those already flagged in the discussion· of the First Paralogism? The chief error Kant attacks in this discussion is an attempt to combine the doctrine of the ideality of time and the theory of the Subjective Deduction into an argument about the unbroken continuity of thinking beings. This issue certainly engaged Kant's predecessors, with Descartes and Locke differing sharply over the questions of whether thinking beings think continuously or exist continuously. Thus although the central topic is the same in the First and Third Paralogisms, the arguments about substantiality turn on different considerations. In the First Paralogism the argument tries to move from the soul as the subject

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of judgement to the soul as substance; here we are trying to establish some necessary (and, perhaps, sufficient) conditions for the substantiality of the soul, viz. unbroken continuity and permanence. This is how the pseudo-proof would go. Time is merely the form of inner sense. Therefore, for me, moments of time exist only at those moments when I am 'perceiving' a mental state through inner sense. Whenever I am conscious of a mental state, however, I must attribute that state to an I. Thus, from my own point of view, I must attribute unbroken continuity and permanence to myself. In Kant's words: 'all time is merely the form of inner sense . . . I refer each and all of my successive determinations [mental states] to myself, and do so throughout time, that is, in the form of inner sense ... it comes to the same whether I say that this whole time is in me . . . or that I am to be found numerically identical in all this time. [New paragraph] In my own consciousness, therefore, identity of the person is unfailingly met with' (A 362). Thus, to the consternation and confusion of some of the readers,26 Kant maintains that [permanence] and identity are 'necessarily bound up with my consciousness' (A 363) and that 'we must necessarily judge that we are one and the same throughout the whole time of which we are conscious' (A 364). These claims have only subjective validity (A 364), however, because in addition to the doctrine of apperception, they depend crucially on all of us using only their own temporal perspective, i.e. on all of us constructing a temporal order using only their own mental episodes. To dramatize the impossibility of regarding these reflections as establishing an objectively (i.e. intersubjectively) valid claim about our identity and continuity Kant invites us to consider our own 'permanence' from the point of view of an outside observer. Whenever he attributes a mental state to the person he observes he must regard that state as belonging to a continuing I for reasons which are by now familiar (A 363). However, he will not infer the unbroken continuity or permanence of this I for the simple reason that there will be times when he does not, or cannot, attribute a conscious state to the person at all even while he is observing the person from the outside, i.e. observing the person's body. Hence this I, this inner subject, will not be a permanent element in his experience (A 362-3). Hence the claim that I exist at every moment in time is not intersubjectively valid. Thus, if we construe the conclusion of the Paralogism, 'I am a person', as meaning 'I exist at every moment in time', it is not warranted by the argument just given. As in the case of the First Paralogism, however, the conclusion is assert able if it merely restates the minor premiss claim that I am cognizant of the identity of my self [a continuing sequence of interconnected states] at different times. More bluntly, this conclusion, like that of the First Paralogism, is assertable only if it is interpreted as

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materially equivalent to the doctrine of apperception (A 365), i.e. to the doctrine that mental states occurring at different times must be regarded as belonging to an interconnected sequence of mental states. After noting that uninterrupted continuity cannot be established in the way just described, Kant reiterates his claim that substantiality [and permanence] cannot be established by inferring the constitution of the soul from the formal requirements for thought (A 363). In a famous footnote, he argues, via an analogy with the momentum of billiard balls, that a present self many bear all the necessary connections of continuity of thought and memory to earlier selves even though there is no continuity of substance among them (A 363-4a). To whom is this Paralogism compelling? I can find no such argumentation in either Descartes or Leibniz. Sometimes neophytes to the topic of personal identity will claim that from their own perspective their identity is continuous, because at every moment at which they are conscious they are existing. Regardless of whether any of his predecessors actually perpetrated this Paralogism, however, I think Kant regards it as compelling only because it is grounded in two of his own doctrines. Thus even more than the First Paralogism, this argument is Kant's own Paralogism. And his warning about the illusions of Rational Psychology is again a caveat about his own doctrine of apperception: this theory and the doctrine of the ideality of time only appear to give aid and comfort to the idea that we can reason our way to knowledge of the thinking thing.

V Leibniz and the simplicity of the soul That, the action of which can never be regarded as the concurrence of several things acting, is simple. Now the soul, or the thinking, 'I', is such a being. Therefore, etc. (A 351) The Second Paralogism deviates from the pattern we have seen in the First and Third in some significant respects. So far as I can tell the major premiss does not state a widely accepted definition of 'simple'. Of course, 'simple' had a standard definition, 'without parts', but the major premiss makes a different claim. More importantly, this argument actually seems to derive from one of Kant's rationalist predecessors. Margaret Wilson argues persuasively that a very similar line of reasoning can be found in the writings of LeibnizY While Wilson's account of the topic of this Paralogism seems correct, I think it is possible to give a clearer picture of Kant's evaluation of the argument by drawing on material from the Subjective Deduction and the First Paralogism. According to Wilson, Leibniz argued against materialism through the

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following reductio. If the thinking thing were a body or a machine, then it would have parts. If we now imagine enlarging such a thinking machine, we can imagine entering it as we would a mill. But if we imagine visiting a thinking machine, we will realize that nothing in such a machine would correspond to the having of a perception [because perceptions and thoughts have unity]. Hence what thinks cannot be a composite. As Wilson points out, this argument is hopelessly cryptic as it stands. However, I think her interpolation is highly plausible: the feature of thought that could find no correlate in a machine is the unity which binds the different elements into one thought. What is not entirely clear from the passage she cites is the order of Leibniz's reflections. Does Leibniz think that thoughts must have a special unity because they belong to the I which has a true unity (and whose unity is established through quite general metaphysical considerations)? Or does Leibniz try to argue for the unity of the I from the unity of thought?28 I am not going to try to settle this exegetical puzzle, because it is quite clear how Kant sees the direction of argument. As will be obvious below, Kant views the argument as moving from the unity of particular thoughts or representations to the simplicity of the thinking thing, or from the unity that characterizes thinking to the simplicity of the thinker. It is precisely this move that would be sanctioned by the major premiss. I suspect Kant supplies this premiss in order to bring out the hidden assumption behind this reasoning. Kant does not and cannot endorse the major premiss. Still Kant does think that there are two true claims which relate to different parts of this line of thinking. Since we have no intuition of the self, the representation 'I think' cannot be associated with any manifold of intuition at all; a fortiori it cannot be associated with a complex manifold. The representation 'I think' can be regarded as designating something simple, i.e. without parts, in the purely negative sense that it does not designate complex sensory data (A 355, A 356). Hence Kant will grant the conclusion that the soul is simple, so long as this claim invokes a peculiar sense of 'simple' in which it merely expresses his own view about the absence of any intuition of the I. This point is familiar from the First Paralogism; the second worthwhile contribution of the Second Paralogism is new. Representations or thoughts cannot be divided (A 352). For example, the thought that 'the Red Sox will win the pennant' cannot be instantiated by having seven different individuals attend to one of the words. Thus Kant agrees with Leibniz that thoughts possess a peculiar and essential unity. Oddly, Wilson interprets Kant as endorsing this doctrine only in a restricted sense. She reads Kant as subscribing to the view that the elements of a thought must stand in the appropriate 'conceptual connection' .20 What this means presumably is that in this example the elements of the thought

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must stand in the appropriate syntactic and semantic relations to one another: for example the referent of 'Red Sox' must be the appropriate sort of thing to be a potential member of the extension of 'wins the pennant'. Kant uses 'representation' ambiguously to refer to the content of a mental state and to the mental state itself. In terms of this distinction, Wilson is taking Kant's claim about the 'indivisible unity of a representation' (A 355) to refer only to the unity of its content and not to its unity qua mental state. Indeed she thinks Kant criticizes the Second Paralogism by rejecting the datum of the 'true unity of consciousness' or of mental states. 30 I think this interpretation is belied by Kant's concerns in the Subjective Deduction and by the discussion of the Second Paralogism itself. In the Deduction Kant affirms again and again the 'synthetic unity' of representations and the 'synthetic unity' of consciousness, and he explicitly connects the two doctrines: 'all unification of representations demands unity of consciousness in the synthesis of them' (B 137; see also A 102, A 103, A 108, Al13, A 123-4, B 131a). Of course, it is far from clear what Kant takes the 'synthetic unity of consciousness' to mean. In section II, I presented what I take to be one main thread of this doctrine: mental states occurring at different times depend on each other for their contents and so for their existence as mental states. We might label this the doctrine of the 'longitudinal unity of consciousness'. In the Deduction Kant also addresses the question of the 'unity' of a mental state occurring at a moment in time, but his discussion is quite hopeless CA 99). I think Kant regards part of the reasoning behind the Second Paralogism as supplying a sound argument for the 'unity' of a momentary mental state. In a passage strikingly like William James's well-known discussion of this topic, Kant casts this argument as follows: For suppose it be the composite that thinks: then every part of it would be a part of the thought, and only all of them taken together would contain the whole thought. But this cannot consistently be maintained. For representations (for instance, the single words of a verse), distributed among different beings, never make up a whole thought. (A 352) Kant's reconstruction almost makes the argument appear trivial: one thought cannot be realized in different beings because then there would be no one being who had the whole thought. However, his first sentence effectively rules out this reading, by conceding that of course the collection of different beings would contain the whole thought. Kant's point must be that a collection of different beings is just not the right sort of

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thing to realize a complex thought. Unfortunately the last sentence simply states that representations distributed among different beings cannot make up a thought without explaining why this is so. Nevertheless I think there is a fairly obvious way to fill out the argument. Think of the whole content of a thought as made up of representational elements each of which is contained in a different part of the mental state containing the whole content. Translating the Fregean dictum that a word has meaning only in the context of a sentence into the present idiom, we get the doctrine that these representational elements have content only in relation to the content of the whole thought. If this doctrine is accepted, then the hypothesis that 'different beings' might jointly instantiate a thought must fail, because the 'representational element' contained in each being would bear no relation to the 'representational elements' in the others and hence would lack content;31 a fortiori the collection of 'representational elements', the whole 'content', would lack content. Does Kant accept some analogue of Frege's dictum? At A1l6 he endorses something like a psychologized version of Frege's position: 'For in me they [representations] can represent something only in so far as they belong with all others to one consciousness.' In any case, Kant must have in mind some claim to the effect that, since the different elements in the content of a thought are interdependent, the thought cannot be represented in a collection of totally distinct beings. Thus, on a particular construal, Kant accepts the minor premiss: the action of the soul, thinking, cannot be regarded as the concurrence of several [distinct, unconnected] things acting. He expresses this claim somewhat cryptically as the view that the 'subjective "/" can never be ... divided and distributed' (A 354). For reasons given in section II and just above, I take Kant to use'!, or 'I think' to refer to the necessary unity of consciousness, i.e. to the longitudinal interconnections of temporally distinct mental states required for judgemental experience, and also to the interdependence of different parts of a mental state which is necessary for having thoughts. Since Kant uses the representation 'I' to mark these necessary unities, then on pain of inconsistency he cannot allow that the 'subjective "I" , can be divided and distributed, if by 'division' we mean that the interconnections among mental states, or among elements of a mental state, are severed. Once again the crucial mistake in the reasoning of the Paralogism comes in the attempt to move from functional descriptions, from these reflections about the necessary conditions for thinking, to a claim about the constitution of the self: 'This much, then, is certain, that through the "I", I always entertain the thought of an absolute, but logical, unity of the subject (simplicity). It does not, however, follow that I thereby know the actual simplicity of my subject' (A 356; see also B 408). In this case Kant spells out exactly what is wrong with the attempted infer-

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ence from an abstract analysis to a characterization of the specific nature of the soul: For the unity of the thought, which consists of many representations, is collective, and as far as mere concepts show, may relate just as well to the collective unity of different substances acting together. (A 353) Although a mental state containing a thought must be unified, i.e. if we think of it as having parts we cannot regard the parts as independent of each other, this does not imply that only simple beings can have thoughts. All it implies is that a collection of different beings can have a thought only if they constitute a mutually dependent system of beings [in which case the representational element in each being could have content in virtue of that being's interrelations with other parts of the system]. This abstract description provides no clue whatsoever about the kinds of physical or non-physical systems which might realize the unity of thought. Just in case the Rationalist tries to resist this criticism, Kant drives the point home in the second edition. It is not merely fallacious to try to adjudicate among possible characterizations of the soul by appealing to abstract analyses, it is potentially dangerous to the Rationalist cause. If the Rationalist permits himself to argue for the simplicity and immateriality of the soul by claiming that he does not see how a material substance could realize the unity of thought, then the materialist is free to employ the same strategy to 'establish' the opposite conclusion. Since the latter does not understand how an immaterial substance could realize the unity of thought, he may claim that the soul is material (B 41Sa). There are important differences between Kant's First and Third Paralogisms and the Second Paralogism. Only in the present case does Kant appear to carry out the stated purpose of the chapter, viz to criticize arguments of his rationalist predecessors. Further, this appears to be the only case where an argument of one of his predecessors makes a positive contribution to his own theory of apperception. Nevertheless, Kant's evaluation of this argument turns on exactly the same considerations as his evaluation of the First Paralogism. Both arguments are related to genuine insights about the lack in intuition of the self and about the necessary unity of thinking things. Thus, in so far as it merely expresses the unity of a mental state which is necessary for thought, Kant will endorse the Second Paralogism's minor premiss. He will also concede the conclusion so long as 'the soul is simple' means either 'we have no intuition of the self', or 'thinking things have a necessary unity'. Unfortunately these genuine insights are extremely slippery, and we come to accept the conclusions of these arguments, in senses in which the concluding statements are not established, by mishandling the insights.

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In both cases, we misconstrue the absence of an intuition of the I as an intuition of something with remarkable properties and we falsely assume that we can move from abstract analyses to a description of the nature of things. Because he recognizes that such inferences are fallacious, Kant deviates from the pattern of the First and Third Paralogism by not accepting the Second Paralogism's major premiss: 'That, the action of which can never be regarded as the concurrence of several things acting, is simple (A 351). For what this premiss asserts is that a certain type of abstract characterization constitutes a sufficient condition for the applicability of a certain intrinsic description. VI Conclusion In the light of the background material from the Subjective Deduction we have been able to provide answers to all of the puzzles raised about the First Paralogism in section I and to provide quite straightforward interpretations of the topics and critiques of the Second and Third Paralogisms. Still there is a fairly obvious question about this chapter which I have not addressed: why are Kant's discussions so convoluted? As I have presented them, Kant's views about the limitations of self-knowledge are insightful, but not so profound as to defy comprehension. By reflecting on the necessary conditions of thought we can achieve an abstract description of the necessary features of any thinking being. We cannot move from this type of description to a description of the nature of the thing that thinks in us. Nor can we acquire knowledge of the thing that thinks through introspection. Kant has some peripheral difficulties in getting these claims out because he lacks the notions of a 'theoretical term' and a 'functional description' and he is concerned about the consistency of his views on the self with other tenets of his system. Still I do not think these problems explain the deep obscurity of this chapter. We can begin to see the outlines of an answer to this question by addressing another issue which I have thus far avoided. What is the relation between the doctrine of self-knowledge I have extracted from the Paralogisms chapter and Kant's 'official' position of knowledge of the self? As every beginning student of Kant knows, the Critique claims that there are two selves, the real or noumenal self about which we can know nothing, and the merely phenomenal empirical self about which we can develop some anthropological data. However, the I of the Subjective Deduction and the Paralogisms chapter gives the lie to this neat picture because, as Kant ultimately admits, it is neither an 'appearance' nor a 'thing-in-itself' (noumenon) (B 423a). Yet this is plainly the most important I, the central character of the entire CritiqueY I think Kant's official position on self-knowledge is submerged in this chapter, because in writing explicitly about the self he realizes that he must produce an

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account which is both coherent and responsive to the varying demands of religion, morality, epistemology and philosophy of mind. The simple two-self theory, and its attendant doctrine of self-knowledge, are dropped because this theory is unable to handle any of these demands, including those of morality and religion for which it was developed. One awful weakness in the transcendental idealist 'solution' to the problems of free will and immortality is that if we consistently admit that our real selves are totally beyond our ken, then we should wonder 'who or what are we to hold accountable?' and, 'who or what is to be saved?' The transcendental idealist position would be utterly without interest to anyone concerned with these problems unless Kant can locate the bearer of responsibility and the potential beneficiary of salvation among the items with which we are familiar. 33 So without any real justification Kant follows Descartes in quietly identifying the real, moral, potentially immortal self with the thing that thinks. But to allow for the possibilities that our 'real' selves are morally responsible and might enjoy an afterlife, Kant thinks he must show that these selves are outside the province of science and ;ts deterministic presupposition. Thus he often overdraws the moral that function does not determine form by claiming that we do not, and cannot, know the constitution of a thinking being (e.g. A 350). Indeed, he insists that we really have no knowledge whatsoever of the thinking self. Kant cannot press this line too hard, however, without both destroying the point of identifying the noumenal self with the relatively more familiar thinking self and contradicting his own doctrines about the necessary features of thinking things. For, however frequently Kant claims he has established 'merely transcendental[2]' properties of the self, properties which do not concern constitution, these are none the less properties of the self. If recent work in philosophical psychology is right, then these properties are actually more important for understanding ourselves than constitutive properties. I think the obscurity of this chapter results from Kant's attempt to fulfil four incompatible goals. He wants to clarify the implications of his own theory of the self and to point out some subtle and serious problems that have plagued his own and others' attempts to reason about the self. In addition, however, he also needs both to reaffirm the unknowability of the nominal self and to identify this self with some relatively familiar item in order to pave the way for the later critiques. In the attempt to fulfil these last two contradictory desiderata on a theory of the self, Kant's illuminating critique of the limitations of two apparent routes to self-knowledge is very nearly lost. 34

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Notes 1. The two philosophers who have devoted the most effort to analysing the Parologisms chapter are Wilfrid Sellars and Jonathan Bennett. Sellars discusses this chapter in two papers, 'Metaphysics and the concept of a person', in Karel Lambert, ed., The Logical Way of Doing Things (Yale, 1969), pp. 219-32, and in ' ... this I or he or it (the thing) which thinks', his Presidential Address to the Eastern Division of the APA in 1970. I'm happy to acknowledge my indebtedness to these papers, particularly for the suggestion that the Paralogisms chapter extends the discussion of the self in the Transcendental Deduction. Although Sellars makes this suggestion, he does not try to develop it, so his own account of the Paralogisms chapter is not really illuminated by his understanding of the connection between these two texts. Considerations of continuity and space make it impossible for me to discuss Sellars's interpretation in the text. However, I will take up some aspects of his account in nn. 7 and 20. Although Bennett devotes a paper, 'The simplicity of the soul', Journal of Philosophy LXIV, 20 (26 October 1967), 648-60, and three chapters of Kant's Dialectic (Cambridge, 1974) to the Paralogisms, I do not think he is able to unravel this part of the Critique with his usual dexterity. Although I will not be able to treat Bennett's interpretation in the text, I will raise several objections to his analysis in nn. 8 and 24. I will also touch on Strawson's brief account of the Paralogisms in The Bounds of Sense (London: Methuen, 1966) in n. 22. 2. Margaret Wilson argues that Leibniz as well as Descartes is a target of Kant's criticisms in 'Leibniz and materialism', Canadian Journal of Philosophy III, 4 (June, 1974),495-513. 3. A 402/B 411, Norman Kemp Smith's translation, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (St Martin's, 1968). Except as noted, all subsequent references in the text will be to this translation. 4. Kant actually uses 'transcendental' in several different senses. See, for example, the discussion of 'transcendental ideas', A 327/B 384. I think this sense is appropriate in this context, because this is the meaning Kant assigns to 'transcendental' in his introductory remarks to the Dialectic. However, as I will point out below, Kant seems to switch to a different meaning within the confines of the Paralogisms chapter itself. See pp. 16-17. 5. Ralph Walker offers a helpful discussion of the issues in Kant (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), chap. VII. 6. Cf. Leroy E. Loemker, ed. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Philosophical Papers and Letters (D. Reidel, 1976), p. 307. 7. Jonathan Bennett acknowledges this point in Kant's Dialectic, op. cit., p. 74 but dismisses it as unimportant. 8. In his Presidential Address ' ... this I or he or it (the thing) which thinks ... ', op. cit., Wilfrid Sellars takes the object-representation confusion to be fundamental to the Paralogisms. He argues that a mistake common to all the Paralogisms is the attempt to infer properties of 'Is' from properties of the representation'!'. This interpretation is also put forward by Norman Kemp Smith in his Commentary to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (New York: Humanities Press, 1962) pp. 457-8, and it enjoys some direct textual support (A 400). I do not accept it as a central point in my interpretation, because neither Kemp Smith nor Sellars offers a convincing account of why Kant would regard the representation 'I' as having special properties. 9. Kant's Dialectic, op. cit., p. 75. Bennett thinks that the interesting part of the minor premiss comes in the final clause, 'this representation of myself cannot be employed as predicate of any other thing'. By Bennett's lights, this clause

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means that the term 'I' is 'irreducibly substantival'; further, Kant endorses this part of the 'rationalist' position because he has grasped the genuine insights of the 'Cartesian basis'. Both these interpretative notions, the 'irreducibly substantival' and the 'Cartesian basis', are rather elusive, but I think Bennett has something like the following in the mind. The 'Cartesian basis' is really the position of methodological solipsism, i.e. the view that when contemplating the body of knowledge we have, we (or I) must recognize that all the knowledge we (or I) have is founded upon knowledge of our own mental states. According to Bennett, Kant grasped the essential correctness of the Cartesian basis and thus asserted that 'I' is 'irreducibly substantival', meaning that any complete and accurate description of the world must include a referential use of this term. Kant's point against the Rational Psychologists is that they construe the fact that I and my mental states playa special epistemological role, so that I am something like an epistemological substratum, to mean that I am a special sort of substance. I resist Bennett's interpretation of the First Paralogism, simply because Kant's discussion of this argument never touches on the question of a special epistemological role for selves. (See A 348-51). 10. Op. cit., p. 207n. 11. April 1776 edition, as printed in Beattie's Works, vol. IV, Essays, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Hopkins and Earle, 1809). 12. (Leibzig, 1777), pp. 392-4. 13. 'Kant on self-identity', Philosophical Review, vol. XCI, no. 1 (January 1982), 41-72. 14. Kant wanted to argue that the existence of interconnections among mental states is a necessary condition for the possibility of judgemental experience. I interpolate the weakening bracketed remarks because recent critiques of transcendental arguments have shown that all that such arguments can establish is that we can ascribe judgemental experience only if we assume, for example, the existence of interconnections among mental states, or the existence of independent objects. See 'Kant on self-identity', section V. 15. There is still one piece of the minor premiss that I have not tackled. Why does Kant describe the I as the 'absolute' subject of judgements? I do not have any very good answers to this question, but I will offer two speculations. One possibility is that 'absolute' is simply a synonym for 'necessary'. A more likely explanation is again that this usage is an attempt to connect the Paralogism to Kant's general discussion of the 'transcendental ideas', where he talks about the 'absolute (unconditional) unity of the thinking subject' (A 334/B 391). I do not think that Kant has any justification for describing the I as 'absolute' in the Paralogism; rather I think he just helps himself to this characterization in order to make the Paralogism appear to fit into the grand design sketched at the beginning of the Dialectic. 16. Loemker, op. cit., p. 646. 17. E. S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, trans. The Philosophical Works of Descartes (Cambridge University Press, 1972) vol. I, p. 196. 18. 'etwas von ihm zu kennen, oder zu wissen'. Kemp Smith renders this phrase, 'without knowing anything of it either by direct acquaintance or otherwise', p. 337. I do not find this translation very satisfactory, because 'direct acquaintance' is a twentieth-century term of art and because nothing in the translation captures the force of wissen. 19. Needless to say, these two uses do not exhaust the ambiguities of 'transcendental'. See n. 4. 20. This is a difficult issue and a full discussion would take me way beyond the

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appropriate limits of this essay. If what Kant actually does in the Subjective Deduction is conceptual analysis, then there must be concepts to be analyzed, or in contemporary terminology, meanings to be revealed. Drawing on an important distinction made by Hilary Putnam, I will just say dogmatically that, if meanings are what is 'in the head', then I do not think the Subjective Deduction engages in conceptual analysis; if meanings are given by identifying descriptions of referents, then I would describe Kant as (partially) analysing the concept of a judger. Cf. 'The meaning of "meaning" " in Mind, Language, and Reality, Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge University Press, 1975), chap. 12. 21. In' ... this I or he or it (the thing) which thinks ... " Sellars characterizes one of the great insights of the chapter as Kant's recognition that thinking is a 'functional concept'. Unfortunately, he does not address the question of how Kant came to this view, and I think his suggestion that Kant simply recognized that mental terms like 'thought' are functional is implausible. See para. 21. My contention is that it was Kant's own attempts to characterize the necessary properties of a thinking self that led him to this recognition. 22. I base this claim on Lewis White Beck's treatment of Kant's predecessors in Early German Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), and on an examination of some likely passages in Baumgarten and Wolff, specifically §742ff. of Baumgarten's Metaphysica and chap. 3 of Wolff's Metaphysik. 23. I suspect he denies that the existence we attribute to selves is the same 'kind of existence' as that denoted by the category we have no way of assigning intensive magnitude to a self. Cf. A 155, B 207. 24. In the absence of this interpretative handle, even gifted readers of Kant had have a difficult time making any sense of this section of the Critique. So, for example, in his brief account of the Paralogisms, Strawson credits Kant with the insight that we need physical criteria for reidentifying persons. While he regards this as the overall message of the chapter, presumably it should be most sharply etched in the Third Paralogism, where the explicit topic is self-identity. But there is no explicit discussion of physical criteria for reidentification in these passages. Strawson rests his entire interpretation on one slender text, namely, Kant's remark that during life the permanence of the soul is evident, 'since the thinking being (as man) is itself likewise an object of outer sense' (B 415). Earlier Kant had noted that in common parlance we speak of man as thinking (A 359-60). I take Kant's point at B 415 to be that for ordinary purposes of reidentification we do not need Rational Psychology to inform us about the continuity of thinking beings. Rational Psychology is supposed to offer us philosophical proof that souls must continue to exist even after death (B 415). Putting this point in Strawson's own preferred idiom, I take Kant's observation to be simply that during life bodily continuity is the usual way to determine continuity of the self, not that bodily continuity is 'criterial evidence' for self-identity. Any idea that Kant might have anticipated the argument of the 'Persons' chapter of Individuals should be dispelled by Kant's unequivocal statement that 'the predicates of outer appearances cannot be assigned to it [the subject of thought]' (A 358-9; see also A 357). 25. Bennett claims that this definition is common to Locke, Leibniz and Wolff in Kant's Dialectic, op. cit., p. 93. 26. Bennett has trouble with this claim because it runs counter to his interpretation of the Third Paralogism (ibid., pp. 93-102). Bennett takes the minor premiss to assert that when a person is conscious of, i.e. remembers, a past mental state he automatically attributes that state to himself. Kant's great insight, which precisely anticipates an important argument given by Sydney Shoemaker in 'Persons and their pasts' (American Philosophical Quarterly (October, 1970» is that

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this attribution is too hasty because for all the person knows 'he' may have 'branched' Since the remembered event, so that his apparent memory is only a 'quasi-memory'. Bennett rests his case for attributing to Kant the recognition that it is illegitimate to move from 'I [seem to] remember mental state m' to 'I am identical with the subject of m' on the 'outside observer' passage. By Bennett's lights Kant's contention that something I wish to assert would be false from the point of view of an outside observer means that my memory claim (and consequent identity claim) could be revealed as false by an outside observer who has seen 'me' split. [I give a different account of this passage in the text.] As Bennett admits, there is a considerable gap in his interpretation. He cannot explain Kant's claim that from my own point of yiew I must attribute identity and permanence to myself. Besides the passages in the Critique, Bennett notes that Kant reasserts this claim in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Bennett finds this troubling because, given that Kant recognizes that such identity claims are not objectively valid (i.e. are not valid from the point of view of the outside observer), he should not say that the subject of a memory claim 'must necessarily' attribute identity to himself at different times. I think these passages pose a greater obstacle to Bennett's interpretation than he does. He portrays his problem as one of not having an account of why Kant makes these remarks (p. 100). But seemingly Kant's insistence that we must recognize our identity at different times directly contradicts Bennett's reading of the outside observer passage, that it is illegitimate to make such claims because of the possibility of branching. Besides this problem, the fact that there is not a single reference to memory or its potential fallibility in the entire chapter should make us chary of accepting Bennett's analysis. 27. Wilson, op. cit., in n. 2. 28. ibid.; see the references cited on pp. 506-8. 29. ibid., p. 509. 30. ibid., p. 513. 31. One might try to get around this point by adopting a Central State Materialist account of mental states. Seemingly, this account will enable us to assign content to an isolated physical state on the grounds that other states of the same physical type are connected to behaviour, stimuli and other mental states. Since Kant explicity denies that physical properties can be assigned to mental states, he would not have considered this possibility (A 358-9). Although the claim that every mental state must be regarded as unified is vulnerable to this type of counterexample, I think the more limited claim that typical mental states must be regarded as unified is defensible. See section V of 'Kant on self-identity', where I argue that in a representational system which is a representational system for itself, the conceptual conceptions among the representational elements must be mirrored in some way in the elements of the system. 32. I think that most commentators have recognized both that there is a third self in the Critique, the thinking self (the I of apperception) and that this is the most important self in Kant's philosophy. In 'Kant's real self' (MS), I work out some details of this interpretation, by showing how we can make sense of several crucial steps in the Transcendental Deduction, by assuming that Kant is referring to the thinking self. I also offer some reasons why the thinking self can be identified with neither the noumenal self, nor the phenomenal self. 33. Strawson makes a related observation in The Bounds of Sense, op. cit., p.247. 34. I am grateful to Philip Kitcher for many helpful discussions and suggestions about this essay. Part of the work was completed while I enjoyed a Summer Research Grant from the University of Vermont.

6 Kant's Doctrine of the Self Susan Mendus

English-language commentators of the Critique of Pure Reason frequently suggest that in the Paralogisms chapter Kant is addressing himself to the same problems as those with which Hume is concerned in the chapter of the Treatise entitled ' Of personal identity'. More generally, it is commonly held that the Paralogisms chapter constitutes Kant's attempt to answer questions about personal identity such as 'What makes B at time t2 the same person as A at time tl?' So common are these interpretations that they are frequently merely stated rather than argued for: both Strawson in The Bounds of SenseI and Wilkerson in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason 2 compare the Kantian and the Humean accounts without ever entertaining the idea that Kant's enterprise might be different from Hume's. Thus Wilkerson dismisses what he sees to be the conclusion of Kant's chapter on the Paralogisms, stating that 'after all, Hume had already made very much the same point more eloquently in the Treatise' ,3 and Strawson, although believing Kant's treatment to be 'greatly superior to Hume's', never doubts that Kant and Hume are indeed addressing the same question. Similarly, and even more zealous than Strawson and Wilkerson, Jonathan Bennett4 construes Kant as a mere precursor of and under-labourer for Sidney Shoemaker, asserting that 'Kant says very little about the observer's criterion for my personal identity' and that 'it has been left to Shoemaker'S to fill in the gaps. It is the aim of this essay to show that this assumption is false and that Kant in the Paralogisms chapter and Hume at I.vi.6 of the Treatise are addressing different questions: more specifically, I shall try to show that Kant's concern is not to provide a solution to the problem of personal identity, but is rather to comment upon the over-ambitious nature of the inferences which have been drawn from the Cartesian cogito. If I am right, then attempts to 'grade' Kant's effort and Hume's effort on the same scale will be seen to be misguided and to be unfair both to Kant and to Hume.

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I begin with Strawson's interpretation of the Paralogisms chapter, and my first argument will be that Strawson's account embodies a misinterpretation of Hume, which renders his comparison between Kant and Hume unfair to Hume in so far as it underestimates the latter's contribution to the topic of personal identity. Later in the essay, I will go on to argue that Strawson's Kant is suspiciously Strawsonian and that in his discussion of the Paralogisms chapter Strawson foists upon Kant views which are not recognizably his; I begin, however, with Strawson's discussion of the Paralogisms chapter and its implied interpretation of Hume. In Bounds of Sense Strawson announces: We now come to the fact that lies at the root of the Cartesian illusion. It may be put as follows: When a man (a subject of experience)

ascribes a current or directly remembered state of consciousness to himself, no use whatever of any criteria of personal identity is required to justify his use of the pronoun 'I' to refer to the subject of that experience .... I think it could be said without serious exaggeration that it is because Kant recognised this truth that his treatment of the topic is so greatly superior to Hume's.6 The assumption that Kant and Hume are addressing the same question is perfectly clear here, and it is equally clear which question Strawson takes the two philosophers to be addressing: Strawson asserts that Kant recognized the truth that I do not make use of, or need, any criteria whereby I justify the ascription of states of consciousness to myself; whereas Hume, he thinks, in doubt about this fact, searched fruitlessly for such a criterion. Thus, according to Strawson, the problem for both Kant and Hume is one of perception-sorting, and both philosophers are thought to be asking questions about how we tell the difference between our own experiences and those of other people. Now my argument is not, or not yet, that this is an implausible interpretation of Kant. It is rather that Strawson's attempt to foist this problem on to Hume does not square well with a reading of the relevant section of the Treatise, and to that extent the unfavourable comparison with Kant is simply unfair to Hume, for Hume's concern in the Treatise is quite clearly with the question of what gives unity to a set of perceptions which has already been picked out as one set, and not with the Strawsonian question of what criteria may be used to justify classing any particular perception as a member of this set rather than that, or more accurately, with the question of how I decide that an experience is, or was, mine and not someone else's. It is, I hope, clear that there are two separate questions here: first, the question of how I recognize a perception as being mine and not another's (how I classify perceptions), and second, the question

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of how, having classified perceptions into sets, I explain the unity through time of a single set. Nevertheless, the tendency to conflate them is understandable at least partly because of their common connection with the rationalist doctrine of the soul. That doctrine has been offered as an answer to both questions, and since both Kant and Hume are attacking the rationalist doctrine of the soul, it is natural to suppose that they are attacking it on the same grounds. In Strawson's case the assumption is that both Kant and Hume are addressing the first question and that both find fault with the doctrine of the soul in so far as it is provided as an answer to that question. I have said that this, Strawsonian, interpretation is unfair on Hume, since Hume aims to answer not the first of the two questions, but the second - not the question 'What justifies me in ascribing a current or directly remembered state of affairs to myself?', but the question 'What gives unity to a set of perceptions which has already been picked out as one set?' Nevertheless, there is some excuse for Strawson's interpretation of Hume, for it must be allowed that there are certain features of Hume's account which suggest that he is discussing the experience-sorting problem. The most obvious, perhaps, is that Hume discusses only the first-person version of the problem of personal identity. It is this feature which prompts David Pears to label Hume's discussion of the topic 'surprisingly unrealistic'. 'Unrealistic', he says, 'because in everyday life one asks questions not only about one's own identity, but also about the identity of other people, but Hume only considers questions about his own identity'. 7 This emphasis on the first-person view can give rise to the suspicion that Hume is asking the former of the two questions mentioned above, but the emphasis certainly does not entail that reading of Hume's text and there are, in any case, other aspects of Hume's account which do not accommodate such a reading. For example, in the analogy between state and soul Hume tells us that: As the individual republic may not only change its members and constitution, in like manner the same person may vary his character and disposition, as well as his impressions and ideas without losing his identity.s Here, the question addressed is obviously the second of the two, and Hume never raised the question of how we pick out one set of perceptions, or one republic as one; his concern is with what gives unity to a set of perceptions or republic which has already been picked out as one. Similarly, in comparing the human mind to a theatre, Hume never asks how we know that a perception belongs to one set and not another, but rather asks what binds together the members of the set, when that set has already been identified. Thus

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the mind is a kind of theatre where several perceptions pass, re-pass, glide away and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different .... The comparison of the theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only which constitute the mind. 9 Bennett, in his book Locke, Berkeley, Hume: Central Themes,lO recognizes this feature of Hume's account and comments upon Hume's 'suppression' of synchronous identity statements in favour of serial ones. The emphasis on serial identity statements indicates that Hume is concerned with the conditions for identity of xs through time, not with the conditions for isolating xs at a time; with the criteria for regarding a perception as a member of this set rather than that. But whereas Strawson construes both Kant and Hume as asking questions about the justification of ascription of states of consciousness to oneself, and is thus unfair to Hume, Wilkerson construes both Kant and Hume as asking questions about the correct criteria of personal identity (about the criteria whereby we explain the unity through time of a set of perceptions already picked out as such) and thus runs the risk of being unfair to Kant. Wilkerson's claim that Kant's treatment of the self is no better than, indeed less eloquent than Hume's, cannot be allowed to go unchallenged, for there is a crucial difference between what Kant has to say about the self and what Hume has to say about the self. Compare the following: If anyone, upon serious and unprejudiced reflection thinks he has a

different notion of himself, I confess I can reason with him no longer. All I can allow him is that he may be in the right as well as I and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may perhaps perceive something simple and continued which he calls himself; though I am certain there is no such principle in meY It follows, therefore, that the first syllogism of transcendental psychology, when it puts forward the constant logical subject of thought, as being knowledge of the real subject in which thought inheres, is palming off upon us what is a mere pretence of new insight. We do not have, and cannot have, any knowledge whatsoever of any such subjectY One obvious difference between the two is that whilst Hume simply refuses to believe that other people may have an impression of a continuing self, he has no weapons in his philosophical arsenal with which to counter the claims of someone who professes to have such an impression; Kant, on the other hand, tells us that there is not and cannot be knowledge of any such subject.

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Hume's difficulty springs from the fact that he constantly searches for an impression from which the idea of self can have been derived. In a different context Jonathan Bennett has said of Hume's philosophy that If it were correct it would be vitally important to search for impressions

'of necessary connexion' or 'of power' . . . since the theory is not correct the impression hunt can be called off and the serious philosophy can begin,u It is in Kant's treatment of the self that the serious philosophy begins, for Kant tells us not merely that we have (or that he has) no evidence for a continuing self, but that there can be no such evidence. He insists that the search for and purported discovery of an impression of self springs from an inflation of the fact that the'!' is in all thoughts, and involves an illicit move from the recognition that 'this representation is invariably present in all thoughts' to the belief that it is therefore 'an abiding and continuing intuition, wherein the thoughts, as being transitory, give place to one another' (Ak IV. 221, 16-20/A 350). Whereas Hume simply insists that he has no impression of self, Kant goes further and isolates the source of the mistake which has led other philosophers to claim that they have an impression of self. Kant's rejection of the rationalist doctrine of the soul as simple and substantial is thus a rejection of the assumption that the self is something, some object of intuition. Rather, he argues, in the 'I think' the'!' is not an empirical representation but an 'actus' (Ak III. 276, 35-7/B 423). Running through the rationalists' philosophy is the assumption that in the 'I think' we must be aware of something. Hence Descartes's move from 'I think, therefore I am' to 'What am I?' This something is now used both as the justification of the ascription of states of consciousness to ourselves and as a principle whereby we may judge a person to be identical through time. Kant, therefore, unlike Hume, pinpoints the source of the mistaken belief in a continuing and invariable subject of experience: the mistake lies in supposing that consciousness of self must be an experience and in not recognizing that such consciousness is, in fact, the condition of all experience. Earlier in the essay I gave Strawson's interpretation of the Paralogisms chapter and said that certain parts of Kant's text might seem to support the Strawsonian reading. Strawson's claim is that 'when a man, a subject of experience, ascribes a current or directly remembered state of a consciousness to himself, no use whatever of any criterion of personal identity is required to justify his use of the pronoun "I" to refer to the subject of that experience' Y Two questions immediately arise here: first, is this a correct interpretation of Kant? and second, is Kant committed to the conclusions drawn for him by Strawson? For having stated the

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'key fact', Strawson continues: 'it would make no sense to say, or to think "I distinctly remember an inner experience occurring, but did it occur to me?" '15 Strawson clearly thinks both that such a question is absurd, and that Kant thinks that it is absurd. In other words, the 'key fact' is interpreted as an incorrigibility claim; as the claim that 'first person memory claims are immune to error through misidentification relative to "I" '. That this is an interpretation of Kant, and a controversial one at that, can be seen by comparing Strawson's remarks with those of Johanthan Bennett, who construes Kant as claiming that when I make a memory-based judgement of the form 'I was F at t', I may be wrong about who was F at t. 16 If Bennett is right, then the 'key fact' cannot be an incorrigibility claim, for on Bennett's interpretation Kant is arguing that I may well be wrong in my ascriptions of current or directly remembered states of consciousness to myself. What then is the correct interpretation of the 'key fact'? I think that both Bennett and Strawson mislocate the Kantian interest here. Strawson tells us that according to Kant certain judgements are incorrigible; Bennett tells us that according to Kant certain judgements are corrigible. The surprising fact is that in the relevant sections of the Critique Kant never mentions incorrigibility or certainty or indubitability at all. Strawson makes much of the fact that in the ascription of states of consciousness to oneself, no application of criteria of personal identity is 'required'. He then helps himself to the incorrigibility thesis by inferring that since criteria are not required, 1 cannot be wrong in my ascription of states of consciousness to myself. But this inference is unwarranted, for Kant's claim in the relevant passage is only that 'we must necessarily judge that we are one and the same throughout the whole time of which we are conscious' (Ak IV. 229, 11-12/A 364), that 'the identity of the consciousness of myself at different times ... is a formal condition of my thoughts and their coherence' (Ak IV. 228, 32-4/A 363). He never mentions the criteria for the correctness of such judgements and never says that they cannot be wrong. To move, as Strawson does, from the claim that we have no criteria whereby we ascribe states of consciousness to ourselves to the claim that all such ascriptions must be correct is to make a move which is simply not justified by Kant's text. Furthermore, and leaving aside the incorrigibility claim made on Kant's behalf by Strawson, we might ask whether even the 'key fact' is as important as Strawson suggests. Strawson argues that the central feature of Kant's doctrine of the self is his claim that I have no criteria whereby I justify the ascription of states of consciousness to myself, but it is not clear what part this is meant to play in Kant's thinking, or where Kant ever discusses the

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question. The Kantian warning is a warning against inflating the importance of judgements in the course of which I ascribe states of consciousness to myself, not a theory about the conditions under which such judgements may be made in the first place. In the philosophy of the dogmatic metaphysicians the question of how I come to ascribe states of consciousness to myself is never raised, nor does it figure in Kant's criticism of these metaphysicians. What then of Bennett's interpretation of the 'key fact'? Bennett remarks that 'Kant is silent about the observer's criterion for my personal identity . . . it has been left to Shoemaker to fill in enough details to create a presumption that the idea (that first person memory claims are not immune to error through misidentification relative to'!') contains no lurking inconsistencies. '17 But the fact that Kant says nothing suggests that he has nothing to say. Again, he is emphasizing a point about how my experiences come to me, not a point about what that entails. All memories will be either 'from the inside' or 'from the outside'. This is true even in cases of fission, where the resultant persons (post-fission) will remember (from the inside) things done by the original person, but how we are to characterize the relationship between the original person and the resultant (post-fission) persons remains an open question, and one to which Kant certainly does not provide an answer. Thus, pace Bennett, Kant's warning is simply the warning that we should not inflate judgements in the course of which we ascribe states of consciousness to ourselves, not the warning that we can be wrong in making such judgements: pace Strawson, Kant's warning is simply the warning that we should not inflate such judgements, not the warning that we cannot be wrong in making such judgements. The source of the 'key fact' and of the incorrigibility debate seems to be Kant's assertion, in the Third Paralogism, that the personality of the soul has to be regarded not as inferred but as a completely identical proposition of self-consciousness in time. (Ak IV. 228, 11-13/A362) I have argued that this has nothing to do with incorrigibility, or certainty, or indubitability, but is at most the point that in ascribing states of consciousness to onself one does not make use of criteria of personal identity. This brings us back to the two questions mentioned earlier: (a) What criteria are there whereby we sort perceptions/experiences? (b) What criteria are there whereby we explain the unity through time of a set of perceptions already picked out as such? The doctrine of the soul has been used in an attempt to answer both

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questions. We have seen Hume's hankering after an impression of self which he might use to explain the unity of a set of perceptions already picked out as such. Surprisingly, Locke toys with the notion of self or substance as a means of overcoming problems associated with the former question: for Locke seems to think that it is reference to an identical self which really makes perceptions or memories mine, hence his insistence, in the example of the prince and the cobbler, that the soul of the prince be transferred together with the memory of the prince's past life. Hence, also, his appeal to the goodness of God to prevent transfer of consciousness from one soul to another. Locke sees it as a fault demanding faith in God that we have no criteria for sorting our own data and distinguishing them from those of other people. Kant's suggestion is that this is a fault only if we inflate the importance of the fact that

again, 'The analysis of the consciousness of myself in thought in general, yields nothing whatsoever towards the knowledge of myself as object' (Ak III. 268, 2S-7/B 409). Here we have Kant's insistence that the 'I think' is a performance, an 'actus'. Consciousness of self is not an experience, but is the condition of all experience. Thus the import of the 'key fact' is to reject the conception of the 'I think' as involving an awareness of the self as it is in itself, for 'we do not have and cannot have any knowledge whatsoever of any such subject' (Ak IV. 221, 19-20/A 3S0). My ascription of states of consciousness to myself is not an inference from an awareness of the self: on the contrary, permanence is 'inferred first from numerical identity' (Ak IV. 230, 2/A 36S). In addition to interpreting the 'key fact' as an incorrigibility claim Strawson construes Kant as adhering to a 'principle of significance', thus

the personality of the soul has to be regarded not as inferred, but as a completely identical proposition of self-consciousness in time. (Ak IV. 228, 11-13/A 362)

The doctrine of the Analytic concludes that for any employment of concepts in propositions purporting to give knowledge of objects to be a significant employment, that employment must be tied to a possible intuition, to empirical conditions of the concept's application. An employment of a concept not subject to this limitation is illegitimate. Here is the principle of significance. 19

and fail to remember that The identity of the consciousness of myself at different times is a formal condition of my thoughts and their coherence and in no way proves the numerical identity of my subject. (Ak IV. 228, 22-S/A 363) In brief, then, talk of the soul cannot serve to answer either question. This is because we have and can have no intuition of the self as it is in itself. Running through the rationalists' philosophy is the assumption that in the 'I think' one must be aware of something. Hence Descartes's worry, 'I am aware of my own existence. 1 want to know what is this "I" of which I am aware', and again 'What then am I? A conscious being. What is that?,18 This 'something' is now used both as a justification of ascription of states of consciousness to onself, and as a principle whereby we may judge that a person is identical through time. The 'I' is responsible for perceptions being my perceptions, and its continuance is responsible for my being identical from one time to another. Here is the place for Kant's insistence that 'the personality of the soul has to be regarded not as inferred, but as a completely identical proposition of self-consciousness in time' (Ak IV. 228, 11-13/A 362). I cannot but regard myself as identical through time, but this judgement is not an inference from an awareness of a continuing subject of experience: this is not an inference from an awareness of an object of any sort. '1 do not know an object merely in that I think ... I do not know myself through being conscious of myself as thinking' (Ak III. 267, 4-9/B 406). And

This insistence that Kant is accusing the rationalist philosophers of talking nonsense is found not only in Strawson, but also in Wilkerson, who states baldly that, according to Kant To talk about objects that are non-spatial and non-temporal, objects that cannot yield possible intuitions, is to talk straightforward nonsense. The Dialectic is devoted to an attack on those who infringe such limits, who talk such nonsense. 20 But what textual evidence is there that Kant holds such a principle? At the very outset of the Dialectic, Kant tells us that the conclusions of the Paralogisms are 'sophistications, not of men, but of pure reason itself .... Even the wisest man cannot free himself from them. After long effort he may, perhaps, succeed in guarding himself against actual error, but he will never be able to free himself from the illusion which unceasingly mocks and torments him' (Ak IV. 214, 32; 21S, 3/A 339). As Ralph Walker has pointed out, this, written as it was, prior to the heyday of logical positivism, does not sound like the opinion of a man who thinks his opponents are talking nonsense. Further, in the Antinomy chapter, Kant claims that These pseudo-rational assertions thus disclose a battlefield in which the side permitted to open the attack is invariably victorious, and the

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side constrained to act on the defensive is always defeated .... As impartial umpires we must leave aside the question whether it is for the good or the bad cause that the contestants are fighting. They must be left to decide the issue for themselves. After they have rather exhausted than injured one another they will perhaps themselves perceive the futility of their quarrel and part good friends. (Ak III. 291, 17-34/B 450-1) Kant's argument against the rationalists is not that their conclusions are meaningless, or nonsense, but only that they are empty, that they will do no honest philosophical work for us. The superficial evidence then is that Kant subscribed to no 'principle of significance', and the argument of the Dialectic seems to be simply that the rationalist philosophers are presenting arguments which can neither be refuted nor confirmed, not that their conclusions are unintelligible. Nevertheless, there are reasons why Strawson not only does, but must interpret the key fact as an incorrigibility claim, and must construe Kant as holding the principle of significance, for these two doctrines, taken together, generate Strawsonian conclusions about the self. Strawson refers to the Kantian claim that in ascribing states of consciousness to myself I do not use any criteria of identity and interprets this as an incorrigibility claim, as the claim that I cannot be wrong in ascribing current or directly remembered states of consciousness to myself. The interpretation of Kant as adopting an incorrigibility thesis is also, in itself, an interpretation of Kant as having something to say about personal identity. The incorrigibility thesis, together with the principle of significance, generates the conclusion that Kant is at one with Strawson in thinking that we could not have any coherent use of 'I' which was not linked to an empirical concept of a subject of experience, and that the criteria for the numerical identity through time of a subject of experiences 'though not the same as those for bodily identity, involve essential reference to the human body'.21 But there is no suggestion in Kant that such a use is incoherent. Kant's only claim is that such a use of the first person does not involve any intuition of a subject of experience, because the 'I think' is an act or performance and not a perception of an object. Again, Kant's objection to the Cartesian is not that his utterances are meaningless, but only that they cannot be refuted or confirmed - the rationalist may say what he likes without fear of contradiction. So the incorrigibility thesis and the principle of significance are both attributed to Kant in an attempt to make Kant utter Strawsonian doctrines about the self. But there is little in Kant to justify this interpretation. Indeed, there is little in Kant to justify ascribing to him any story about personal identity and its criteria. On my interpretation the point of the chapter on the Paralogisms is

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to emphasize that the rationalists are wrong in claiming that the soul is simple, substantial, indestructible, etc. In making such claims they confuse a true but trivial analytic proposition with a more exciting synthetic proposition. Hence Kant's repeated warnings against inflating the conclusions of the paralogisms (Ak IV. 2211A 350; Ak IV. 224/A 356; Ak IV. 230/A 366). Hence also his explanation of why Hume's search for an impression of the self was misguided. Thus Kant's arguments are (i)

that we have no awareness of a simple self - and we could have none; (ii) that we have no awareness of a self - as subject of the 'I think' and could have none; (iii) that the reason we have no such awareness is because the 'I think' does not involve our being acquainted with anything at all. The Cartesian move from 'I am' to 'What am I?' is a move in the making of which we are confused by our language. The identity of the consciousness of myself at different times is therefore only a formal condition of my thoughts and their coherence, and in no way proves the numerical identity of my subject. Despite the logical identity of the 'I' such a change may have occurred in it as does not allow of the retention of its identity and yet we may ascribe to it the same-sounding 'I' which in every different state, even in one involving change of the thinking subject might still retain the thought of the preceding subject and so hand it over to the subsequent subject. (Ak IV. 228, 32; 229, 4/A 363) This surprisingly Lockian passage from the Critique emphasizes yet again that nothing could count as evidence for a persisting self, precisely because everything seems to count as evidence for a persisting self. All experience will come to me 'from the inside' or 'from the outside': this I cannot help, since this is the condition of there being experience at all, but it proves nothing save that 'we must necessarily judge that we are one and the same throughout the whole time of which we are conscious'. Whether we are right to do so is a question which Kant does not set himself to answer.22

Notes 1. P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense (Methuen, 1966). 2. T. E. Wilkerson, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: A Commentary for Students (Oxford University Press, 1976). 3. ibid., p. 110.

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4. Jonathan Bennett, Kant's Dialectic (Cambridge University Press, 1974). 5. ibid., p. 100. 6. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense, pp. 164-5. 7. D. Pears, 'Hume on personal identity', in Pears (ed.), David Hume: A Symposium (London, 1963), p. 145. 8. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Selby-Bigge p. 26. 9. ibid., p. 253. 10. Jonathan Bennett, Locke, Berkeley, Hume: Central Themes (Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 336. 11. Treatise, p. 252. 12. Critique of Pure Reason, ed. N. Kemp Smith, IV, 221, 16-20/A 350. 13. Bennett, Locke, Berkeley, Hume: Central Themes, pp. 262-3. 14. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense, p. 165. 15. ibid. 16. Bennett, Kant's Dialectic, p. 100. 17. ibid. 18. Descartes, Meditation II. 19. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense, p. 156. 20. ibid., p. 164. 21. ibid. 22. Thanks are due to the referee, who made many helpful suggestions for improvement of the initial draft of this essay.

7 Personal Identity and Kant's 'Refutation of Idealism' Richard E. Aquila

In the 'Refutation of Idealism' which he added in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant offers a defence of the thesis that 'The mere, but empirically determined, consciousness of my own existence proves the existence of objects in space outside me' (B 275).1 In the Preface added in the second edition he puts the same claim this way: 'This consciousness of my existence in time is bound up in the way of identity [identisch verbunden] with the consciousness of a relation to something outside me' (B xl. note). Commentators have not agreed as to the interpretation of Kant's claim. There is of course a temptation to view it as developing a point already argued in the Transcendental Deduction. There Kant maintains, in a first edition formulation, that 'The original and necessary consciousness of the identity of the self is thus at the same time a consciousness of an equally necessary unity of the synthesis of all appearances according to concepts, that is, according to rules, which ... determine an object for their intuition' (A 108); or, in a second edition statement, that 'The transcendental unity of apperception ['The Objective Unity of Self-Consciousness'] is that unity through which all the manifold given in an intuition is united in a concept of the object' (B 139). Thus both Bennett and Strawson, for example, view the two sections of the Critique as containing a single line of argument, presented more abstractly in the earlier and then more concretely in the later of these sections. 2 Recent interpretations fail to elucidate the problem Kant raises in the Refutation of Idealism. I shall argue that this problem differs from the problem of 'unity of consciousness' dealt with in the Transcendental Deduction. The distinction rests on a contrast between two different notions of 'unity of consciousness' and of 'personal identity'.

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I

Kant's claims in the Refutation of Idealism lend themselves, in general, to two interpretations. On the one hand Kant's emphasis on empirical self-consciousness may indicate a concern with the identification of certain necessary conditions for awareness of oneself, independently of any more detailed question as to the legitimacy of regarding that awareness as constituting a genuine claim to knowledge. It may thus indicate a concern that is independent of specific conditions for the justification of whatever propositions give expression to the awareness in question. Some things Kant says, on the other hand, indicate that he is primarily concerned with a specific problem concerning self-knowledge precisely qua knowledge: Certainly, the representation '1 am', which expresses the consciousness that can accompany all thought, immediately includes in itself the existence of a subject; but it does not so include any knowledge of that subject, and therefore also no empirical knowledge, that is, no experience of it. For this we require, in addition to the thought of something existing, also intuition in respect of which ... the subject must be determined, for which outer objects are absolutely indispensable. (B 277) It might be thought that interpreting Kant's thesis in the former of these ways must involve interpreting his argument as a piece of phenomenological description, and not really as an argument at alP But this need not be so. An examination of the condition for self-awareness, qua awareness, might simply be viewed as directed towards the local pre-suppositions of what Strawson calls the 'self-ascription of experiences'. The distinction, that is, between conditions for self-awareness and conditions for self-knowledge might be taken as a distinction between conditions for possession, on the one hand, of whatever conceptual abilities are presupposed by the ability to make judgements about oneself qua subject of experience and conditions, on the other hand, for possession of whatever justification entitles one to make such judgements on an occasion. Viewed in this way both Strawson's and Bennett's accounts concern conditions for self-awareness rather than knowledge. Thus the issue reduces, on Strawson's account, to an analysis of conditions for possession of a concept of 'experience', and hence an 'experiencer', in the first place:

The requirement which underlies the objectivity condition, however, is ... that it [i.e. experience] should have a certain character of selfreflexiveness ... What is meant by the necessary self-reflexiveness of

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a possible experience in general could be otherwise expressed by saying that experience must be such as to provide room for the thought of experience itself. 4 A necessary condition for this, on Strawson's view, is that one possess the conceptual abilities involved in distinguishing experience from objects of experience. s On Bennett's account, similarly, the primary concern is not with conditions for justifying certain judgements, but rather with one's ability to make such judgements in the first place. In this case the crucial concept is that of the 'past': Any state of being which 1 can intelligibly suppose I might find myself in must include self-consciousness and thus knowledge of my past states, and thus the intellectual ability to have and assess such knowledge ... [But] 1 do not say that because he can bring several data to bear on a single judgment about the past, he is therefore entitled to make such judgments: my argument does not concern the increase in trustworthiness which might be thought to accrue from piling up data ... Within the complex, ordered manifold which is his outer experience, i.e., his experience of an objective realm, he can generate a network of pros and cons; and so ... His concept of the past, in short, is not idle. 6 Thus neither Bennett nor Strawson deals with self-knowledge specifically in so far as it is knowledge of the self, but simply in so far as it presupposes the ability to be judgementally aware of oneself in the first place. Perhaps the primary reason for assuming that Bennett and Strawson are wrong, and that Kant's concern in the Refutation of Idealism is with conditions for a certain kind of knowledge, qua knowledge,? lies in the passage quoted earlier. There Kant distinguishes between the consciousness of existence, which can accompany all one's thoughts, and a genuine knowledge of the subject of those thoughts: the former 'immediately includes in itself the existence of a subject; but it does not so include any knowledge of that subject' (B 277). In the sentence preceding this passage, similarly, Kant maintains that his concern is with 'not indeed the consciousness of my own existence, but the determination of it in time'. And in the second edition Deduction he says: The 'I think' expresses the act of determining my existence. Existence is already given thereby, but the mode in which I am to determine this existence, that is, the manifold belonging to it, is not thereby given. (B 157, note)

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It is tempting to suppose that Kant's distinction between a mere consciousness of one's existence and a genuine determination of that

existence is just a distinction between mere self-awareness and genuine self-knowledge, hence that Kant's concern is in fact with the conditions for justifying certain judgements and not merely our ability to form those judgements in the first place. But another distinction can also be seen to playa crucial role in these passages. This is not a distinction between self-consciousness and selfknowledge, but rather between two distinct sorts of self-consciousness (or knowledge). The first is the mere awareness (or knowledge) that one exists as subject of thoughts; the second is the awareness (or knowledge) of the identity of that subject. A person, it seems clear, may be aware of their existence, yet fail to be aware of their identity. Suppose, for example, that a total amnesiac awakens in a sensory deprivation chamber. Since he lacks a sense of identity linking some past to his present, and an awareness of his body as a presently locatable object capable of linking his present to some future, his presently experienced thoughts, dreams, images and hallucinations can at most provide a continually renewed sense that he exists, but never a clue as to who in particular he is. (It might be objected that the subject at least is aware of being the present subject of a certain sequence of thoughts, dreams, images or hallucinations. But this, I shall argue, amounts for Kant at most to an awareness of one's present experience as forming a 'unity of consciousness' with other experiences. It does not amount to an awareness of who or what in particular is undergoing those experiences. To say that it is of course just 'I' who am undergoing those experiences will then be met by Kant's distinction between two very different uses of the term 'I', once to express a mere 'unity of consciousness' and once in a genuinely referential way. The Refutation of Idealism is primarily concerned with conditions for this latter use.) I shall argue, therefore, that the distinction between mere consciousness of one's existence and genuine 'knowledge' and 'determination' of that existence is primarily a distinction between a mere consciousness (or knowledge) that one exists and a consciousness (or knowledge) of who in particular it is that thus exists. The distinction between mere self-consciousness and consciousness (or knowledge) of one's existence 'as determined in time' is a distinction which Kant introduced into the second edition Deduction. The first edition Deduction rested on the notion of a 'transcendental unity of selfconsciousness'. This, as Kant reminds us in the second edition Deduction, involves two things. First, it involves an awareness of relations which obtain between any present state of consciousness and past (and perhaps future) states of consciousness: This thoroughgoing identity of the apperception of a manifold which

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is given in intuition contains a synthesis of representations, and is possible only through the consciousness of this synthesis. For the empirical consciousness, which accompanies different representations, is in itself diverse and without relation to the identity of the subject. That relation comes about, not simply through my accompanying each representation with consciousness, but only in so far as 1 conjoin one representation with another, and am conscious of the synthesis of them. (B 133) The second condition for transcendental unity of self-consciousness is that one be able to accompany any present state of consciousness with the thought that one is in fact in that state: 'It must be possible for the "I think" to accompany all my representations' (B 131). Some things that Kant says may appear to suggest that a satisfaction of these conditions for a unity of self-consciousness will amount to the fulfilment of conditions sufficient for an awareness of one's personal identity, i.e. for awareness of who one is as a particular subject retaining an identity throughout the diversity of its conscious states. It is perhaps the case that Kant assumed this in the first edition Deduction. But in the second edition he explicitly acknowledges that a satisfaction of these conditions does not suffice for recognition of one's personal identity: On the other hand, in the transcendental synthesis of the manifold of representations in general, and therefore in the synthetic original unity of apperception, 1 am conscious of myself, not as I appear to myself, nor as I am in myself, but only that I am .... The consciousness of self is thus very far from being a knowledge of the self. (B 157-8) By contrasting, in this passage, a mere 'consciousness of self' with a genuine 'knowledge of the self' it seems clear that Kant is attempting to distinguish between a mere consciousness (or knowledge) that I exist and a consciousness (or knowledge) of who in particular I am. The mere consciousness of a synthesis involving a series of successive consciousnesses, even where each momentary consciousness is accompanied by the '1 think', yields at most the knowledge that some intelligent being is present at each moment. It does not, in itself, yield any answer to questions bearing on the particular identity of that being. This is the point that Kant puts by distinguishing between mere self-consciousness and consciousness (or knowledge) of one's existence 'as determined in time': The consciousness of self is thus very far from being a knowledge of

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the self .... Just as for knowledge of an object distinct from me I require, besides the thought of an object in general (in the category), an intuition by which I determine that general concept, so for knowledge of myself I require, besides the consciousness, that is, besides the thought of myself, an intuition of the manifold in me, by which I determine that thought. (B 158) The distinction between mere self-consciousness and a determination of that consciousness is thus not primarily a distinction between mere consciousness and genuine knowledge of the same state of affairs. It is rather a distinction between a very general sort of consciousness (or knowledge) and a particular, determinate form of that same consciousness. It is a distinction between the mere consciousness (or knowledge) that 1 exist and the particular consciousness (or knowledge) of who it is that thus exists - i.e. who I am. For this I require 'an intuition of the manifold in me, by which I determine [the] thought' that I exist. Kant grants, to be sure, that mere awareness of my existence includes an empirical manifold. This is clearer in the Paralogisms chapter than in the Transcendental Deduction. In the latter he seems to maintain that the awareness of existence as contained in the 'I think' that necessarily accompanies consciousness is a purely intellectual awareness, containing no empirical content: 'This representation is a thought, not an intuition' (B 157). But he makes it clear in the Paralogisms chapter that this is not so. The awareness of my existence inevitably contains a sensory content, but this content may simply not, in itself, be sufficient for determining who thus exists. Accordingly, while the 'I think' expresses exmpirical knowledge for Kant, the term 'I' itself remains a mere 'thought', as yet provided with no determinate reference: The '1 think' is, as already stated, an empirical proposition and contains within itself the proposition 'I exist' ... But the 'I think' precedes the experience which is required to determine the object of perception through the category in respect of time .... For it must be observed, that when I have called the proposition 'I think', an empirical proposition, I do not mean to say thereby, that the'!' in this proposition is an empirical representation. (B 422-3, note; cf. B 278) Thus awareness that I exist always accompanies, on Kant's view, a manifold of sensory content (or at least any such manifold in which there is something I recognize, and hence 'think'). But not all such content helps to 'determine the thought' of myself as existing. That is, not all

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such content is relevant to the specification of who in particular thus exists in that manifold. This interpretation rests on a straightforward use of the word bestimmen (to 'determine'). The word may suggest, to an English reader, what is primarily an epistemological distinction. It may suggest the distinction between merely asserting and actually verifying some particular state of affairs. But in fact Kant more often uses the term to introduce a logical distinction, namely, the distinction between the general or abstract, on the one hand, and the process of making determinate reference of such generalities or abstractions to particular cases, on the other. Thus, Kant says: Judgment in general is the faculty of thinking the particular as contained under the universal. If the universal (the rule, the principle, the law) be given, the judgment which subsumes the particular under it ... is determinant [bestimmend)B This interpretation is also confirmed by Kant's association of the distinction between 'I' as expressing a 'unity of consciousness' and 'I' as employed in the 'determination' of my existence with the distinction between mere concepts ('thoughts') and intuitions. Kant's claim, as we have already seen, that 'I' expresses a mere thought, when employed in the former manner, is not meant to rule out the necessity for intuitive content in awareness of my own existence. Kant's claim that this use of 'I' nevertheless needs to be brought into relation to a manifold of intuition might therefore suggest that Kant's problem is really a problem concerning the verification of judgements containing that term. But it is not necessary to suppose this. For the fact that awareness of my own existence involves intuitive content is compatible with maintaining that awareness of my existence is not, just as such, awareness of who in particular I am. Thus it would be perfectly appropriate for Kant to say that, apart from awareness of who in particular I am, my use of the 'I' can at most express the existence of some intelligent being, and hence contain the concept or thought of such a being; but that concept or thought will still need to be brought in relation to intuition. For, at least in one central use of the concept-intuition distinction, the distinction that Kant is attempting to draw is between conditions for the significance of a general term and conditions for the use of properly referential, singular terms.9 The latter are needed, we may say, in order that we may 'determine', or specify, the generalities in question, hence, in the present case, move from the thought of myself merely as an 'I' in general to concrete reference to myself as some particular'!'. This interpretation is also confirmed by the Paralogisms chapter. There of course Kant is mainly concerned with rejecting the pretensions of

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those who claim knowledge of the self as it is 'in itself'. But it also confirms the claim that a mere satisfaction of the 'transcendental' conditions for unity of self-consciousness is not at the same time a satisfaction of conditions sufficient for providing the term'!' with determinate reference. It confirms the view, that is, that awareness of a unity of consciousness - hence awareness of present consciousness as my own and as connected with past consciousness - is not in itself awareness of who in particular 1 am: But this identity of the subject, of which 1 can be conscious in all my representations, does not concern any intuition of the subject, whereby it is given as object [B 408]. The unity of consciousness, which underlies the categories, is here mistaken for an intuition of the subject as object .... But this unity is only unity in thought, by which alone no object is given. (B 421-2) Again, Kant does not deny that awareness of a unity of consciousness needs to involve awareness of a manifold of particular data; but he does deny that such data by themselves suffice for a specification of the identity of the subject of consciousness, i.e. for a 'determination' of that subject. For that we require reference to 'outer objects': But since my existence is taken in the ['I think'] as given ... the proposition is empirical, and can determine my existence only in relation to my representations in time. But ... for this purpose I again require something permanent, which, so far as I think myself, is in no way given to me in inner intuition. (B 420) In the light of these considerations, it seems reasonable to conclude that Kant's distinction, in the Refutation of Idealism, between a mere consciousness of the self on the one hand, and genuine knowledge and empirical 'determination' of the same self on the other, is not primarily a distinction between mere consciousness and genuine knowledge of the same state of affairs. It is rather a distinction between awareness of one's existence through successive states of consciousness and awareness of one's identity through those states. It thereby becomes important to see, however, that the notion of an 'awareness of identity through successive states' is ambiguous in a crucial way. It might simply mean awareness (whether veridical or not) of myself as the subject of successive states of consciousness, awareness of those states as one and all 'mine'; or it might mean awareness not only that I am the subject of successive states of consciousness, but awareness also of who in particular I am. It is the

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notion of 'self-identity' in the first of these senses which appears to provide the main focus for Kant's arguments in the Transcendental Deduction, the arguments which concern the notion of 'transcendental unity of consciousness'. But Kant, as we have now seen, distinguishes such a unity of consciousness, with its attendent awareness of 'identity' through time, from awareness, in the Refutation of Idealism, of my existence as determined in time. The fact that the latter may also be described as awareness of 'identity' through time has, I think, generated the mistaken assumption that the Transcendental Deduction and the Refutation of Idealism are simply two ways of stating the same poinL lO

II

The thesis of the Refutation thus becomes: Awareness (and hence knowledge) of who I am always includes awareness of objects in space outside me. 1 now want to turn to a more detailed consideration of the way in which this formulation relates to some others that have recently been given. In one respect, first of all, the interpretation agrees with those of Bennett and Strawson. It agrees with them in reading Kant's claim not simply as a claim concerned with conditions for the justification of certain beliefs about oneself, but rather as a claim concerning conditions for the very awareness (veridical or not) of oneself in the first place. This does justice to Kant's insistence that consciousness of oneself ('as empirically determined in time') includes an immediate awareness of objects outside oneself. If reference to outer objects were necessary only as part of the justification for beliefs about oneself, then there would be no reason for insisting that mere self-awareness, apart from any question of justification, already includes an awareness of such objects. Thus, as one recent interpreter puts it: If we accept this second interpretation, however, we are faced with

the consequence that at the very least the terminology of the section is confused, for the very statement of the thesis is in terms of consciousness, which is the sort of thing which can be mistaken, rather than knowledge. To make the argument coherent we must assume that wherever Kant speaks of consciousness he is using it as synonymous with experience or objective knowledge rather than with awareness as he seems to do in other placesY On the other hand, it is also possible, on the interpretation I propose,

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to explain why Kant does at least sometimes say that it is in fact knowledge of the self that concerns him in this argument. For on that view Kant's distinction between mere 'consciousness of the self' and genuine 'knowledge' of the self is really just a distinction between mere consciousness (or knowledge) that I exist through a sequence of conscious states and genuine consciousness (or knowledge) of my identity through those states (i.e. of who I am). But it is perfectly appropriate for Kant to deny that the mere consciousness (or knowledge) that I exist through a sequence of conscious states is, just as such, knowledge of the subject of those states. For knowledge that there is a subject is not necessarily knowledge of that subject. One might of course object that such knowledge at least includes knowledge that I am the subject in question. But apart from any further specification of just who I am, this response would seem to be idle. This on my view is just Kant's point. Now it might be observed that the knowledge that I have undergone a sequence of conscious states does involve a significant claim, even if it fails to state just who I am. For it involves a knowledge of my past, even if knowledge insufficient for determining who I am. Those who interpret Kant's argument as primarily concerned with knowledge, qua knowledge, thus naturally regard the argument as directed towards the problem of justifying beliefs about one's past. 12 (It seems clear that Kant was not concerned with a problem about the justification of beliefs concerning present states of consciousness - apart, that is, from beliefs concerning the identity of the subject of those statesY Any justification of judgements which we make about our past, it might be argued, requires appeal to an objective standard independent of our sUbjective memory-impressions; hence self-knowledge presupposes knowledge of outer objects. In addition, however, to whatever intrinsic weakness this argument might have,14 there are two further problems in the way of adopting this reading of Kant. The first is that Kant himself nowhere refers, either in the Refutation of Idealism or the Transcendental Deduction, to the problem of the validity of memory. If it was this problem which occupied Kant in either of these sections, then one would expect some mention to be made of it. In fact, however, Kant seems prepared to grant that knowledge not only that I am presently conscious, but also that I have been conscious, is entirely unproblematic. To assume the contrary, after all, would be to assume that the immediate knowledge of my existence is knowledge at every instant based upon an instantaneous state of consciousness rather than knowledge, as Kant holds, of a unity of consciousness. Thus an interpretation of Kant's problem as a problem about the justification of certain memory-impressions would seem to be misguided. But there is also a further problem with this interpretation. It reduces Kant's problem to a problem which has nothing in particular to do with consciousness (or knowledge) of oneself. The

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problem of justifying memory-impressions is a problem which applies perfectly generally to all sorts of objects. In the light, however, of our earlier considerations, it is difficult to believe that Kant's concern was a perfectly general one of this sort, and not one specifically based upon reflections concerning the self. It could of course be argued that Kant is concerned, in the Refutation of Idealism, with the problem of the self only to the extent that it provides a basis for an attack upon scepticism. Thus Kant assumes, with everyone else, that we have knowledge of ourselves, then he shows that this presupposes knowledge of outer objects. But the obvious difficulty in this is that there is no clear reason why the sceptic should be expected to grant that we are capable of justifying our beliefs about the past. And if it is Kant's point that the justification of beliefs about the past is a necessary condition for knowing who one is in the present, then there is no reason why we should expect the sceptic to grant that he knows who he is in the present. Kant's attack upon the sceptic, then, would have to involve not simply the claim that knowing who one is in the present presupposes the actual justification of beliefs about one's past, but the much stronger claim that even so much as having an idea who one is presupposes this justification. Not only do we find no such argument in Kant, but it is difficult to believe that he thought the argument could be given. Strawson's and Bennett's accounts also fall into difficulties which my approach avoids. The first is that their reconstructions isolate issues that do not appear to have provided the central focus for Kant's own thought. Thus Strawson argues that 'self-ascription' of experiences presupposes the ability to distinguish between experience and objects of experience, since the ability to make the latter distinction is in turn presupposed by our possession of a concept of experience, qua experience, in the first place. But the claim that this is a point which Kant himself is making seems largely speculative. Kant is of course concerned with the problem of 'self-ascription'. But there is nothing to indicate that the reason this presents a problem for Kant lies in the question of how we can be said to possess a concept of 'experience' in the first place. Nothing Kant says in fact implies that a condition for ascribing experiences to oneself is that one possess the concept of 'experience' in the first place. One apparently might, so far as Kant claims, ascribe experiences to oneself simply by recognizing that one is in certain states (which are experiences) without actually describing those states to oneself as experiences. 15 Perhaps one could argue that this is really impossible .16 But it is not clear where Kant himself argues, or even explicitly assumes, that it is. Thus Strawson's reconstruction diverts attention from what appears to have been the main focus of Kant's own argument. The problem of ascribing experiences to oneself lies, on Strawson's formulation, in a

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problem concerning the general notion of experience; culty appears rather to lie in a problem concerning the as a particular experiencer distinguished from others. the problem of 'self-ascription' drops out of Strawson's acknowledges this:

for Kant the difficoncept of oneself Thus the 'self' in account. Strawson

[T]he possibility of ascribing experiences to a subject of experiences and hence the possibility of self-ascription of experiences requires that there be some 'determinate intuition' corresponding to the concept of a subject of experience ... that there be empirically applicable criteria of identity for subjects of experience .... But Kant's provisions for the possibility of self-ascription of experiences ... includes no reference to these facts. I? But this, Strawson observes, does not imply that Kant's argument is weak. Kant is simply not concerned with the 'full conditions' for selfascription, but only with one of the necessary conditions for self-ascription, the condition that we have a concept of experience in the first place. 18 In the light, however, of the connections already explored between the second edition Deduction, the Paralogisms chapter, and the Refutation of Idealism, it is difficult to believe that Kant was not in fact centrally occupied with the problem of criteria for determinate reference to oneself as a particular individual, rather than as a mere 'experiencer'. The same difficulty affects Bennett's account. 19 Just as the problem of self-ascription of experiences becomes a much more general problem concerning the concept of 'experience' for Strawson, so for Bennett the problem of self-consciousness becomes a problem merely concerning the concept of something as 'past': reference to outer objects is presupposed by our ability to make judgements about the past, qua past, and hence by the ability to be aware of ourselves as having a past. Bennett observes, to be sure, that it is part of Kant's view that any self-consciousness always includes a consciousness of oneself as having a past. He also offers an argument to show that the only intelligible problem one could have concerning the self-ascription of experiences is a problem about the ascription of past states. According to Bennett there is no problem, nor did Kant perceive a problem, about the ascription of present experiences to oneself: But how can there be an empirical synthesis - a deliberate coming to a conclusion - in respect of one's ownership of one's own mental states: Kant seems to have ruled this out by saying, rightly, that one's mental states are given to one as one's own.20 What question then remains with which Kant might be dealing? 'The

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answer is that one can, at a given time, seriously employ criteria for mental identity in order to decide what states were one's own at earlier times. '21 But Bennett is wrong in saying that the only problem concerning self-ascription is one which involves the ascription of past states to oneself, for the fact that a present state is given unproblematic ally as 'mine' only permits a certain limited sort of present 'self-ascription'. It permits the awareness that I am presently in the state in question. But so long as it does not also tell me who in particular I am, there is an important sense in which it permits no self-ascription at all. Since it fails to tell me who I am, it fails to tell me who it is that is in the state in question. This is a problem which Bennett overlooks, but there is, as already argued, reason for supposing that it is precisely this problem which occupies Kant in the Refutation of Idealism. Bennett, of course, may rightly observe that on Kant's own view the question of whom I am refers me to a past which is presented in recollection. But even the ability to connect present with past states in recollection ('synthesizing' them in so far as I recognize them all as 'mine') is not in itself sufficient for enabling me to recognize who I am. I may recall that I previously had certain experiences, yet still have no idea who I am. Thus while in one sense my state of awareness necessarily includes consciousness of identity through a succession of states, in another sense it may include no consciousness of my identity at all. 22 There is a second respect in which the interpretation I propose does more justice than either Bennett's or Strawson's to the claims Kant actually makes. For both Bennett and Strawson the 'reference' to outer objects that is presupposed in cases of self-ascription is a perfectly general sort of reference. The concept of 'experience', for Strawson, and the concept of the 'past', for Bennett, presuppose our ability to distinguish between mental states and outer objects in general. It is only in this sense, then, that on Strawson's and Bennett's accounts self-ascription always includes an awareness of outer objects. But Kant repeatedly emphasizes that awareness of oneself ('as determined in time') includes an immediate awareness of outer objects (twice at B 276, and in a footnote to that page; also in a footnote to B xxxiv). He insists, accordingly, that this awareness presupposes not simply the ability to distinguish between experiences and outer objects, hence the possession of a concept of the latter, but rather the immediate awareness of the existence of such objects: the determination of my existence in time is possible only through the existence of actual things which I perceive outside me .... In other words, the consciousness of my existence is at the same time an immediate consciousness of the existence of other things outside me. (B 275-6)

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The fact, of course, that the ability to regard myself as undergoing a certain experience, or as having done so in the past, presupposes my possession of a concept of outer objects does not in itself imply that it presupposes some actual reference to particular existing objects (or objects which once existed). Nor does either Bennett or Strawson suggest that it does. On the account that I propose, on the contrary, it is Kant's claim that awareness of myself as a subject 'determined in time' includes an immediate awareness of outer objects. Or to put the same point a little differently: reference to myself as a subject individuated and distinguished from others includes direct reference to the actual existence (present or pa§,t) of particular outer objects. 23 It includes whatever such reference serves to distinguish and identify me as an individual person in the first place. To be aware of myself, in other words, as the particular individual who I am - not merely as someone undergoing, or having undergone, certain experiences - is to be aware of the actual existence of particular outer objects. Strawson and Bennett may be right, of course, that the mere awareness of myself as undergoing an experience, or having undergone experiences, presupposes my possession of a concept of external objects. But the reference to any particular such object is not introduced in this way. It is introduced only on the further supposition that I am aware of who in particular I am that has undergone the experiences in question. It is just this, I have argued, that constitutes Kant's distinction between a mere consciousnesses of my existence as a single subject through successive consciousnesses and a genuine consciousness of that subject as 'empirically determined' in time. It is the same consideration which would make it inappropriate to attempt an explication of Kant's claims in the Refutation of Idealism merely by appeal to the points Kant makes in the second edition 'General Note' to the Analytic of Principles. There Kant claims that the very concept of an 'inner alteration' - a succession of inner states viewed as changes in the state of some subject presupposes reference to outer intuition: For in order that we may afterwards make inner alterations likewise thinkable, we must represent time (the form of inner sense) figuratively as a line, and the inner alteration through the drawing of this line (motion), and so in this manner by means of outer intuition make comprehensible the successive existence of ourselves in different states. The reason of this is that all alteration, if it is to be perceived as alteration, presupposes something permanent in intuition, and that in inner sense no permanent intuition is to be met with. (B 292)

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But, once again, this presupposition of the inner by the outer is much more general than what Kant claims in the Refutation of Idealism. It does not say that reference to myself as a subject undergoing alteration actually includes reference to particular objects existing in space. It only says that it includes at least a general notion of the latter. This, I think, reflects the fact that what Kant is primarily speaking of, in the General Note to the Principles, are the conditions for the intelligibility of selfascriptive statements. But the precise point of the Refutation of Idealism is to distinguish such conditions from conditions for the actual identification of any self about which such statements might be made.

HI It might be thought that a consideration of Kant's specific argument in

the Refutation of Idealism will cast doubt on this interpretation of the thesis it is seeking to prove. The argument proceeds as follows: I am conscious of my own existence as determined in time. All determination of time presupposes something permanent in perception. This permanent cannot, however, be something in me, since it is only through this permanent that my existence in time can itself be determined. Thus perception of this permanent is possible only through a thing outside me and not through the mere representation of a thing outside me; and consequently the determination of my existence in time is possible only through the existence of actual things which I perceive outside me . . . In other words, the consciousness of my existence is at the same time an immediate consciousness of the existence of other things outside me. (B 275-6) The problem, it might seem, of distinguishing between conditions for recognizing that I am a subject who is undergoing, or has undergone, a succession of experiences and conditions for recognizing who in particular I am does not enter into this argument. Kant, it would seem, is simply concerned with conditions for recognizing that an event has occurred at some particular point in time; a condition for this is awareness of objects as actually existing in space. But if this is so, then awareness of objects in space is a necessary condition for awareness that I am undergoing, or have undergone, some particular experience at some particular point in time - quite apart from the question whether I am also aware who I am. This objection supposes that by a 'determination of time' Kant simply means the obtaining at some moment of a particular state of affairs. Now in one sense, it seems clear, the apprehension at some moment of

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a particular state of affairs does not presuppose awareness of objects existing in space. This is the case of many awarenesses of my own present experience, and there is nothing which shows that Kant was of a contrary opinion about such cases. 24 Thus interpreting Kant's argument in the manner suggested requires that Kant's claims be regarded as limited in some way. They might, for example, be taken as claims applying only to the awareness of past determinations of time. Or they might be taken as applying also to present determinations of time, it being then observed, however, that, apart from appeal to outer objects, it is impossible to date any present determinations of time. 25 Both of these approaches formulate problems which are not explicitly presented as problems in the Refutation of Idealism. It could of course be argued that they are none the less Kant's problems, but any such argument can only be forceful in the absence of alternative interpretations appealing more directly to the text. By a 'determination of time' Kant does not in fact mean merely the obtaining of a state of affairs at some moment. A 'determination of time', as Kant appears to employ the notion (both in the Refutation and First Analogy), is a mode of the very existence of time itself, in so far as the latter manifests a concrete existence at all. Determinations of time are ways, that is, in which time itself exists. But time exists, on Kant's view, only as duration; hence determinations of time are modes of durational existence: Only through the permanent does existence in different parts of the time-series acquire a magnitude which can be entitled duration. For in bare succession existence is always vanishing and recommencing, and never has the least magnitude. Without the permanent there is therefore no time relation. (A 183/B 226) There are, on Kant's view, two such 'time-relations,' or 'determinations of time'. Coexistence involves the durational existence of something simultaneously characterized by difference (as the existence of something simultaneously round and red); succession involves the duration of something in which difference is also successively manifested (as the existence of something successively round and then elliptical). Thus coexistence and succession, as determinations of time, are determinate forms in which duration, hence some sort of 'permanence', exists: All appearances are in time; and in it alone, as substratum (as permanent form of inner intuition), can either coexistence or succession be represented. Thus the time in which all change of appearances has to be thought, remains and does not change. For it is that in which, and

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as determinations of which, succession or coexistence can alone be represented (B 224-5) ... And simultaneity and succession being the only relations in time, it follows that only in the permanent are relations of time possible. In other words, the permanent is the substratum of the empirical representation of time itself; in it alone is any determination of time possible. (A 182-3/B 226) The important point to note is that while Kant thinks of 'determinations of time' as determinate ways in which duration exists concretely, he is also prepared to distinguish between the apprehension of concrete durational existence and that of mere duration. The latter, Kant grants, is experienced in so far as one experiences a 'unity of consciousness'. But a mere experience of a unity of consciousness does not amount to the apprehension of concrete durational existence. This is just the point of the Paralogisms chapter: This identity of the subject, of which I can be conscious in all my representations, does not concern any intuition of the subject, whereby it is given as object, and cannot therefore signify the identity of the person, (by which is understood the consciousness of the identity of his own substance, as thinking being, in all change of states). (B 408) In the Paralogisms, of course, Kant is mainly concerned with the mistaken attempt to infer the existence of an enduring subject, as thing-initself, from the fact of a unity of consciousness. But it is important to see that his arguments there are perfectly general ones. The mere consciousness of a unity of consciousness is not as such the consciousness of durational existence, hence it is not as such consciousness of the identity of a person - noumenal - or phenomenal. Kant does not deny, after all, that the empirically determined person may be regarded as an at least relatively permanent subject of inner states, hence as a substance which undergoes alteration (A 379). He does maintain, however, that any such way of regarding the subject presupposes acquaintance with something more than a mere unity of consciouness (B 292). Thus in so far as experience of a unity of consciousness is not as such awareness of a subject of experience, it is an experience of SUbjective duration but not of the durational existence of a subject. The distinction between duration and concrete durational existence is one which Kant himself draws in the first edition of the Paralogisms: In my own consciousness, therefore, identity of person is unfailingly met with. But if I view myself from the standpoint of another person

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(as object of his outer intuition), it is this outer observer who first represents me in time, for in the apperception time is represented, strictly speaking, only in me., Although he admits, therefore, the'!', which accompanies, and indeed with complete identity, all representations at all times in my consciousness, he will draw no inference from this to the objective permanence of myself. (A 362-3) Thus experience of identity through a unity of consciousness is an experience of duration, but not necessarily of concrete durational existence. It seems clear from the Refutation of Idealism, however, that the 'determinations of time' which presuppose a reference to outer objects are simply the various determinate forms of the latter. Thus the particular determination with which the Refutation deals is that of my existence in time: For this we require, in addition to the thought of something existing, also intuition, and in this case inner intuition, in respect of whose form (i.e., time) the subject must be determined. But in order so to determine it, outer objects are quite indispensable. 26 (B 277) While I may, apart from this determination, be aware of being in various psychological states, I could not be aware just who in particular I am. The problem of 'determining' my existence in time, in other words, is just that of providing a determinate reference for the word 'I'. The reason that reference to outer objects is a condition for this determination is, on Kant's view, that such determination involves reference to something enjoying a concrete durational existence - something relatively 'permanent'. Since no such something can be found merely by appeal to 'inner sense', determination of the inner manifold as concretely 'mine' presupposes determining it by relating it to objects comprising part of a world which does exhibit permanence. Apart from that, while I may continue to employ the concept of a subject of 'my' consciousness, I will have no idea what in particular (i.e. who) to apply that concept to: The consciousness of myself in the representation'!' is not an intuition, but a merely intellectual representation of the spontaneity of a thinking subject. This 'I' has not, therefore, the least predicate of intuition, which, as permanent, might serve as correlate for the determination of time in inner sense in the manner in which, for instance, impenetrability serves in our empirical intuition of matter. (B 278) With respect to Strawson's and Bennett's accounts, then, the following

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result emerges. Strawson and Bennett may be right in maintaining that a conception of outer objectivity is presupposed in any attempt to regard ourselves as subjects of conscious states. Distinguishing between the concept of experience and the concept of an object of experience may be a necessary condition for the intelligibility of self-ascriptive statements. But there is little evidence that this is the point Kant is trying to make in the Refutation of Idealism. For there Kant is arguing not simply that a distinction is required between the concepts of the inner and the outer, but that a genuine reference to particular objects, taken as existing in space, is required for the possibility of 'determining' one's existence in time. We can accommodate this only by recognizing that Kant's argument in the Refutation is not concerned with conditions for the intelligibility of self-ascriptive statements; it is rather concerned with conditions for providing these statements with determinate reference. The argument is concerned, that is, with conditions for awareness of who in particular one is. By the same token, it is also unnecessary to interpret Kant's argument as an argument directed specifically towards the problem of justifying self-ascriptions. If that were Kant's problem, it is difficult to see why he would think that an awareness of one's existence in time already includes particular references to outer objects. If this view is correct, then it is necessary to be cautious about assuming a basic identity of purpose between the Refutation of Idealism and the Transcendental Deduction. The Deduction deals with the 'transcendental unity of consciousness' (or, it may be better to say, with the 'transcendental' conditions for any unity of consciousness). This Kant believes is a necessary condition for the ability to 'determine' one's existence in time. But it seems clear from the Deduction's second edition that it is not a sufficient condition. It is not unlikely that Kant's thinking underwent some change between the two editions. In both Kant argues that unity of consciousness presupposes consciousness of a synthesis of intuitions. The first edition appears to infer that unity of consciousness therefore presupposes awareness of objects existing as objects of intuitions. Commentators have observed that Kant offers little ground for this inference: though awareness of objects actually existing is awareness, in Kant's view, of a certain synthesis of intuitions, not every awareness of a synthesis of intuitions is an awareness of actually existing objects. 27 Kant himself tells us that the sort of synthesis which mathematical categories signify is indeed a synthesis which one can apprehend without any attention to the question whether the objects thus represented are actual or merely imaginary or hallucinated objects: In the application of pure concepts of understanding to possible experience, the employment of their synthesis is either mathematical or

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dynamical; for it is concerned partly with the mere intuition of an appearance in general, partly with its existence. (A 160/B 200)

states in time does involve regarding them in relation to a human body which serves in some way as their 'subject'. There is, for example, the passage quoted earlier from A 362-3. There is also the following passage:

The second edition Deduction appears more cautious than the first. Unity of consciousness, as in the first edition, is a necessary condition for awareness of objects, and this unity itself presupposes consciousness of a synthesis of intuitions. Hence consciousness of a synthesis of intuitions is a necessary condition for awareness of objects. But the suggestion that the synthesis necessary for a unity of consciousness is not only necessary but also sufficient for awareness of actual objects is by no means as prominent in the second as in the first edition. Kant may have realized, by the time of the second edition, that the argument of the Deduction at most establishes that unity of consciousness includes consciousness of some unity in objects of consciousness. It does not establish that unity of consciousness includes consciousness of some unity in objects actually existing in a world which is not merely imagined or hallucinated. Thus so far as the Deduction can show, consciousness of a unity of consciousness is compatible with consciousness of oneself as existing in a world of pure fantasy. Such consciousness, of course, does involve awareness of certain pure concepts (categories) as applying to that world. But this is compatible with denying the need for application of those specific (dynamical) categories involved in the representation of objects as actually existing. For demonstration of this stronger point, Kant may have come to realize, a further argument is required. The Refutation of Idealism may have marked at least the beginning of this realization. 28 If it did not, then it is difficult to see why Kant did not meet the sceptic, in the Refutation of Idealism, simply by referring him to the line of argument contained in the Transcendental Deduction. Instead, the Refutation offers what appears to be a completely independent argument. The difference, I suggest, lies in Kant's inability to show that awareness of actually existing objects is necessary for any consciousness of unity of consciousness as such; it is only necessary for consciousness of oneself as a particular individual who has such a unity of consciousness. 29

Thus the permanence of the soul, regarded merely as object of inner sense, remains undemonstrated, and indeed indemonstrable. Its permanence during life is, of course, evident per se, since the thinking being (as man) is itself likewise an object of the outer senses. (B 415)

IV

It is noteworthy that Kant refrains from concluding, in the Refutation of Idealism, that a person's awareness of who they are presupposes awareness of their own body as a concretely enduring subject of inner states. There are passages - though rare ones - in which Kant does suggest that the empirical 'determination' or 'personalization' of inner

Similarly, though in the Refutation itself Kant only claims that personalization of consciousness involves directing that consciousness towards a world regarded as actual 'outside' of oneself, the following passage appears to imply that this in turn requires that one exist in the form of some body: That I distinguish my own existence as that of a thinking being, from other things outside me - among them my body - is likewise an analytic proposition; for other things are such as I think to be distinct from myself. But I do not thereby learn whether this consciousness of myself would be even possible apart from things outside me through which representations are given to me, and whether, therefore, I could exist merely as thinking being (i.e., without existing in human form). (B 409; final italics mine) But the other hand, it is also clear from this passage that Kant regards the body itself as something 'outside me' and 'distinct from myself'. It is difficult to see how something distinct from myself could be regarded as the subject of my consciousness. But there is in fact no theoretical difficulty, on Kant's view, in regarding the body as at least in a certain sense the 'subject' of consciousness. To say that the body is necessarily something distinct from me is just to say that consciousness is not itself a body of any sort; that is, what says (as it were) that my body is 'outside me' is just consciousness itself. Hence the'!' in question is merely that'!, of a 'unity of consciousness'; the status of the I as concrete subject is not thereby questioned. With regard to the latter, however, there is no reason why Kant is unable to grant that, in one important sense, the concrete I as subject of consciousness just is the human body (or some part of it). What we would be supposing is just that the consciousness to which my body (or some part of it) is given as appearance is ('in itself') a state of the very being which appears in that form: Though the'!', as represented through inner sense in time, and objects

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in space outside me, are specifically quite distinct appearances, they are not for that reason thought as being different things [Dinge]. (A 379; my italics) Thus the body (or some part of it), considered 'in itself', may in fact be the subject of consciousness. Though it does not, therefore, appear as such, the body may well correctly be thought to be the subject of consciousness. It would seem, indeed, that such a thought is required by the very act of 'determining' my existence in time, i.e. becoming aware of my consciousness as concretely mine. The claim that 'determining' one's existence in time requires regarding consciousness in relation to a body thought as its subject does not, however, imply that awareness of existence as determined in time requires awareness of one's body as an objec:t. Suppose, for example, that I awake, face-up, on an operating table (of which I have no awareness) and have experienced a loss of any memories which serve to determine who I am. Suppose, further, that I am in no way aware of my body as an object. (I experience no bodily sensations, or at least none which 1 am able to identify in connection with some particular body I perceive, and 1 perceive no body at all which I would identify as my own.) It is compatible with this supposition that I perceive my surroundings and regard what 1 see as a real world and no mere object of hallucination or fantasy. Given this, it seems clear, the process has already begun, apart from any awareness of my body as an object, of providing myself with a new sense of personal identity. Aware of my experiences not as mere experiences, but as experiences which delineate just this particular path through just this domain of objects, 1 refer those experiences to something which provides an enduring correlate for selfknowledge (knowledge at least of who 1 now am, if not of who I was before awakening in the present state). My awareness of a personal identity is provided by my very awareness of the world presented to me. I identify myself by identifying myself with a particular point of view on that world. But suppose, on the other hand, that I am suddenly unsure whether I am in fact in a room surrounded by objects, and can recall no past room, or anything of the kind, in which 1 am sure that I have been. I suffer both from total amnesia and from a thoroughgoing scepticism with regard to whether or not I am now dreaming or hallucinating. This very supposition removes, it would seem, whatever material might have been present to serve in 'determining' my existence. Uncertain whether I am dreaming or hallucinating, and unable to recall a past life during which I was not thus uncertain, 1 remain without any data relevant to providing an answer to the question 'Who am I?' 1 may know that I am and have been undergoing just these experiences. But anyone might be undergoing these experiences.

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Thus it is possible to grant that awareness of myself as a concrete subject of experience does not require awareness of my body as an object. But it appears to be Kant's view that such self-awareness requires at least awareness of a world which I assume is real and which is experienced from some identifying point of view. In so far, of course, as I thereby identify myself in terms of that point of view, I am accordingly committed to thinking of myself as existing in the particular location which it defines. I am thus committed to thinking of myself as a bodily subject of consciousness, even if I am not presented with that body as an object. It may have been Kant's recognition that awareness of who in particular I am does not require awareness of my body as an object, even if it does require reference to that body, which led him, in the Refutation of Idealism, to omit any mention of the body in connection with the problem of 'determining' my existence in time. Or it may have been that Kant did not think that his view does lead to the conclusion that reference to the body is involved in all determinations of personal existence. Perhaps he considered it possible to regard my existence as personally determined solely in terms of a relation to the world on which I take (or am) a particular point of view, independently of any additional reference to a location at which such point of view is to be found. 30 (The passage quoted from B 409, however, runs counter to this supposition.) Or, finally, Kant may have realized that reference to one's body is implicit in all determinations of personal existence, but neglected to say as much for fear of embarrassment from the consequences of this admission. For if personal awareness involves awareness of a subject equally of consciousness and of bodily predicates, then there would appear to be no possibility of personal existence in disembodied form. But this is a proposition that Kant wished to maintain could neither be proved nor disproved rationally, and was only a subject for faith (B xxix-xxx).

Notes 1. References to the Critique will appear parenthetically in standard form. I occasionally modify Norman Kemp Smith's translation. 2. Jonathan Bennett, Kant's Analytic (Cambridge University Press, 1966), p. 202: 'Kant has a certain line of argument which, though adumbrated in the Transcendental Deduction in A ... appears explicitly only in B, under the heading "Refutation of Idealism".' P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense (London: Methuen, 1966), p. 27: 'The force of these contentions is by no means immediately obvious. It becomes somewhat clearer when we turn to certain sections of the Principles, which are supposed to contain a more detailed working out of the implications of the Deduction; notably, to the argument called the Refutation of Idealism and the arguments of the Analogies.'

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3. Myron Gochnauer, 'Kant's Refutation of Idealism', Journal of the History of Philosophy XII, no. 2 (April 1974), 198. 4. Strawson, p. 107. 5. ibid. 6. Bennett, pp. 124 and 208 (final italics added). Bennett also presents a version of Kant's argument in terms of the problem of verification, but he rejects the argument as too weak to establish Kant's conclusion (pp. 204-6). 7. Gochnauer, 204: 'self-knowledge implies world-knowledge because the world provides the only possible justification for self-knowledge claims'; ct. 202. Barry Stroud, 'Transcendental Arguments', Journal of Philosophy LXV, no. 9 (2 May 1968), 256: 'For Kant a transcendental argument is supposed to answer the question of "justification", and in so doing it demonstrates the "objective validity" of certain concepts.' 8. Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Publishing Co., 1951), 'Introduction', IV (contained in vol. V of the Akademie edition of Kant's works). 9. The interpretation of Kant's 'intuition' in terms of the notion of 'singular reference' has been much discussed recently. See M. S. Gram, Kant, Ontology, an. d the A Priori (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), chap 2; Jaakko Hllltikka, 'On Kant's notion of intuition (Anschauung)', in The First Critique: Reflections on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, ed. Terence Penelhum and J. J. MacIntosh (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1969), pp. 38-53; Manley Thompson, 'Singular terms and intuitions in Kant's epistemology', Review of Metaphysics XXVI, no. 2 (December 1972), pp. 314-43. 10. Thus it would be wrong to take the following passage from the Transcendental Deduction as illuminating Kant's argument in the Refutation of Idealism: 'Only in so far, therefore, as I can unite a manifold of given representations in one consciousness, is it possible for me to represent to myself the identity of the consciousness in these representations' (B 133). William D. Stine does this in 'Self-consciousness in Kant', Philosophical Studies 28, no. 3 (September 1975), 195, but it is precisely the distinction between identity of consciousness and identity of the person who is conscious that distinguishes the two arguments. 11. Gochnauer, 203. 12. ibid., pp. 200ff. Gochnauer indicates that he takes his 'cue from Bennett' on this point, but see n. 6 above. 13. Thus Bennett is wrong in saying (pp. 109-10, 118) that there can be no problem of criteria concerning present ownership of experiences. Though there may be no problem of criteria for determining that some presently experienced mental state is mine, there yet remains the problem of determining who I am, and hence whose mental state that is. 14. See Bennett's criticism of it, pp. 205-6. 15. This point is made by Richard Rorty, 'Strawson's Objectivity Argument', Review of Metaphysics XXIV, no. 2 (December 1970), 221. 16. Rorty argues (pp. 222-3) that while this impossibility cannot be 'demonstrated', the burden of proof lies on a person who affirms such a possibility. 17. Strawson, p. 102. 18. ibid., p. 103. 19. Stine (pp. 191ff.) argues that Bennett's account is superior to Strawson's in this respect. 20. Bennett, p. 118. 21. ibid. 22. It might of course be argued that I can verify a judgement concerning the

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first of these identities only if I can know who I am, hence be conscious of the second of these identities. But I have already argued that Kant's problem is not primarily a problem concerning the verification of judgements about one's past. 23. Erling Skorpen also emphasizes the importance of 'immediacy' in Kant's claims, 'Kant's Refutation of Idealism', Journal of the History of Philosophy VI, no. 1 (January 1968), 30ff. But for Skorpen a reference to particular objects in space is included in any proposition about oneself, not only in those which contain a determinate, identifying refrence to oneself (p. 33). This on my view overstates Kant's claims. 24. Kant grants that reference to particular objects in space is not presupposed in the mere awareness of myself as an experiencer, but only in the determinate awareness of who that experiencer is (B 276-7). 25. Stine, p. 195. 26. Kemp Smith's translation is somewhat modified. 27. Bennett, pp. 131-2; Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason', 2nd edn (New York: Humanities Press, 1962; reprint), p.252. 28. One cannot look to the Analogies for the argument in question. They deal with conditions for judgements concerning the actual existence of outer objects, without revealing in what sense it is necessary to make such judgements in the first place. I have also argued above that the 'General Note' to the system of Principles also fails to provide the argument in question. 29. It should perhaps be observed that these criticisms of Bennett's and Strawson's view of the relation between the Deduction and Refutation apply as well to some of my own recent claims: 'Two kinds of transcendental arguments in Kant', Kant-Studien 67 (1976), 1-19. 30. This would make Kant's view similar to Sartre's, The Transcendence of the Ego, trans. Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick (New York: Noonday Press, 1957), p. 49: 'In fact, I am then plunged into the world of objects; it is they which constitute the unity of my consciousness; it is they which present themselves with values, with attractive and repellant qualities - but me, I have disappeared; I have annihilated myself. There is no place for me on this level.' For Sartre, however, the world qua object of my consciousness is my 'body', though it is my body 'for-itself' and not 'for others'. Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1968; reprint), pp. 401ff.

Critical Assessments

8 Kant on the Perception of Time W. H. Walsh

This essay amounts to a commentary on some of the leading doctrines of the Analogies of Experience, whose main contention I take to be that we should not be in possession of a unitary time-system unless certain things were true, and indeed necessarily true, of the world of experienced fact. A unitary time-system is one in which all temporal ascriptions - all dates and durations - are directly relatable; it makes sense inside such a system to ask of every supposed happening whether it preceded, followed or was simultaneous with anything else which is taken to happen. Kant assumes, obviously correctly as it seems to me, that the temporal system we have at least purports to be unitary in this way. He also assumes, again as I see it uncontrovertibly, that statements assigning dates to events or durations to processes are intended to say something about the objective world, instead of to record what particular persons happen to feel. We do contrast real with apparent duration ('the struggle lasted for ten minutes, though it felt like an age'), but it is the former which necessarily occupies our primary attention, for only if we first fix the real position of some things in the temporal process can we speak effectively of the apparent position of other things. The real, here as elsewhere, is the normal, the apparent the deviant, and you cannot understand the deviant until you grasp that from which it deviates. Our chief aim in operating a system of temporal concepts must accordingly be to say what objectively is the case. It turns out, however, that the achievement of this aim is less easy here than in some other instances. Direct perception, at least if we correlate the data of different senses, or even of one sense at different times, enables us to say that physical objects possess certain properties. But time, as Kant himself is constantly saying, 'cannot be perceived': events do not come to us with their dates stamped on them, and the fact that a precedes b in my experience does nothing to show that a

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precedes b in reality. The special difficulties of the establishment of objective time-determinations are such, Kant believes, that we can make genuine temporal judgements only if the experienced world has a certain necessary form. It must be a world in which nothing is absolutely created or absolutely annihilated, one where all change is transformation. It must be a world in which events are not loose and separate in the way Hume took them to be, but rather where the very fact that something occurs means that something else must have occurred or be about to occur, i.e. one where there are necessary connections between events. Finally, it must be a world in which different physical things do not operate in causal independence of one another, but form part of a system all of whose members are in thoroughgoing causal reciprocity. That these things are the case in the world we have to deal with Kant says is not just a fact but a necessary fact: it is bound up with our having a certain consciousness of time whose characteristics we all recognize. l In what follows I shall be trying to sketch and evaluate Kant's arguments for these striking conclusions. As he says himself, many persons before him had accepted them as true, but few, if any, had subjected them to serious examination and none had offered a satisfactory proof of their validity. The 'philosopher' who, asked how much smoke weighs, replied that you could get the answer by subtracting the weight of the ashes left from the weight of the wood burned (B 228/A 185) was in fact assuming the principle of the first Analogy; so were the ancients when they produced their formula Gigni de nihilo nihil, in nihilum nil posse reverti. Similarly the principle that nothing happens without a cause is accepted as axiomatic by philosophers and non-philosophers alike in daily life. One can call attention to the special necessity we attach to such principles by pointing out that, if someone says that something happened for no reason at all (without any connection with anything that preceded) or that something may have gone clean out of existence, this is taken as a joke: the implication is that we are not prepared to subject principles of this kind to serious doubt. But it is one thing to establish this as a matter of fact, and quite another to find a justification for treating them in this way. What makes Kant's position intriguing is just that he thinks he can provide such a justification. Still more impressively, the justification he offers of one principle is, as we shall see, closely bound up with those he gives of the others: the three Analogies, although formally separate, belong intimately together, with the result that the argument in anyone case derives support from the argument in the others. This is not to say that it has to be accepted, either as a whole or in part; it is merely to call attention to an immediate point of strength in Kant's case and to suggest that its rejection may involve more farreaching consequences than may at first appear. Kant makes remarks both at the beginning and at the end of the

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Analogies about the form of the proofs he offers. He maintains that neither a conceptual nor an empirical proof is in point here, what is wanted being rather a 'transcendental' proof, 'from the possibility of experience'. We need to start from the fact that we are able to apply a certain system of concepts, and then ask what must be true if this situation is to obtain. I have drawn attention elsewhere2 to some of the difficulties in this notion, and shall merely say now that, for all Kant's disclaimers, the suspicion must remain that he offers a series of analytic arguments after all, built largely round his idea of what is involved in being an event. I do not mean this to imply that his contentions are, in my opinion, essentially arbitrary: he could and would assert that his concept of an event was framed to fit the facts of our actual temporal experience. But even if this is true, as no doubt it is, the form of the argument would not be unique in the way Kant says it is. With this by way of preliminary let us now proceed to the details of Kant's case. The reason why the Analogies, unlike the Axioms and Anticipations, involve three special principles in addition to the general principle already referred to is that time has three modes, duration, succession and coexistence (B 219/ A 177). The obvious inference from this would be that the first Analogy is concerned with the perception of duration. In fact, its purpose is wider than this: it seeks to lay down a general condition which must be satisfied if we are to have a single, continuing time-system, as opposed to a set of particular temporal judgements which can be brought into no relationship with one another. If all times are to belong to a single series (and we all behave as if they must), we must believe, Kant maintains, that there is something in the experienced world which endures through all time, something which persists as the underlying substance of things, though its manifestations or modifications constantly change. At bottom, in this scheme of things, nothing is created or annihilated; what is fundamentally there continues to exist, unchanged in quantity. The idea is perhaps most easily made intelligible if we take it, as Kant himself was inclined to do, in terms of the classical doctrine of matter, the configurations of which were supposedly constantly changing though it was itself indestructible and though its quantum in nature was neither increased nor diminished whatever changes occurred. But it is important to notice that all Kant needs to make good his point is that there is something in the world of experience which endures through all time; he has no call, or indeed any authority, to say what that something is. To put it in his own terms: that the concept of substance has application in the experienced world is a truth we can know a priori; what its application is we can find out only by empirical means. Kant's position about substance is in fact exactly parallel to his position in the rest of the Analytic of Principles. In the Antici-

Critical Assessments 171 pations of Sense-Perception, for example, he tries to show that every sensation must have a determinate degree; only on this presupposition, he argues, are we justified in asking quantitative questions about, e.g., the intensity of an illumination or the depth of a colour. But he never pretends that we can anticipate experience here in more than formal terms: to find out in what degree a sensation is present we need to have recourse to experience. Similarly in this passage: to discover what form the permanent takes we must go to the scientist, not the critical philosopher. 3 In the summary proof he added in the second edition at the beginning of the First Analogy (B 224-5) Kant first remarked that time itself 'remains and does not change', since it is in time that all changes must be thought to take place. But time itself cannot be perceived, and hence it follows that 'there must be found in the objects of perception ... the substratum which represents time in general'. To say the least, this is not very lucid. The case is put rather more convincingly in the opening paragraph of the first edition version, where we read that, in order to determine whether 'the manifold of appearance' is, as 'object of experience', coexistent or successive, 'we require an underlying ground which exists at all times, that is, something abiding and permanent, of which change and coexistence are only so many ways (modes of time) in which the permanent exists' (A 182IB 225-6). But for anything like an effective argument in support of Kant's conclusion we have to turn to the last pages of the First Analogy. If we were willing to allow that 'new things, that is, new substances, could come into existence', we read in one passage (B 229/A 186), we should 'lose that which alone can represent the unity of time, namely the identity of the substratum'. The reason for this, as given in a later paragraph (B 231/A 188), is that 'this permanent is what alone makes possible the representation of the transition from one state to another'. A coming to be or ceasing to be that is not simply a determination of the permanent but is absolute, can never be a possible perception' (B 231/A 188). 'If we assume that something absolutely begins to be, we must have a point of time in which it was not. But to what are we to attach this point, if not to what already exists? For a preceding empty time is not an object of perception' (same paragraph). If substances could come into being or cease to exist, 'appearances would relate to two different times, and existence would flow in two parallel streams - which is absurd' (B 231-2/A 188). I shall now attempt a free reconstruction of this somewhat elusive line of thought, designed to bring out what I take to be its main points. Let me remark first that inspection of the whole passage reveals that Kant is concerned not just with the unity but also with the continuity of time, which he says can be assured only if we suppose that the underlying substance or stuff of the experienced world - whatever it is that under-

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goes change - persists unaltered in quantity. Without continuity of substance in this sense we could not have continuity of time. Why not? First, for the general reason that 'only the permanent can change': we can take cognizance of alterations only if we see them against a background that persists. If there were nothing stable in our experience - if we lived in a world more Heracleitean than that of Heracleitus, with everything 'flowing' at the same rate - we could not even appreciate its instability. Kant makes use of this argument in the second edition Refutation of Idealism when he claims that knowledge of our inner states is possible only if we have outer experience. The mental world, as Hume put it (Treatise, p. 252, ed. Selby-Bigge), is one where perceptions 'succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement'. In these circumstances, to say no more than that different perceptions are related as earlier and later we require to be conscious of something permanent, and this must be something outside the series of perceptions (B 275-6). However, this argument alone will certainly not give Kant all he wants in the First Analogy, for the persisting things it demands need only be relatively persistent. We all know that as a matter of fact a dating system is possible only because the physical world contains relatively stable and long-lasting objects like the earth and the sun; that there are such objects is, one supposes, an empirical matter. But the First Analogy puts forward what is claimed to be an a priori as opposed to an empirical requirement; the permanence or persistence it speaks of is absolute, persistence through all time rather than for a long time. Kant must therefore have, or suppose himself to have, further arguments in support of his case. In fact, these arguments are all indirect: they take the form of asking what the situation would be if the principle of the First Analogy did not hold. Suppose in the first place that the principle were to be breached by the creation of a new substance, which would then presumably manifest itself in what, in our present language, we should describe as a series of happenings. How should we integrate these happenings with the rest of our experience? How indeed should we be justified in speaking of them as happenings at all? Since by definition they would be accidents of a substance which was totally unrelated to anything else in existence, their history would be separate from that of the rest of the experienced world. We could not accordingly say whether what happened to this new substance was happening before, after or simultaneously with any other events; we should find ourselves in the paradoxical position of having two wholly unrelatable time-series, one which we had already, the other which we had newly acquired. But would even this language be legitimate in the circumstances sketched? It is surely plain that it would not. We could not date the emergence of the new substance, and in consequence would not be justified in saying that the 'new' time-series had 'just been

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acquired'. We can say things like 'At such-and-such a time Vesuvius first erupted', because we can see this occurrence as part of the history of the earth, which in turn is part of the history of the supposedly persistent physical universe. But we could not say 'At such-and-such a time a new substance began to manifest itself', since ex hypothesi other happenings would have no connection with this supposed event. The first appearance of a new substance would accordingly be preceded by nothing but empty time which, as Kant says, is not a possible object of perception. Consider now the opposite contingency, in which substance is thought of not as being created but as annihilated. It might be supposed that the annihilation of substance - its going clean out of existence - could be a datable occurrence, since it would follow on a regular series of happenings in which something taken to be permanent changed in an orderly way. Provided that events of this sort were relatively rare - if transformation were the general rule and annihilation only exceptional - we could at least recognize them as events. But there are difficulties about this too. Unlike all other events, an occurrence of this sort would have predecessors but no successors; as the absolute termination of a series it could not be said to belong to the history of anything. More seriously, it is hard to see how what we should describe as subsequent to it could be said to be really subsequent to it; as an event with no outcome it could not be seen as a regular part of the time-series. Once more, it would be followed by nothing but empty time, and as such could not be perceived. Substance, then, must be taken as permanent, because neither the creation nor the annihilation of substance can be experienced. It follows that we must suppose that everything that happens must belong to a single history, the history of eternal (phenomenal) substance. Were this not so, we should be without a framework inside which to elaborate a unitary system of temporal relations. The position would be that we should be presented with a series of distinct histories which could be brought into no relationship to one another; the temporal questions we now think it appropriate to raise on all occasions simply could not be posed. It is important to observe that the same predicament would threaten us if we followed the lead of some commentators and argued that relatively persistent objects of the kind previously referred to would be enough to meet Kant's requirements. That they would not we can see by reflecting that there might be, and doubtless are, relatively persistent physical objects in different galaxies. It would be possible in these conditions for different groups of intelligent beings to make temporal judgements which were wholly unrelatable; with nothing more to go on than is here presumed we could not ask whether events in the one galaxy were or were not simultaneous with those in another. Kant is right in holding this to be a paradox, and in arguing that we in fact make more

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extensive demands about the unity and continuity of time than would be possible in the conditions sketched. We need to provide for overall continuity, and that is why we need not relative but absolute permanence in the substance of things. It scarcely needs to be emphasized that the substance for which Kant argues in the First Analogy is not metaphysical substance. He is not talking about things in general, but about the world of experience; the characteristics of substantia phaenomenon, as he calls it (B 186/A 146), can accordingly be quite different from those of substance in the metaphysical sense. Substantia phaenomenon, to mention one point only, is something which essentially manifests itself in time, which would certainly not be true of, for example, Leibniz's monads. Substance in the First Analogy resembles the substance of metaphysicians in that it cannot be directly experienced; you can get at phenomenal substance only through its accidents. But there the resemblance ends, for whereas metaphysical substance is empirically inaccessible because it transcends experience altogether, substance of the kind Kant here postulates is inaccessible because it is not the sort of thing which could be got at in itself. Just as one could not confront the social structure of a community, but only discern it in the attitudes and actions of its members, so one cannot experience phenomenal substance, but only grasp it through its manifestations. In other words, substance is an organizing concept, concerned to relate different items in experience. But it is not any less respectable because of that fact. I am inclined to think that this part of Kant's case is not only plausible, but plainly correct. But I confess to two serious misgivings about it. First, any attentive reader of the Analogies notices the way in which Kant alternates between talk of substance in the singular and talk of substances in the plural. The Third Analogy in particular will make sense only if we are permitted to speak of phenomenal substances. But what could these substances be? In the Third Analogy they seem to be large astronomical objects like the sun. But the sun is certainly not an eternal object with a never-ending history: it came into existence at a particular time or during a particular period, and will cease to exist at some time in the future. At this date the material of which the sun is composed will be transformed into something else. Similarly with other suggested substances, where these are identified with familiar objects, whether large or small. But to attempt the identification is in any case mistaken, for the reason explained in the last paragraph: to speak of substance in the sense of the First Analogy is not to speak of an item in the world. The transition from substance to substances accordingly seems quite unjustified. My second misgiving arises out of the awkward fact that there is a well-known theory in cosmology which involves a doctrine of the continu-

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ous creation of matter, and so seems to go directly counter to Kant's conclusions. True, this theory is not universally accepted, but it is for all that seriously discussed, which would hardly be likely if there were some a priori objection to it. Defenders of Kant seem to me to have two options as regards this theory. They might in the first place claim that the continuous creation of matter is not the continuous creation of substance in the sense Kant intends; on this I can say only that it looks uncommonly like it. Alternatively, they can argue that there is after all an a priori objection to the theory of continuous creation, though its propounders, not having considered the questions Kant raises, are not aware of this. My own inclination would be to fall back on this second defence, and at least to require the theory's supporters to explain how on their view the unity and continuity of time are to be safeguarded. But I admit that I feel an awkwardness in supposing that men as intelligent as these can make the mistake which on this interpretation they would be making. I must now pass to the Second Analogy, which I shall again discuss only from a limited point of view, omitting any proper enquiry into Kant's concept of causality and concentrating on the relevance of his arguments to the perception of time. The First Analogy, as expounded above, sought to establish a general condition for the making of temporal judgements: the continuity and unity of time had to have their counterpart in the world of experience. As we saw, Kant himself connected this requirement with the perception of duration. In the Second Analogy he considers another mode or aspect of time, succession, and argues that we can say that one event really precedes another only if there are necessary connections in the experienced world. The connections in question are not the intelligible connections for which rationalist philosophers like Descartes sought; all that Kant is claiming is that, when an event occurs, there must be some preceding event upon which it follows according to a rule. There is no question here of our being able to attain insight into the workings of nature; in one way these remain as 'secret' on Kant's view as they do on that of Hume. But in another way the experienced world as Kant sees it is altogether different from the world of Hume, for whilst in the latter all events are loose and separate and anything can, in principle, precede or follow anything else, in Kant's understanding of the scheme of things events are tightly linked together, and the temporal order, so far from being full of contingencies, is determinate down to the last detail. Unless this were true, Kant argues, we could never say that this objectively followed that. To get a grip on this at first sight extravagant argument we need to observe at the outset that Kant is here making a specific application of something for which he had put up a case in the first edition version of the Transcendental Deduction, that association presupposes affinity.4 In

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claiming that the categories are necessary for experience he naturally had to refute the suggestion that they are nothing but highly general concepts empirically arrived at. Hume had invoked the psychological machinery of association with a view to showing that this was true of the key concept of cause. According to this way of thinking, some of our 'perceptions' introduce others in a regular manner - there are constant conjunctions in our experience - and this leads us, when a perception of the first sort appears, to feel very strongly that one of the second sort will follow. We imagine in these circumstances that there is a necessary link between the one event and the other, but the necessity is in fact purely subjective. Kant's objection to this theory is fundamental: he denies that the process could even start unless necessary connections were presupposed. If the situation were as Hume describes it - if we had to deal with nothing but perceptions occurring in individual minds - it would be impossible to speak of one regularly following another. That our experiences are orderly depends on the fact that the world of events is orderly, and the world of events must be separated sharply from the sphere of private perceptions. Experiences do follow one another in regular sequence, but that is because necessary connections are already built in at this level: events of their nature have necessary ties with what precedes and follows. Hume succeeds in extracting causality from experience only because it is there already, and there not as a matter of fact but as a matter of necessity. Before trying to elaborate this further I should like to emphasize another relevant respect in which Kant and Hume differ fundamentally. Hume builds his whole theory of mind around the occurrence of perceptions, which he divides into the two species impressions and ideas. Asked to account for the peculiar nature of belief - to explain what it is to assent to or dissent from an idea, as opposed to merely entertaining it - Hume replies that it is to contemplate the idea in question with a special sort of feeling. So far as I know, Kant nowhere discusses this theory of belief directly, but everything he has to say on the closely connected subject of judgement goes to show that he must have rejected it in its entirety. In his account of the subject the central aim in judgement is to say what is really the case, as opposed to how things seem to the individual experient. Judgement aspires to express truth, and what is true holds without distinction of persons. To see the distinctive feature of judgement as residing in a privately experienced feeling is from this point of view to pick on something utterly irrelevant. For even if it were in fact the case (as it is not) that whenever we form beliefs we experience such feelings, they clearly have nothing to do with belief as involving truth-claims. To maintain that a certain belief is true is to claim the ability to go beyond the impressions or feelings of individual believers and state what must be accepted by anyone who considers the facts.

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Hume displays enormous ingenuity in trying to show how on his account of the matter we could still speak of a 'system of realities'; the fact remains, even so, that his theory is broken-backed from the start. By contrast, Kant brings the notions of judgement and truth into prominence from the beginning of the Critique, and in so doing avoids the fantasy, if also some of the charm, of his great contemporary. Whatever the merits of these general remarks, it is certainly true that Kant's notion of judgement has to be kept constantly in mind in reading the Second Analogy. As everyone who has looked at that section knows, Kant puts his problem as that of how we are to pass from subjective to objective successions: he wants to know on what conditions we can say that one thing follows another 'in the object', as opposed to in my mind or yours. Kant says notoriously that 'the apprehension of the manifold of appearance is always successive' (B 234/A 189), but there was no necessity from his point of view to insist on the 'always'. To get the argument started it is enough to make the modest claim that the order of our apprehension does not necessarily coincide with the order of actual events; to point to the obvious fact that we sometimes apprehend successively states of affairs which we take to be really simultaneous, and at other times believe that the order of our apprehension is the same as, or corresponds to, the objective order of events. We are set a problem by the circumstances in which our experiencing takes place: we have to sort out what the world is really like from how it merely appears to us, and this problem is as urgent for time-relations as anywhere. Hume tried to hold on to appearances, here as elsewhere, as the only palpable realities; the so-called real world could in his view be no more than a necessary fiction. Not the least of Kant's merits was that he saw that this involved a reversal of the true order of things: the subjective could become intelligible in the light of the objective, and not vice versa. The conception of appearance makes no sense unless we have first given sense to the conception of reality. The solution Kant offers to his problem is a variant of the general doctrine advanced elsewhere in the Critique which connects the notions of objectivity and necessity. A subjective sequence is one which is essentially arbitrary; it is like the connecting of two ideas by association. An objective sequence, by contrast, is not arbitrary but necessary; it is like the connecting of two ideas by judgement. There is a sense in which what is true may be said to be compulsive for all thinkers, whatever the nature of the content involved; everyone who thinks rationally is under obligation to accept it. Kant may well have been thinking of this sort of compUlsiveness in the present discussion, but it is certainly not all he had in mind. For he wants to explicate the notion of an objective sequence as being necessary in a further, internal sense, namely, that it is one which takes place in accordance with a rule. To understand this we must begin

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at the point at which he begins himself, with the conception of an event as occurring at a determinate place in time. Events are, of their nature, not self-contained, but point both backwards and forwards in the timeseries. Nor is this the mere tautology that everything present has a past and a future. Something happens now because of something which happened in the past; its place in the time-series is not accidental, but is due to the occurrence of some preceding event. Because a thing of a certain sort happened at a time t 1, a thing of another sort happens at time t2 ; there is a rule connecting the two occurrences. It is not Kant's doctrine that rules of this sort can be discovered a priori. All that we can know in advance of experience is that any event will point backwards to some event in the past and forwards to some event in the future. But that this much can be said is entirely certain, for only on these terms can we understand what it means for one thing to succeed another as a matter of objective fact, as opposed to in our private experience. It should be observed that Kant is not committed to the impossible proposition that every objective sequence is a causal sequence; his own instance (B 237/A 192) of the boat seen sailing downstream clearly precludes this. There is no rule to the effect that when boats are seen upstream they must subsequently be seen downstream. For the sequence to be objective what is required is that it be causally determined in a more general sense: elements in the later situation must be what they are because of the occurrence of the earlier one. Here as elsewhere Kant's claims are more modest than they have sometimes been taken to be. But the fact that they are modest when considered in detail should not disguise their radical character when considered more broadly. That we can know a priori that there are necessary connections between events is a sufficiently startling proposition even when all the proper qualifications have been put in. And it must be emphasized that Kant is in no doubt either about its truth or about the ubiquity of its application: he believes that it would not be possible to claim that anything really preceded or followed anything else unless every event in the experienced world pointed forwards and backwards in the way I have described. The time-series as a whole must be fixed in advance, with the position of the earlier members determining that of the later, if we are to be able to make true judgements about succession. We all know the discomfort this result caused Kant when he came to write his moral philosophy, but we are not concerned here with this aspect of the matter. In the Discipline of Pure Reason (B 81S/A 787) Kant says that it is a 'peculiarity' of transcendental proofs that 'only one proof can be found for each transcendental proposition'. It is somewhat curious in view of this that he offers what seem to be six or seven separate arguments in support of the principle of the Second Analogy. But the diversity here is perhaps misleading: at bottom Kant relies throughout on a single main

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line of thought. He moves from a formal feature of time - the fact that past must precede present and present future is what is taken (this is the all-important point) as a single continuous series - to its counterpart in the real world, arguing that we could not 'empirically apprehend this continuity in the connection of times' (B 224/A 199) unless 'the appearances of past time determine all existences in the succeeding time'. It seems clear that this argument has a close relationship to the main proof of the First Analogy, and indeed the difficulty is to make any sharp separation between the two. In the First Analogy Kant sought to demonstrate that whatever happens must form part of the history of something which persists through all time without increase or diminution; his emphasis there is on the unchanging subject of which all events are the history. In the Second Analogy his shifts attention from the subject to its manifestations; the point which now preoccupies him is the specific place of events in time. But there is the same stress in the two passages on connectibility, and in both the conclusion is drawn that to allow exceptions to the principle argued for would jeopardize the continuity of time. Just how close the two come can be seen if we reflect that, instead of ruling out absolute creation as he does in the First Analogy by arguing that it would involve unrelatable time-series, Kant could have considered the subject in the Second Analogy and declared absolute creation impossible on the ground that the first manifestation of a new substance would not follow on any preceding event according to a rule and could not therefore be said to have a determinate place in time. Absolute annihilation could similarly have been proscribed on causal grounds: if something went clean out of existence we should have an event which had no effects, a possibility which Kant believed would have fatal results for our perception of objective succession. From the point of view of the Second Analogy the creation of a new substance would involve what was in effect a random occurrence, whilst the annihilation of some existing substance would issue in what might perhaps be called a random nonoccurrence. Both would involve inexplicable breaches of regular temporal sequences, and as such would constitute a threat to the very possibility of making true judgements about the objective order of events.s Few philosophers today are prepared to take the threat just spoken of with entire seriousness; indeed, the prevailing view is that conclusions such as Kant tries to establish in the Analogies must be viewed with profound suspicion. It is not denied that experience is as a matter of fact full of regularities, as even Hume was prepared to admit; what is questioned is the contention that we need to provide for total regularity, on pain of losing all ability to discriminate between the real and the imaginary. Two quite distinct factors combine to build up and sustain this attitude. First, the widely shared empiricist prejudice against principles which claim to be synthetic a priori: it is felt that only those

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deplorably ignorant of or insensitive to the most elementary distinctions in philosophy could commit themselves to these. Reflection on the special character of the principles Kant advocates in the Analogies will perhaps go some way to dispel this prejudice, for whatever account we finally give of them, they can scarcely count as ordinary truths of fact, miraculously known apart from experience. But even if this defence succeeds, the general attitude to this part of Kant's work is not likely to change. For there is a second factor in operation here, namely, a persistent belief that Kant is making a lot of fuss about nothing. He confronts us, on this account, with possibilities which he himself describes as alarming, but which can be seen, if contemplated coolly, to be nothing of the sort. Why should there not be an occasional random occurrence, or an occasional random non-occurrence, for that matter? Experience shows that we can take a certain amount of disorder in our stride: the aberrant can upset us, but need not cause the catastrophic consequences which Kant says must result if we take it seriously. The late Dr Waismann is said to have believed that a hammer he once possessed went clean out of existence: what harm is there in admitting that he may have been right? Provided that most substances persist, the annihilation of one here and there will make no practical difference. And if most sequences are regular, an occasional breach of causal law can be tolerated without difficulty. The suggestion here is that there is enough persistence and regularity in the experienced world to enable us to accommodate the exceptions which Kant wants to rule out dogmatically. But is there? The difficulty, as I see it, is to set any limit to the number of exceptions, once their possibility has been admitted. To argue that as a matter of fact the creation and annihilation of substance are rare, and the reign of causal law nearly if not quite universal, will not provide the necessary security. For even if it is true (and how we could know it is not obvious) that exceptions to Kant's principles have up to now been few, that will not prevent their occurring with far greater frequency in the future. How far must this process go before we have to confess ourselves totally baffled? If the reply is made that we are concerned with real and not merely logical possibilities, and so can safely discount any such contingency, the question can be asked whether without it the situation as described is free of difficulty. On the hypothesis under consideration thing are occurring few in number, admittedly, but occurring nevertheless - which we cannot integrate with the rest of our experience: events which have no antecedents, events which have no consequences, happenings that come about for no reason at all. What is there in these circumstances to distinguish these peculiar phenomena from total illusion? If some hard-headed person of a scientific cast of mind were to pronounce them entirely unreal, would there be any means of answering them? To take this line

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is, of course, to subscribe to Kant's principle that only what is connectible according to law is empirically real. Alternatively, an attempt might be made to hold on to the reality of the phenomena whatever the consequences: the effect of this, if it were seriously persevered with, would be to cast doubt on what had hitherto been taken as the system of realities. We cannot, in fact, do justice at the same time to those happenings which conform to rule and those happenings which do not; it is a case of choosing the one or the other. In this respect our position is like what Kant described when he spoke of the creation of substance involving time flowing in two different streams. And just as in that case, we should have no reason for preferring either to the other. I do not myself believe that those who think we could (or can) get on with a moderately disorderly world have thought through the consequences of their hypothesis. One merit of Kant's discussion in the Analogies is that it makes these consequences clear. It remains to say something about the Third Analogy, the part of Kant's case which has received least attention from commentators. Here Kant tries to do for coexistence what he had, to his own satisfaction at least, already done for succession in the Second Analogy. It would be impossible, according to the argument of the latter, for us to say that one event is really prior or posterior to another unless, in general, events had necessary connections, the occurrence of one at a determinate point of time necessitating the occurrence of another at some subsequent point. Irreversibility of perception is on this view a sign of objective succession, but itself needs to be explained by something more fundamental, which turns out to be the ubiquity of causal connections between earlier and later members of the temporal series. Similarly in the Third Analogy Kant starts from the reversibility of perceptions as empirical evidence of coexistence, but argues that two things can be judged to coexist only if a further and deeper condition is fulfilled, namely, that they should stand in mutual causal interaction. The perception of coexistence is thus possible only if we can know a priori an important and surprising truth about the world of experienced fact. The first difficulty in assessing this argument is to know what Kant is talking about. In the Second Analogy he was concerned with the succession of events; here he speaks not about events being simultaneous but of substances coexisting. We have already seen that serious problems are involved when Kant passes from the singular to the plural in his discussion of substance; the First Analogy seems to argue for the existence of a single continuing substance, and makes no provision for this to exist in separate bits.6 Moreover, the substances of the Third Analogy are perceived to coexist in space; they are, in fact, familiar objects like the moon and the earth. Things of this sort are, of course, only relatively

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persistent; they cannot, as we have seen, fulfil the function in our knowledge of temporal relations which Kant assigns to substance in the First Analogy. Nevertheless, it seems clear enough that it is of them that Kant is thinking in this part of his work: he wants to show that physical things are in dynamical interaction, and to maintain that this is a necessary condition of our being able to make any judgements about real coexistence. How do we in fact know that the earth and the moon coexist? We can look first at the earth and then at the moon, or we can look first at the moon and then at the earth, and the order of our perceptions will be without effect on their content. But this, according to Kant, would not suffice to show that the two are really coexistent. For something of the kind might be true if we each lived in a world of our own private experience, in which everything would be what it seemed to be and nothing could be said about objective dates. Just as the perception of succession demands the universal operation of the category of causality as regards successive members of any temporal series, so the perception of coexistence demands that there shall be no temporal series which are wholly self-contained. It cannot, for instance, be the case that what we may perhaps call the life-histories of the earth and the moon are each determined throughout by causal law, but nevertheless remain entirely without influence on one another. For if this situation obtained, we should once more be in the position of having separate temporal orders with no means of bringing them into relationship with one another; in these circumstances we should not be able to operate a unitary temporal system. The fact is, however, that we do take our temporal system to be unitary, and must therefore accept as true whatever is necessary for it to be so. In Kant's eyes this means that we are committed to the category of reciprocity as well as to the categories of .substance and causality. It might be thought that this argument evidently claims too much. Many very different kinds of event are thought of as happening at the same time; many different kinds of substance, in the loose sense of 'substance' used in the Third Analogy, are taken to be coexistent. If, to take an instance, Mr Harold Wilson coexists with the Taj Mahal, must we suppose them to be in thoroughgoing causal interaction? It should be noticed, however, that Kant says only that 'each substance ... must contain in itself the causality of certain determinations in the other substance' (B 2S9/A 212; my italics). I take this to mean that the Taj Mahal need not affect the whole of Mr Wilson's life-history, or vice versa; the influence of the one on the other need not be significant, provided it is real. That it is real, though slight, in so far as Mr Wilson and the Indian monument are both physical bodies, would be generally admitted. The point Kant wants to add is that it must be real.

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The argument here becomes altogether more plausible if we observe the emphasis placed in the Third Analogy on substances coexisting in space; the causal interaction Kant postulates is clearly between objects in a physical universe, united by, for example, gravitational force. But though this illustrates what Kant was after, I do not think it necessarily exhausts it. Just as in the First Analogy the notion of continuing substance can, but need not, be illuminated by referring to indestructible matter, so here reference to the dynamical community of objects in a gravitational system is helpful but not compulsive. If scientists have abandoned the conception of matter as Kant himself understood it, the argument of the First Analogy is not invalidated, for it requires only that there be something in the experienced world which persists through all change; as was emphasized earlier, it is for scientists to say what form it will take. Similarly in the Third Analogy. It could be that physical objects have to be thought of in ways which were not suspected in Kant's day, and that the principles which unite them in a single physical system are very different from what men thought them then. But even if this is true, it does not alter the situation in essentials, for there will still be an a priori reason, connected with our perception of time, for supposing that nothing in the universe can be totally independent of anything else. How the concept of reciprocity applies must be found out empirically; that it applies can be shown from the principles of the Critical philosophy. Is this the beginning of Naturphilosophie? Historically no doubt it is. We all know that the Critique led on to the Metaphysical First Principles of Natural Science, and that the latter was the starting point for the wild speculations of the Opus Postumum. That Kant, for all his suspicion of metaphysics, had a taste for the constructivism fashionable in his later years could scarcely be denied. Nor is it easy to refute the suggestion that he might never have started on this slippery slope if he had not believed himself to have a good case in the Analogies. But however regrettable the latter steps in this progress, the fact that they occurred cannot in itself discredit its beginning. I suggest that the argument of the Analogies deserves attention for its own sake, and that its conclusions, which are both clearly stated and closely reasoned, cannot be set aside for any general reason, such as that they involve a claim to intellectual intuition (which they do not) or they conflict with the plain truth of empiricism. If they are to be refuted at all, they must be refuted on their own ground and in their own terms. And the critics must tell us how the problems about continuity, succession and coexistence which Kant raises are to be solved, if they are not to be solved along Kantian lines.

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Notes

9

1. The general principle of the Analogies is best stated in the formula Kant uses in the first edition (A 176-7): 'All appearances are, as regards their existence, subject a priori to rules determining their relation to one another in one time.' I take it that the last three words here are the crucial ones. The formula in the second edition ('Experience is possible only through the representation of a necessary connection of perceptions' - B 218) would apply to the Transcendental Deduction as well as to the Analogies, and does not bring out the special concern of the latter with dates and duration. Kant's reference in the first edition passage to 'existence' is in contrast to what he had tried to established in the Axioms of Intuition and Anticipations of Sense-Perception, where it was the internal structure of appearances which occupied his attention. In the Analogies he seeks to show that, quite apart from their internal structure, the very fact that certain items occur in our experience commits us to the belief that other items will occur or have occurred, and so permits us to move necessarily from the existence of one thing to that of another. Naturally, he finds something paradoxical in our ability to make demands on fact in this way; his solution to the paradox is to argue that we are dealing not with an independently existing world, but with one which is merely phenomenal. I shall not be concerned with this issue in the present discussion, but I try to bring out Kant's caveat that he is dealing only with 'phenomena' or 'appearances' by speaking of 'the experienced world' or 'the world of experienced fact'. 2. See my article 'Philosophy and psychology in Kant's Critique', Kant-Studien 57 (1966), 186-98. 3. It was in his Metaphysical First Principles of Natural Science (1786) that Kant laid down as the 'first law of mechanics' that 'in all changes of corporeal nature the quantity of matter on the whole remains unchanged, neither increased nor diminished' (Berlin edition, IV, 541). In this work Kant professes to apply the results of the Critical philosophy, but not without introducing empirical concepts, in particular that of motion. The concept of matter involves the concept of motion in its definition, according to Metaphysical First Principles, IV, 480. 4. See A 112ff., 121ff. 5. It is interesting to observe that there is very little in the Second Analogy to correspond to the indirect arguments of the First (see above, p. 172). In B 239-40/A 194-5 Kant has a paragraph which begins with the words 'Let us suppose that there is nothing antecedent to an event, upon which it must follow according to rule', in the course of which he maintains that 'we should then have only a play of representations, relating to no object; that is to say, it would not be possible through our perception to distinguish one appearance from another as regards relations of time'. But there is no attempt here to discuss the case in detail. A later passage (B 247/A 201) speaks briefly of what would happen 'were I to posit the antecedent and the event were not to follow necessarily thereupon': I should, Kant claims, 'have to regard the succession as a merely subjective play of my fancy; and if I still represented it to myself as something objective, I should have to call it a mere dream'. But there is no detailed discussion in this case either. 6. What makes this still more curious is that Kant was strongly opposed to atomism in physical theory. He thought it a mere prejudice to assume that matter must exist in packets which differed only in size. See, e.g., B 215/A 173ff.

The Unity of Time and Space, and its Role in Kant's Doctrine of A Priori Synthesis Michael D. Newman

In the first part of this essay, I discuss some important aspects of what Kant means by considering time and space as unities. In the second part I try to explain how the unity of space and time is involved in the mind's 'legislating for nature'.

I

At a crucial stage in the second edition version of the Transcendental Deduction, Kant provides this footnote: Space, represented as object (as we are required to do in geometry), contains more than the mere form of intuition; it also contains combination of the manifold, given according to the form of sensibility, in an intuitive representation, so that the form of intuition gives only a manifold, the formal intuition gives unity of representation. In the Aesthetic I have treated this unity as belonging merely to sensibility, simply in order to emphasize that it precedes any concept, although, as a matter of fact, it presupposes a synthesis which does not belong to the senses but through which all concepts of space and time become possible. For since by its means (in that the understanding determines the sensibility) space and time are first given as intuitions, the unity of this a priori intuition belongs to space and time, and not to the concept of the understanding. (B/160-1n.; Kant's italics) This passage, which obviously requires us to reread and reconsider what is said in the Aesthetic, makes several striking and puzzling claims. For one thing, we are told that time and space are each 'given' twice - once

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as 'forms of intuition' and again as 'formal intuitions'. To discover what this means, we must begin by attending to what Kant says here about these two modes of givenness. A formal intuition is, in some sense, the representation of an 'object'. It is also the representation of a 'unity', or unified representation. For there to be such unity, a 'combination' (ZusammenJassung) or 'synthesis' of a 'manifold' is required. This synthesis is said to be effected by the understanding. The results of this synthesis - time and space as 'objects', i.e. unified 'formal intuitions' are said to be themselves 'given as intuitions' whose unity 'precedes any concept'. Whatever this synthesis may turn out to be, it (like any synthesis) must presuppose some manifold to be synthesized. This manifold itself must be 'given', and this may suggest that its existence is in some way (probably logically, perhaps psychologically or causally) independent of whether or not it is synthesized. Space and time qua given according to the 'form of intuition' are these 'ununified' manifolds. The context (B 160-1) makes it clear that these must be pure manifolds of space and time, given a priori, and that their syntheses must lie at the foundation of a priori knowledge. Now let us turn to the Aesthetic and see what is said there about the unity of space and time. In the Metaphysical Expositions of space and time, the third (in B) argument about space and the fourth argument about time attempt to show that space and time are not concepts but intuitions, because only intuitions can represent individuals: Different times are but parts of one and the same time; and the representation which can be given only through a single object is intuition. (A 31-2/B 47) The corresponding argument about space provides more detail about the nature of that intuition's unity: we can represent to ourselves only one space; and if we speak of diverse spaces, we mean thereby only parts of one and the same unique space ... these parts cannot precede the one all-embracing space, as being, as it were, constituents out of which it can be composed; on the contrary, they can be thought only as in it. Space is essentially one; the manifold in it, and therefore the general concept of spaces, depends solely on limitations. (A 25/B 39) The time and space Kant discusses in these passages are obviously unified representations - so unified that their parts (particular times and spaces)

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may not be thought of as eXIstmg prior to being 'put together' into a whole, but rather must be thought of only qua 'limitations' of a whole upon whose existence they in some way depend. Clearly, then, these versions of time and space describe the pure 'formal intuitions' (not the mere 'forms of intuition') Kant speaks of in the passage quoted above from B 160-1n. (It is clear, by the way, that the fourth (in B) space argument and the fifth time argument use the 'formal intuition' view, and it is quite likely that the first and second arguments in each case do, too.) In one respect, however, the time and space of the Aesthetic appear to be more unified than Kant allows for in the footnote to B 160. For he says in the latter passage that time and space as formal intuitions are the results of 'combinations' of manifolds. It seems most natural to interpret 'combination' as meaning combination of particular times or spaces. These uncombined times and spaces, it seems, comprise the 'manifolds' spoken of in the footnote (see A 99-100, B 137-8). They are 'given' separately, it seems, and while the synthesis resulting in formal intuition is dependent upon their being given, their being given does not appear to depend upon their being synthesized. If this is what Kant is saying in the footnote, then he appears to contradict what he says in the Aesthetic, viz. that 'these parts cannot precede the one all-embracing space, as being constituents out of which it can be composed; on the contrary, they can be thought only as in it'. This is a natural but, I think, faulty reading of the footnote. Kant is not saying that particular times and spaces are 'given' independently of their combination into the whole formal intuitions of time and space. (Or, if there be any sense in which they are so given, it is not a sense which contradicts the statement that the whole's givenness is prior.) To clarify all the difficulties here would require a complete investigation of Kant's doctrine of a priori synthesis, and in this essay I can present only the outlines of such an account. I will begin by concentrating on issues relevant to the nature of synthesis in general, putting off specific difficulties of a priori synthesis until later. Consider, as an example, Kant's account, at B 154-5, of how we represent time (he means time as a whole, a formal intuition, or, as he calls it here, a 'determinate intuition'). time itself we cannot represent, save in so far as we attend, in the drawing of a straight line (which has to serve as the outer figurative representation of time), merely to the act of the synthesis of the manifold whereby we successively determine inner sense, and in so doing attend to the succession of this determination in inner sense. To represent time we draw a straight line and, in so doing, concentrate not on the line itself (it, of course, is only a spatial object; nevertheless it

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serves as a sort of visual analogy to time - see A 33/B 50) but on the nature of the mental act whereby we draw it. What are the important characteristics of this act? (1) It is successive. The act of representing time itself 'takes time'. I will drop this point for now and return to it later. (2) It is called a synthesis of a manifold by a 'transcendental act of the imagination'. The manifold is primarily that of 'inner sense' (B 153-4), i.e. of time as 'mere form of intuition, but without combination' (though obviously space is also involved, in some subsidiary way). Now a similar passage on B 137-8, also discussing the synthesis involved in drawing a line, makes it clear that the most important features of this synthesis are that it creates a unity (unified representation), and that it does this because it is guided throughout by a single self-consciousness (unity of apperception). It is the same 'I' that performs the entire synthesis, the same consciousness that contains the entire act of combining the manifold. Now Kant's fundamental point here, a point crucial to his whole doctrine of synthesis, is that this 'I' is not a mere detached spectator 'taking in' the combination of the manifold. Rather the combination itself could not occur were this original unity of self-consciousness not presupposed (B 131, 133). Without this presupposition, there would be merely a temporal sequence of events with no perceivable relations to each other. Indeed, we would not even be aware that there was any temporal sequence at all. For if identity of consciousness throughout the act of drawing the line were not presupposed, all I could ever be aware of would be whatever part of the line entered my field of consciousness at any particular present moment. To perceive a line being drawn, I at least need to remember the drawing of the past parts of the line, but I can remember only what I have experienced - this means it must be the same'!, that experiences all temporal parts of the drawing of the line. (For a good discussion of these issues, see H. J. Paton, 'Self-identity', Mind, vol. xxxviii, no. 151 (July 1929).) Kant makes the basic point in these words: The representation of [the synthetic unity of the manifold] cannot ... arise out of the combination. On the contrary, it is what, by adding itself to the representation of the manifold, first makes possible the concept of the combination. (B 131) Imagination (which is directly responsible for the actual combining) by itself is 'blind' (A 781B 103). It must be guided by the demand for unity (see, e.g., A 119), and this demand must arise from the unity of apperception (A 105, 108). It is a mistake, therefore, to think of 'synthesis' as a process whereby a set of representations is successively posited and then, somehow, on the basis of this positing, 'taken in as a whole' and for the first time

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regarded as a set. Instead, the demand that they be taken together and regarded as a set must be presupposed throughout the successive positing. A familiar example (see A 103) may help emphasize this point. When I count a set of strokes on a piece of paper, I do not merely attend to each one in succession, and then, by some act of immediate insight, view them as representing one particular number. Rather, what the process of successive attention, if it is to be relevant at all, must involve is my giving each stroke a number as I encounter it (I count as I go along). Moreover, each assignment of a number must presuppose any assignments I have made previously in the series (numbering something '3' presupposes that I have numbered something else '2' and another '1'). What the application of this rule for counting throughout the apprehension of series means is that I am explicitly viewing the strokes as parts of a 'total' (a unified whole) - see also A 170-liB 212. (Again the identity of self-consciousness throughout the process is presupposed as the source of this combination, first, because of the considerations about memory mentioned above, and, also, because there is certainly nothing in the strokes themselves to constrain us to view them as a total. Only the mind, according to Kant, can be the source of the unity. The only other conceivable source of unity would be some utterly unknowable 'thing-in-itself' that the strokes might be held to represent - see A 105.) Partly because Kant himself characterizes synthesis rather vaguely as an act in which a manifold is 'gone through, taken up, and connected' (A 77/B 102), and distinguishes this from the other crucial, but even more vaguely described, element in thought, viz. that we 'bring this synthesis to concepts' (A 78/B 103), i.e. 'give unity' to the synthesis (A 79/B 104), one can easily put the emphasis on the process of 'going through, taking up, and connecting' without realizing that and how this process presupposes grasping the connected representations as a unity. One imagines (or at least I tend to imagine) 'bringing the synthesis to a unifying concept' as a mere 'finishing touch' to the more substantial part of the act of thought as if all the representations could first be 'collected' like a pile of sticks by the 'synthesis', and 'grasping them as a unity' were like tidying up the pile into a neat bundle and then binding it with a piece of rope. I hope I have shown how much this picture differs from Kant's view. One 'synthesizes a manifold' if and only if one considers each representation as a part of a whole. Kant's basic position is that the first step towards taking any representation as an element of knowledge is to deny that the representation (qua element in knowledge) may properly be regarded as independent of a larger sphere of representations (A 116, A 110, A 99, A 67-9/B 92-4). With these ideas in mind, let us return to our original problem. In the Analytic (B 154, 160n.), the formal intuition of time was said to be a combination of an otherwise uncombined manifold of particular times.

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This suggested that the particular times could exist independently of their combination in the whole. But in the Aesthetic, the particular times were said to be only 'limitations' of the one whole time - they were said to be essentially 'parts' dependent on the whole. The key to the solution is implied by our conclusions, just stated, about the nature of synthesis and knowledge, and may be summarized in the following sentence. As far as thought (taken in its general sense as the 'spontaneous', synthesizing power of the mind - see A 50-21B 74-6) is concerned, there is no such thing as a completely uncombined manifold. Any representation, qua object of thought (i.e. qua synthesized), is necessarily a part of a larger whole. Any particular time (or space) is necessarily, qua object of thought, a part of that thought product known as the 'formal intuition' of (the whole of) time (or space). This applies to what is said in the Analytic as well as in the Aesthetic. We may, by means of an oblique and indeed questionable reference, speak of an uncombined manifold - qua object of intuition. But this 'uncombined manifold' must not be conceived of as a chaotic multiplicity of separate particular times (like a load of washing haphazardly strewn about, just waiting to be pinned neatly upon a clothesline by some act of 'combination') waiting to be put together in a time-order, designated as a 'whole', then, miraculously, taking on completely different logical relations to the whole and to each other. The point is that a completely uncombined manifold cannot be conceived at all. All attempts we make to describe it (e.g. the metaphor of the strewn-about clothes and the clothesline) inevitably involve the representation of a whole (e.g. a whole 'load' of clothes), and thus do not represent a completely uncombined manifold: 'intuition ... does indeed offer a manifold, but a manifold which can never be represented as a manifold, and as contained in a single representation, save in virtue of such a synthesis' (A 99). The solution to the apparent discrepancy between the Analytic and the Aesthetic passages is this: strictly speaking, there is no way intelligibly to consider a particular time or space that does not also consider it as necessarily part of (dependent upon) the whole of time or space. Kant's apparent references to an 'uncombined manifold' cannot, then, be taken seriously to refer to a multiplicity of particular times. In that case, how are they to be taken? I think the expression 'uncombined manifold' must be viewed as designating a limit to which we can approximate in thought (perhaps by considering descendingly complex modes of combination), but never actually conceive. But, it may reasonably be asked, what reason has Kant to suppose that such a limit exists? The answer, I think, is that even though the nature of our experience is determined through and through by the contributions of thought, there are certain ineliminable residual elements which can most plausibly be accounted for by attributing them to the 'form of intuition'. One is that

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we receive our sensory input in a successive fashion. (As Kant notes at B 154, the very act of synthesis by which we represent time as a formal intuition must be successive - i.e. must take place according to the conditions of time as a form of intuition). Another may be that the sensory input we receive is always fragmented, that is, we get it one moment at a time. The future can be predicted and the past reconstructed only by thought - they are not, qua future and past, given in intuition (A 493-7/B 521-5). This fragmentation in our experience, imperfectly describable as it must be, is probably the reason why thought ends up being called 'combination' or 'synthesis' (B 138-9, 145) and why 'manifold' seems such an apt (though for the reasons given above, never fully justifiable) name for the form of the ultimate raw material of experience (B 145).

II

Having delineated these basic features of the unity of time and space, we may now consider the reasons Kant says, in the footnote to B 160-1, that this unity 'precedes any concept'. Even a glance at the difficult passage in the Transcendental Deduction to which the footnote is appended reveals the crucial role this unity plays in Kant's account of the sources of empirical knowledge: In the representations of space and time we have apriori forms of outer and inner sensible intuition; and to these the synthesis of apprehension of the manifold of appearance must always conform, because in no other way can the synthesis take place at all. But space and time are represented apriori not merely as forms of sensible intuition, but as themselves intuitions which contain a manifold [of their own], and therefore are represented with the determination of the unity of this manifold (vide the Transcendental Aesthetic). Thus unity of the synthesis of the manifold, without or within us, and consequently also a combination to which everything that is to be represented as determined in space or in time must conform, is given apriori as the condition of the synthesis of all apprehension - not indeed in, but with these conditions. This synthetic unity can be no other than the unity of the combination of the manifold of a given intuition in general in an original consciousness, in accordance with the categories, in so far as the combination is applied to our sensible intuition. All synthesis, therefore, even that which renders perception possible, is subject to the categories; and since experience is knowledge by means of connected perceptions, the categories are conditions of the possibility of

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experience, and are therefore valid apriori for all objects of experience. (B 160-1; Kant's italics) My purpose here is not to expound the Transcendental Deduction, of which this is the climactic paragraph, but to examine what Kant is saying about the role of the unity of time and space in our knowledge. What he is saying here is that the a priori synthesis - the synthesis guided directly by the schematized categories - is a synthesis only mediately of sensations, and is in the first instance a synthesis of pure time and space, creating the two formal intuitions mentioned in the footnote. The combination of the actual sensations that occur in time and space, e.g. in the empirical synthesis of apprehension, is dependent upon the understanding's act of thinking pure time and space as unities. The difficulty of Kant's doctrine regarding the unity of space and time must be partially responsible for some commentators - e.g. Kemp Smith and Wolff - playing it down or ignoring it. There can be no doubt, however, that Kant regarded it as fundamental. As far as the Transcendental Deduction is concerned, it is emphasized mainly in the second edition (B 160-3, B 168-9, B 150) and remains in the background of that Deduction in the first edition. (Nevertheless, see A 98-9, A 99-100, A 101-2.) But the most explicit statement that the a priori synthesis is a synthesis of pure time and space is in the Metaphysical Deduction, which appears in both editions, and there is evidence, which I will consider, of this doctrine in both editions of the Schematism and Principles. It cannot be denied that the doctrine is a difficult one. Kant's thesis is that the synthesis determining the unity of pure time and space is one 'to which everything that is to be represented as determined in space or in time must conform' (B 161; my italics). Of course Kant must hold this view if he is to claim the apriority of anything more than geometry or perhaps arithmetic. 'Nature', for which the understanding is said ultimately to legislate, is 'the sum of all appearances' (B 163) - i.e. the sum of all temporal and spatial sensations (see definition of 'appearance', A 20/B 34). Our way of thinking about the given 'matter' of experience must be determined a priori, and this must somehow be done by means of an a priori determination of the way we think about the 'form' of experience. One way Kant has of showing how the mind can legislate for nature is to argue from examples that any empirical synthesis presupposes an a priori synthesis - i.e. that any case of viewing the phenomenal world as unified presupposes viewing time or space as unified. His way of thinking here is not too hard to follow. Briefly put, his arguments depend on his view that time and space are, in some sense, 'containers' 'in which'

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spatio-temporal events occur. He gives two main reasons for this view in the Transcendental Aesthetic, both in the form of criticisms of what he takes to be Leibniz's position (that time and space are sets of relations or properties somehow inhering in, and abstractable from, spatio-temporal items). One criticism is that the Leibnizian view makes the apriority of mathematics inexplicable (A 39-40/B 55-7). Another is just his outright denial that spatiality and temporality are sensory properties. Finally, in the Amphiboly of Concepts of Reflection, his argument seems to be based on his rejection of the doctrine of the identity of indiscernibles (A 263-4/B 319-20). His view of time as some sort of container is illustrated by these lines from the Transcendental Deduction in the first edition: All our knowledge is thus finally subject to time .... In it [representations] must all be ordered, connected, and brought into relation .... Every intuition contains in itself a manifold which can be represented only in so far as the mind distinguishes the time in the sequence of one impression upon another .... This synthesis of apprehension must also be exercised apriori, that is, in respect of representations which are not empirical. For without it we should never have a priori the representations either of space or of time. (A 99-100) The train of thought in or behind this passage seems to me to be: by means of the empirical synthesis of apprehension we view each senseimpression as a part of a whole by viewing them as occurring in one time-order, i.e. in different moments of one series. But this is possible only if there is one unified series of moments 'in' which those senseimpressions can occur. For example, if there existed two time-orders (series of moments) running somehow 'parallel' to (not before or after) each other, in different 'dimensions' of reality, and if one of the senseimpressions occurred in one dimension's time-order, and another senseimpression in another dimension's time-order, we could not think of the two sense-impressions as parts of one phenomenal whole. But the position that we must hold, as a result of these considerations, viz. that these sense-impressions occur in one time-order, requires our conceiving a whole of pure time (by means of an a priori synthesis). For as the Aesthetic argued (A 23/B 38, A 30/B 46), spatiality and temporality are not sensory properties, but properties that impressions possess as a result of being 'in' space and time. (For similar examples, compare those of the perception of a house and of freezing water at B 162-3.) Study of such examples can be helpful, but the understanding gained thereby is likely to remain unsatisfying. Above all, it is still not really clear what the relation is between a priori and empirical synthesis. Especially unclear is how the a priori synthesis takes the leading role in

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Kant's account of empirical knowledge. Undoubtedly Kant's doctrine is that the synthesis effected according to the categories is above all a synthesis of pure space and time. It is not hard to understand how categories - rules for considering representations as parts of a whole may apply to actual appearances, e.g. how the category of cause and effect may apply to actual appearances of, say, billiard balls. But how can the category of cause and effect apply to pure time and space? And how can this pure application 'legislate' a subsidiary application to actual appearances that occur 'in' time and space? To answer these questions I must pause first to discuss in more detail Kant's views about the nature of the formal intuitions of time and space. For simplicity's sake, some of my remarks will have to concentrate on time alone, mainly when I refer to Kant's accounts of the Schematism and the first two Analogies. In these cases what I say about time will not apply mutatis mutandis to space (although I think that even in these cases some indirect correlations may be made). It is clear enough, from what was said in the first part of this essay, that the formal intuition of time is that of a set of particular times viewed as parts of one infinite whole time by means of rules (the categories) that are applicable to any particular part of time. But more needs to be said about the characteristics of this whole, especially those characteristics which make it a ground for a priori knowledge. The most important thing here is to achieve some clarity about the sense in which time and space may be viewed as 'containers' of the empirical world, the sense in which empirical events may be said to happen 'in' time or space. Such language naturally arouses pictures of space and time as kinds of empty 'frames' that may be 'filled' by appearances. As mentioned above (see B 154-5, A 33/B 50), Kant encourages us to compare pure time to a line along which events can be 'hung' (see Inaugural Dissertation, §14, 5, especially footnote to 5; p. 66 in the Kerferd-Walford edition). I suppose the 'container' metaphor is more appropriate to space, which has three dimensions, and the 'line' more suited to time, which has only one. Yet the 'container' idea has some relevance to time in so far as events are said to be in time. The basic idea, in any case, is that of time as something 'empty' which the world 'fills'. Now I think Kant accords much more importance to the notion of pure time as something empty than some commentators are willing to admit. It is true that he thinks we cannot perceive empty time (B 219, A 172/B 214, B 225, A 183/B 227, B 233, etc.). But he clearly also holds that we can think time as empty. For example, the notion of a 'merely formal a priori consciousness' of empty time (what he calls 'negation = 0') plays an important role in his account of the Anticipations of Perception (B 208, A 167-8/ B 209-10; see also A 452/B 480n.). And our ability to think time as empty is used as proof of its apriority in the Aesthetic (A 311B 46).

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There is, however, an important misconception to guard against when considering Kant's views on empty time. It is a mistake to think that empty time, according to Kant, stands in no necessary relation to whatever may fill it. Instead it must be recognized that the very idea of 'being empty' involves that of 'being capable of being filled'. And for Kant, who considers time as a formal element of empirical experience, to speak of time as being 'empty' is to say it is capable of being 'filled' by sensations. I think Kant's view may be expressed by saying that each moment of time is just an opportunity for an appearance. It is an essential property of time that it is possible for some appearance to occur 'in' any portion of it. Even space and time, however free their concepts are from everything empirical, and however certain it is that they are represented in the mind completely apriori, would yet be without objective validity, senseless and meaningless, if their necessary application to the objects of experience were not established. Their representation is a mere schema which always stands in relation to the reproductive imagination that calls up and assembles the objects of experience. (A 156/B 195; my italics) A remark Kant make's about space seems also to apply here: Although we know apriori in synthetic judgements a great deal regarding space in general and the figures which productive imagination describes in it, and can obtain such judgments without actually requiring any experience, yet even this knowledge would be nothing but a playing with a mere figment of the brain, were it not that space has to be regarded as a condition of the appearances which constitute the material for outer experience. (A 157/B 196; my italics) This definition of time as a complex of 'appearance opportunities' is extremely important in Kant's theory of a priori synthesis. It provides the bridge by which he gets from the claim that the categories unify pure time to the claim that they legislate for 'nature' (the sum of appearances, i.e. of filled time). One reason this definition helps Kant make this transition is that the notion of an 'appearance opportunity' is very close to that of a 'possible appearance'. In fact, Kant seems sometimes to treat the two notions as if they were equivalent. For example, the transcendental synthesis of imagination (which in the second edition Deduction is said to determine 'space and time in general', B 159-65, 168-9) is described in the first edition's Objective Deduction in the following terms:

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We entitle the synthesis of the manifold in imagination transcendental, if without distinction of intuitions it is directed exclusively to the apriori combination of the manifold. (A 118; my italics)

[the categories] contain the necessary unity of the pure synthesis of imagination in respect of all possible appearances. (A 119; my italics) Assuming that Kant means such remarks to be consistent with his description, in the same edition's Metaphysical Deduction, of pure synthesis as a determination of a pure manifold, we can see how closely he considered the connection to be between a moment of pure time and a possible appearance. The same conflation of the two notions is to be found, with all of its unclarity, in the Schematism chapter. There Kant insists on distinguishing a schema (a 'transcendental determination of time' - which I think may just mean the representation of an aspect of the formal intuition of time) from an 'image' (which must be an appearance or group of appearances, i.e. a specimen of 'filled' time): The schema is in itself always a product of imagination. Since, however, the synthesis of imagination aims at no special intuition, but only at unity in the determination of sensibility, the schema has to be distinguished from the image. (A 140/B 179; my italics) This ambiguity is one that permeates Kant's whole doctrine of pure time. When he says here (and in the passage just quoted from A 118) that the transcendental synthesis 'aims at no special intuition, but only at unity in the determination of sensibility', does he mean it represents a whole of pure empty time, a frame on which appearances can be pinned, or does he mean that the synthesis considers filled time as a unified whole, but abstracts from the particular sensory content that fills time's moments? In the end, is there any difference between these two formulations? There must be some difference (the difference between an empty moment and a 'filled moment in general'), but Kant himself is unsure which way of expressing the matter he thinks is most apt. In any case, the ambiguity presents itself again in the following important lines from the Schematism chapter: the schema of a pure concept of the understanding can never be brought into any image whatsoever. It is simply the pure synthesis,

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determined by a rule of that unity, in accordance with concepts, to which the category gives expression. It is a transcendental product of the imagination, a product which concerns the determination of inner sense in general according to the conditions of its form (time), in respect of all [my italics] representations, so far as these representations are to be connected in one concept in conformity with the unity of apperception. (A 142/B 181) This passage, however difficult to decipher, seems to express a basic doctrine of the Schematism chapter, viz. that the 'application of the category to appearances' is possible because pure 'time is contained in every empirical representation' (A 138-9/B 177-8; my italics). Indeed, the descriptions Kant gives of the actual schemata of quality, relation and modality treat time as filled. The thesis I have been trying to present is that this transition from pure to filled time is most intelligible if we take Kant to mean by 'pure time' something like a complex of 'appearance opportunities' (or perhaps even, by an illegitimate further move, 'possible appearances'). I will now try to defend and develop this reading by examining certain passages from the five synthetic Principles of Pure Understanding. That something like my interpretation is correct is indicated by a remark Kant makes just before he begins his exposition of the Principles. Now these Principles are clearly statements of a priori truths about all possible appearances - about filled time in general. But in a sentence at A 162/B 202 Kants speaks of the subject matter of these Principles by means of the same formula he used earlier (A 118, A 140/B 179) when he was undoubtedly referring to pure time. We treat only of the principles of pure understanding in their relation to inner sense (all differences among the given representations being ignored). (my italics) I, and I think Kant also, would stop short of completely identifying an appearance opportunity with a possible appearance. Kant does think, however, that there are enough structural parallels between pure time and filled time for it to make sense to explain the structurally parallel aspects of filled time by tracing them to a synthesis performed on pure time. The mind, by thinking pure time as a unity, legislates a priori certain structurally parallel aspects of filled time as well, making it possible to think the world of appearances also as a unity. A fairly plausible case of this exploitation of structural parallelism occurs in the Second Analogy. It seems true that for any appearance

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opportunities (moments) 01 and 02, and for any appearances a1 and a2 occurring at 01 and 02 respectively, if 01 is earlier than 02, then a1 is earlier than a2 (the same goes for the relations of 'later than' and 'simultaneous with'). Call this principle 'A' for short. Now, presumably, to think of time as a unity (to synthesize the pure manifold of inner sense) is to think that time is a determinate order of appearance opportunities succeeding one another, necessarily, in accordance with the rule of the synthesis. If this is so, then, when we apply principle A, it follows that there is also a necessary parallel succession of appearances. This result, of course, is basically the Principle of Pure Understanding that Kant wants to establish in the Second Analogy. Of course, this is not, for the most part, the way he argues for that Principle - my main purpose here is only to show how the causal maxim about filled time is related to a synthesis of pure time. But the considerations I have just raised are made relatively explicit in one of Kant's arguments for that maxim. This is the argument at A 199-200/B 244-5. There Kant says that the understanding makes possible the representation of objects by carrying the time-order over into the appearances and their existence. For to each of them, [viewed] as [a] consequent, it assigns, through relation to the preceding appearances, a position determined apriori in time. Otherwise they would not accord with time itself, which [in] apriori [fashion] determines the position of all its parts. (Kemp Smith's interpolations) The point Kant goes on to make is that our assignment of objective time-positions to appearances cannot be a direct relation of appearances to positions in pure time, but must rather involve necessary connections among the appearances that parallel the necessary connections among the moments of time. We can see here how closely the unification of appearance opportunities corresponds to that of appearances. In both cases, the categorially imposed relation - necessary succession - is the same. It so happens that we call that relation 'cause and effect' only when the items connected are appearances, but since the relation, considered as connecting appearance opportunities, is the same one, we can see that Kant has some right to speak of this category as a rule for the synthesis of pure time (see also A 722/B 750n.). The idea of structural parallelism is prominent throughout Kant's discussion of the First Analogy. There is one whole time, and the particular times that are its parts are in succession, but time, as a whole, is not in succession. It must be thought as permanent and as the 'substratum' for its successive parts. The relation of time as abiding substratum to the particular times as its successive parts is one of the ways (each way being determined by a particular category) in which time is viewed as a unity.

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Now throughout the discussion of the First Analogy Kant takes it for granted that the appearances occurring in time must also be unified in one experience (if there is to be empirical knowledge). And his remarks indicate that experience can be a unity only if it occurs 'in' a single unified time (A 186/B 229, A 188-9/B 231-2; See also A 99-100). For this to be the case, he claims, there must be a representation analogous to that of time-as-substratum, with the difference that it must be perceptible (matter, whose quantity is said to remain constant through all its vcarious alterations of form, seems to be Kant's choice for this empirical substratum). This empirical 'expression' of pure time is evidently supposed to unify successive experiences in the same way as pure time unifies successive particular times. As Kant summarizes it in the Schematism chapter: 'To time, itself non-transitory and abiding, there corresponds in the [field of] appearance what is non-transitory in its existence, that is, substance' (A 143/B 183). Pure time is abiding appearance opportunity, and indestructible matter is abiding appearance. The category called 'substance' is directly responsible for the representation of the former, and thus indirectly responsible also for the latter. That, more or less, seems to be Kant's way of thinking. Unfortunately, I see no way here to make the situation as clear as it was in the case of the Second Analogy, where principle A was available. The ultimate obscurity of the notion of substance, the difficulties surrounding the idea of time as both 'flowing' (successive) and abiding, and Kant's conflation of Aristotelian and modern views, by making 'substance' = 'matter', make the full explication of the First Analogy's relation to a priori synthesis too complex to go into here. But I hope the basic idea has been clarified. The Third Analogy can probably be treated on the same lines as the first two, but the treatment may have to be even more complicated (mainly because different moments of time cannot coexist, while different appearances can). I conclude with some remarks about the Axioms of Intuition. In that section Kant tries to show that pure mathematics (the science of magnitude) is applicable to the empirical world by arguing that appearances (qua elements in knowledge) can be known a priori to be aggregates of countable parts. The role of the synthesis of pure time (and also space) is again prominent. This is not surprising. The features of and relations among magnitudes are clearly facts of great generality, and so we find Kant accounting for them as determinations of those most general characteristics of the given, the 'formal intuitions' of time and space. The concept of magnitude is said to be the consciousness of the synthetic unity 'des mannigfaltigen Gleichartigen in der Anschauung' ('of the manifold homogeneous element in intuition'). This homogeneous element must be pure time or space, in which the bare essentials of count ability can be represented:

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the pure schema of magnitude (quantitude) ... is number, a representation which comprises the successive addition of homogeneous units. Number is therefore simply the unity of the synthesis of the manifold of a homogeneous intuition in general, a unity due to my generating time itself in the apprehension of the intuition. (A 142-3/B 182) The concept of magnitud~ in general ... is that determination of a thing whereby we are enabled to think how many times a unit is posited in it. But this how-many-times is based on successive repetition, and therefore on time and the synthesis of the homogeneous in time. (A 242/B 300) To represent a magnitude in general is just to consider, in the most general terms possible, the notion of a total. Kant seems to think that this can occur only by a successive process, so the notion of a total is really the notion of 'how-many-times'. This, the most general possible way of conceiving the combination of parts in a countable whole, is obviously the synthesis of a pure manifold of time (see also A 163/B 203). Kant clearly believes that we can in some way think such combinations of empty time, as well as space (e.g. A 724/B 752, A 713/B 741, A 452/B 480n., A 24/B 38-9, A 31/B 46). But he also insists that these pure representations would have no 'sense' or 'meaning' 'were not we always to present their meaning in appearances .... The mathematician meets this demand by the construction of a figure ... in the fingers, in the beads of an abacus, or in strokes and points which can be placed before the eyes' (A 240/B 299; also A 156/B 195, A 157/B 196, both quoted above). In my terminology, this just means that space and time must be viewed as appearance opportunities. There must be some analogue to principle A here, to the effect that if a portion (of whatever size) of time or space can be thought as an aggregate of countable parts, so can any complex appearance that 'fills' that portion (as long as we attend not to any heterogeneity in the appearances, but only to their homogeneous aspect, i.e. to their occurrence merely qua time- and spacefillers). Thus, the categories of quantity, which, strictly speaking, govern the synthesis only of pure time and space, may also be applied to the appearances that fill those formal intuitions. This application is expressed by the Principle of the Axioms. Such considerations apply not only to viewing time and space (and hence their contents) as aggregates, but also to viewing them as continuous magnitudes. This latter conclusion is involved in the section on Anticipations of Perception (it apparently applies to extensive as well as intensive magnitudes - A 169-711B 211-12) and also in the Second Antinomy (A 435/B 463, A 439/B 467).

10 The Concept of Experience and Strawson's Transcendental Deduction Kim Davies

In The Bounds of Sense (Methuen, 1966) Professor Strawson claims that the conclusion of Kant's Transcendental Deduction, namely, that the contents of experience must be brought under concepts of an objective world, represents a 'very great and novel' gain in epistemology (p. 29). I wish to argue that closer consideration of the concept of experience with which Strawson, following Kant, begins, pre-empts the whole project. Strawson sets out the following thesis assumed as a premiss in (his reconstruction of) the Transcendental Deduction: that there must be such unity among the members of some temporally extended series of experiences as is required for the possibility of selfconsciousness, or self-ascription of experiences, on the part of a subject of such experiences (the thesis of the necessary unity of consciousness). (p. 24). This thesis is linked with the dual character of experience (viz. that particular contents of experience should be recognized as having some general character) and, as so linked, is taken as a 'standard-setting definition of what is to count as "experience'" (p. 25). Why should we begin with this definition? Strawson notes that other forms of sentience, short of this standard, may exist; but goes on to argue not only that no other philosopher, 'even the most economical of empiricists', has tried to work with a more limited conception (p. 25), but that only this concept of experience 'can be of interest to us' (pp. 28-9). It is not clear to me that writers such as Hume, Russell and Ayer do in fact build the possibility of self-consciousness into their concept of experience, but I wish to discuss the question of the interest which binds together the community indicated by Strawson's first-person plural. The interest which a concept of experience has for 'us' is presumably

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to be understood in the light of the purposes 'we' share. Of course, we do in fact self-ascribe experiences, but dogs and babies do not, and it might be thought that this less sophisticated form of sentience was of more interest. To see why it is not, we should ask why the concept of experience is important for philosophy. It seems to me clear that its fundamental significance lies in its opening a gap, between how things are experienced as being and how they are, which is the ground of the possibility of any critical philosophy. In the light of the possible disparity between how things are and how they are experienced as being, the question of the justification of claims to knowledge emerges. Without the recognition of this possible disparity, this epistemological gap, the interrogation of knowledge-claims which is central to all philosophy (other than the 'angels on pins' type) would not be possible. It underlies the Cartesian Doubt and those traditions in Western Philosophy which followed in its wake. Now it would seem that for someone to possess the concept of experience required here, and to recognize the epistemological gap, the self-ascription of experience is required - it looked as though X, but in fact Y - or at least that self-reflexiveness of experience which for Strawson constitutes the core of empirical self-consciousness (p.1l1). Thus can we understand the philosophical interest of a concept of experience into which the possibility of self-ascription is built. And if experience is to provide a kind of alternative to successful cognition of an objective world, on the basis of which we can call for the justification of knoweldge-claims, then it must have the dual character Strawson talks of, at least in so far as it must comprise some kind of awareness or consciousness of some kind of item, which recognizes that item as falling under a general concept. Thus can we understand the philosophical interest of the second component of Strawson's concept of experience, so that it may seem that we must agree with him that his definition as a whole is 'surely acceptable'. Let us first look closer at the 'object' side of this concept. Strawson's word is 'accusative', indicating that it is internal to the experience, and not necessarily (at this stage) conceived of as independent of experience. If it were so conceived, then the claim that concepts of the objective must be used in experience would be built into the concept of experience from the start, so that an argument to that effect would hardly be required. But this is precisely what must be the case if the concept of experience is to be adequate to the philosophical purposes it is to serve. For unless experience is of items conceived of as independent of experience itself, there would be no possibility of opening up a gap between how things are and how they are experienced as being, and so no possibility of critical philosophical thought. If experience involved nothing more than an awareness of an item which made no claim to be independent of experience, for example the red patches and tickling

Critical Assessments 203 sensations of the sense-datum theorists (p. 99), then there could be no disparity between how things are experienced as being and how they are, since there would be nothing more to how things are than how they are experienced as being. That experience is of items conceived of as existing independently of experience itself, that those items are brought under 'concepts of the objective', must already be built in to that concept of experience which is to be of fundamental interest to us. Without this as the primary concept of experience, Kant could never have faced a scandal, or Strawson his sceptic. Strawson's reconstruction of the Transcendental Deduction can succeed only in reaching the point from which it first started. Although this account retains the value of some of Kant's Analytic, particularly the Analogies, which layout the necessary structure of the conception of an objective world in terms of substance and causality, and although the kind of considerations prompted by Kant's arguments have a value which transcends this argument itself, the fact that it takes a major thread of the Deduction to be, at bottom, idle might call for more discussion. How is it possible that Kant, and then Strawson, could have failed to recognize this? The answer lies in a forgetfulness of the provenance of their concept of experience inscribed in their work. We can see how, on the basis of a concept of experience as primarily of items brought under concepts of the objective, we could recognize that some experiences do not have this character, and then wish to generalize our concept to that of an awareness of an item, where nothing is presupposed about the nature of that item. It is not then difficult to focus, in the spirit of scientific generality, on this concept at the cost of a gradual amnesia concerning the circumstances in which it emerged, and the features needed for the primary concept to serve its philosophical purpose. This is effectively what occurred between the time of Descartes and Hume; Kant (with Strawson following) takes up Hume's problems and with them the concept of experience which they presuppose. Now there is certainly some intrinsic interest in showing that if one starts with this concept, then the contents of experience must be brought, at least in part, under concepts of the objective. It nevertheless remains the case that this requirement must be built into any concept of experience which, as the ground of the possibility of the demand for justification, can be of fundamental significance to critical philosophy, and so explain the philosophical interest of which Strawson speaks vaguely. That the Transcendental Deduction can be held to have secured very great and novel gains is thus a mark of the thoroughness with which critical philosophy forgets its beginnings, and of the need for the kind of philosophical selfreflection attempted here.

Critical Assessments

11 Why Did Kant Write Two Versions of the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories?* Michel Meyer

This question appears to be one of paramount importance, when we consider the role of the 'Transcendental Deduction of the Categories' (hereafter referred to as TDC) within the Critique of Pure Reason. In order to discover what led Kant to rewrite the TDC, it is necessary to analyse the philosophical problems that the TDC was meant to solve in the whole economy of the Critique and then to examine the reasons why these problems were deemed to be inadequately treated in the first edition. In general terms, the aim of the TDC is to study the relationship between understanding and sensibility. Such a relationship brings about synthesis, and lays the foundation of all synthetic judgements, that is, engenders knowledge. That is why the TDC is central to the Critique, whose basic purpose is to explain how synthetic judgements are possible a priori. There is, however, another important aspect of the TDC that should be underlined. Knowledge, for Kant, is both knowledge of an object, and nothing but the mixed product of concepts and intuitions, 'so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts can yield knowledge' (A 50/B 74).1 Since knowledge always refers to some object, and since it is produced by the combined employment of concepts and intuitions, the specific purpose of the TDC is to exhibit how objective knowledge obtains through the use of our subjective faculties, viz. to determine how knowledge as knowledge of an object is possible. Consequently, the question is what it is to be an object for a subject is the central question of the TDC.2 Through a careful examination of the notion of the object, as Kant conceived it, we can expect to find the answer which provides the reason why the TDC was rewritten, especially if we can spot an untenable duality which Kant hoped to remove by putting emphasis on one of the alternatives, or even by eliminating one

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of them. This duality, because of which Kant produced a second version, as we shall see, should be found as a paradoxical view of knowledge in other passages than the TDC. From Kant's own perspective, his writing a TDC would therefore manifes,t his endeavour to reach a consistent conception of knowledge, rendered impossible if a paradoxical notion of the object is retained. The TDC would allow Kant to reach that goal by being an argument in which one alternative is selected, worked out and justified, while the other is deliberately left out. The TDC would then be a way out of a paradox by supplying a justification of the favoured conception of the object. It would provide a justified answer - hence the juridical connotation of the word 'deduction' - for deciding what it is, for a subject, to know an object. If the paradox of the object is implied by an internal necessity in the Critique itself, we should not be surprised if a first version of the TDC was considered by Kant as unsatisfactory, in virtue of its disruptive impact on the equilibrium of the whole Critique. 3 If the TDC is supposed to be the justified answer that eliminates the paradox, and if the latter is necessitated by the general view held in the Critique, the first edition cannot have brought a complete solution to the problem raised by the Critique. Moreover, if the TDC is meant to provide a full justification of one alternative of the paradox of the object, it implies that the first version of the TDC can only be rejected in favour of the sole alternative left in the paradox. This is why we can maintain that the paradox of the object also determines the content of each of the versions of the TDC. Let us now turn to the verification of our hypotheses.

I The paradox of the object and the TDe As I have shown elsewhere,4 such a paradox can be found in Kant's theory of knowledge. Kant often repeats that through sensibility 'an object is given to us' (A 50/B 74), or that 'intuition takes place in so far as the object is given to us' (A 191B 33).5 Since knowledge is knowledge of the object, as said before, the object would then be known by intuition. If that were the case, the understanding would be superfluous. That is contrary to the fundamental tenet of Kant's theory, according to which knowledge is an intellectual synthesis of an intuited manifold. Such a synthesis of concepts and intuitions requires a combined use of both understanding and sensibility, so that the action of the understanding is an absolute necessity in order to reach knowledge. The understanding alone yields empty judgements to which no object can possibly correspond, for an object is something empirical and is not merely formal. The object, which is conceived by Kant as being what is known, must

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result from the employment of the two faculties in order to be an object at all, and accordingly cannot be given at the level of the senses already. This is obviously contrary to many a formulation offered by Kant. 5 On the other hand, if the object is not given, what is then given to the senses? This second possibility has an equally damaging implication. If the object is not given to the senses, since knowledge ends up with some object, which is as such that which is known, ultimately, the object would be constituted by the understanding. The Object would only receive its existence as such because of the categories. Synthesis, so conceived, is carried out by the understanding alone, and leads the mind beyond the sphere of experience, which is the affection of the senses through sensibility (A 2, B 1). The understanding adds something to the sensible manifold by thinking it. Such a transcendent use of concepts is rejected by the court of the Critique: it does not yield knowledge and does not enable us to know any object at all, according to the Kantian doctrine for which only the limited, empirical, use of the understanding leads to knowledge. Moreover, should the understanding make us know objects (i.e. entities which are not given), knowledge would result from the use of the understanding alone. The understanding alone would be constitutive of reality and reach truth in an a priori manner. Mere analytic judgements, devoid of any real empirical content, would obtain. They would be credited with an empirical bearing and would be said to present objective validity on the ground that it is the understanding which relates to objects, and not the senses to which some matter, or a mere manifold, corresponds. This view is strangely similar to that of the rationalists and the idealists, such as Leibniz or Wolff. By favouring it, Kant would incur the reproach of idealism, from which he relentlessly claims to dissociate his thought. Hence the following paradox: Either the object is given to intuition, and since to have an object means, for a subject, to have knowledge of that object, that implies that there is knowledge at the level of sensibility. This is contrary to Kant's theory of knowledge, in which sensibility alone is not supposed to yield any knowledge at all. Besides, since the object is always the object of judgement, for Kant, if the object is given to sensibility, we can deduce that the understanding is either superfluous or that it has already played its role at the sensible level, under the form of intellectual intuition. This is also denied by the Kantian doctrine. Or something else than the object is given to intuition, a something which can be designated by an X. In this case, the understanding constitutes the object according to its own formal rules, and therefore goes beyond the sensible. It merely yields analytic judgements (A 2S8/B 314),

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whereas they are considered as synthetic because of their relatedness to an object. In fact, these judgements are true by convention, that is, on mere formal grounds, since truth is agreement with the object ( 191/B 236). The understanding, then, goes beyond the sphere of experience, i.e. of what is given to sensibility. The restriction of the use of the understanding to the sensible given is essential to the Kantian doctrine as a necessary condition of knowledge, which must remain empirical to be at all. There is one apparent way out of this paradox, which is to charge the meaning of the concept of experience. In some passages, this term has the common-sense meaning. In Kant's own terminology, it can be translated by saying that experience does not contain any a priori elements, and that it belongs exclusively to the sphere of sensibility. In other passages, Kant uses experience to mean the synthesis of intuitions and concepts. Experience, in this sense, comprises a priori elements and presupposes that the understanding has come into play. Kant uses 'experience' in two ways for a reason which seems evident in the light of the paradox of the object. Our mind has a power of synthesis through the use of the understanding. It constitutes experience a priori, i.e. the object, and thus goes beyond what is given to the senses. But Kant is reluctant to admit that the activity of the mind transcends the sensible which is given in intuition. That is why he also calls experience the synthesis of intuitions (through which objects are given to the mind) and concepts (through which they are thought as objects). Experience, in the latter sense of the word, is the product of an intellectual synthesis and is no longer some empirical intuition. For Kant, experience is sometimes identified with empirical intuition, and sometimes it is considered as a synthesis. This shift in meaning enables him to maintain the critical function ascribed to experience of being a limit constitutive of genuine knowledge. Experience must be the sole criterion of knowledge, and if the mind goes beyond the field of experience, it is trapped in the metaphysical realm of illusion (Schein). If the object is determined as such through the combined use of the two faculties, the mind does not transcend experience if the latter comprises intuitions and concepts. As a consequence, the understanding still retains an empirical use. To the paradox of the object corresponds, therefore, the ambiguity of the notion of experience as one of its manifestations. If the object is defined as being made up of concepts and intuitions, the understanding then goes beyond the mere given through conceptualization of the sensible manifold, and since objects are objects of experience, (A 111, A 1S8/B 197), the latter must be something more than empirical intuition. The question we should raise at this stage of our enquiry is why the ambiguity concerning the object is a paradox. Also why is Kant commit-

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ted to a dilemma in his conception of the object? By what internal necessity does the Critique lead to such a paradoxical view? The key to these questions lies in what could be called the spirit of Kantism as set forth in the Prefaces of the Critique. According to Kant, metaphysics has always erred because the understanding has been used in an unrestricted manner. That is why he holds the general view that the understanding has access to objects in so far as it is united to sensibility. This may be considered the core of the spirit of Kantism in epistemological matters. Knowledge must be empirical to be at all, and only the senses can furnish the required (empirical) content. There is no possible use of the understanding outside of experience. To the understanding alone no object can correspond, since the object is always the empirical object of knowledge (A 2S8/B 314). Objects can obtain if and only if the categories of the understanding are applied to what is given as a sensible manifold. On this view, the understanding is deprived of any autonomy. Kant means autonomy with respect to objects: a faculty of the mind is autonomous to the extent that it is susceptible of yielding objects by itself. It is not autonomous if it cannot generate any object, or have access to it, when used separately. When we affirm here that the understanding has no autonomy, it signifies that objects cannot be determined as such through the exclusive use of the understanding, because some matter must be given to the senses upon which the synthesis of the understanding can be exerted. Had we said that the understanding could operate as an autonomous faculty, it would have implied that an object could have been known through the employment of the understanding alone. Practical reason, for example, is autonomous: it determines its own objects by itself, through the moral law, in virtue of its freedom. On the other hand, Kant accounts for the past mistakes of metaphysics by saying that it is through an illegitimate use of the understanding that those mistakes occurred. The human mind gets into metaphysical conflicts when the understanding transcends the limits of experience. In this situation, our mind seems to be trapped into the illusion (Schein) of having some object corresponding to its thought, as if the understanding could actually generate objects as objects of knowledge. The whole part of the Critique called the Transcendental Dialectic has no other purpose than to describe which paralogisms and antinomies result from an independent use of the understanding. But if such a use is possible, it implies that the understanding can have an autonomous, yet fallacious, use. The autonomy of the understanding is therefore possible. Has this possibility not been previously denied? If Kant wants to explain how transcendental illusions result from the independent use of the categories with respect to the senses, he must allow for the sort of autonomy which he wishes

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to reject on the grounds of his cardinal maxim about the way knowledge arises. It other words, there must be objects corresponding to thoughts if the understanding is to be capable of being used independently, even if such objects are devoid of any empirical reality, and are as such mere noumena. The double bind in which Kant is caught appears quite clearly at this stage: either the understanding can yield objects only when it is used in combination with sensibility, and no dialectical illusion is possible, since the latter can occur only if the understanding is capable of being employed autonomously. The understanding then becomes reason: 'Reason accordingly occupies itself solely with the employment of understanding, not indeed in so far as the latter contains the grounds of possible experience' (A 326/B 383).6 In this situation, practical reason is also threatened in its very possibility: what can I do, how can I act as a moral being if my mind cannot go beyond the sensible given by giving itself its own law? Or, on the other hand, the understanding alone can yield objects as such, since it is conceived as a Vermdgen der Erkenntnisse (B 137), and it can also take the wrong path which, according to Kant, had been taken by metaphysics before him. In the first alternative above Kant renders the understanding incapable of relating to objects without sensibility. Objects can arise as such for the subject only when the two faculties are used jointly. Objects result from the combinations of concepts and intuitions, and that which is given in intuition is not an object but a mere X. We face here the second possibility described in the paradox of the object (see p. 206 above). In the second alternative described above, Kant is compelled to grant the understanding some autonomy. As a corollary, senses can be employed without the understanding. Concepts can thus refer to objects, as well as intuitions, independently of one another. They each deal with the objects of experience, though in a different way to be made precise later. The object (of knowledge) being given to the senses needs no intellectual synthesis, since the aim of the knowing-process is the access to objects. The understanding seems totally superfluous, and that is also contrary to the spirit of Kantism. We face here the first opposite of the paradox of the object. The spirit of Kantism can be epitomized in the well-known maxim that knowledge is a synthesis of concepts and intuitions. It was apparently the only way for Kant to guarantee metaphysics from renewing its past errors. But it led him to face a double bind embodied by the possible roles of the understanding. 7 This, in turn, resulted in the paradox of the object which Kant felt compelled to eliminate through a TDC. Unfortunately, the paradox of the object so far has either been

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unnoticed by Kant scholars, who have only seen 'verbal difficulties' in his conception of the object, or has not been considered as seriously as it should have been with regard to all its implications upon Kant's epistemological construction in the Critique of Pure Reason. Since this paradox has been overlooked as such, the very nature of the TDe and the various discrepancies between its two versions deserve a more articulate interpretation than a psychological one, or worse, than an interpretation resulting in mere rejection on the alleged grounds that the TDe would be useless or would display too many radical changes in its various editions (Schopenhauer). Let us examine how past commentators have stood in regard to the difficulties expounded earlier as to the object of knowledge. 8 The ambiguity of the notion of experience, already underlined by Vaihinger in his famous Kommentar der Kritik der reinen Vernunft,9 is not accidental, any more than the multiplicity of senses of the word 'object' results from some carelessness committed by Kant 10 or from haste in writing. ll Many objections can be raised against such a view of the Critique. Why should we suppose that Kant's alleged haste manifested itself in his conception of the object and experience, and not in his doctrine of space or antinomies? Why would he have been careless when dealing with one definite problem, and scrupulous within the rest of the Critique? Why was he not trapped in verbal difficulties when writing, as hastily, about other issues? Does not this way of analysing contradictions or paradoxes in philosophy beg the question the interpreter has to solve? It is doubtful that great philosophers such as Kant would involve themselves in difficulties on merely verbal grounds, and with selective carelessness. In such cases, we should instead carefully study the text of the Critique itself, before having recourse to ad hoc circumstances, external to the text, to account for the various problems we might come across in its study. Verbal difficulties do not occur at random in the Critique, and the 'four meanings' of the word 'object' are not arbitrary in their content or in their number. As Schopenhauer has put it, in speaking of the Transcendental Analytic, 'here, as everywhere, the style bears the stamp of the thinking from which it has arisen, for style is the physiognomy of the mind' .12 Schopenhauer takes the difficulties of the notion of the object as real, but he fails to relate them to the existence of a TDe and its content. In that respect, we can contend that he does not see that there is a paradox of the object. My claim runs as follows: if there is a paradox of the object, then there must be a TDe. Schopenhauer, however, denied that a TDe was necessary, given the results of the Transcendental Aesthetic (embodied in A 32/B 47, A 87/B 119, A 89/B 121, for example),u Space and time supply the necessary synthesis which gives

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rise to knowledge. In so far as there is one time and one space, through which objects can be identified and individualized in their spatio-temporal continuity, there is no need whatsoever to have recourse to an intellectual synthesis in order to account for the knowledge of objects.14 Such a synthesis would necessarily transcend the synthesis provided by our intuitions, in one way or another, though at the same time it would be required to remain within the boundaries of the empirically given! For Schopenhauer, if synthesis arises at all, it is due as much to intuitions generating knowledge by themselves as to our concepts, even though it is abstract knowledge. Intuitive knowledge differs from abstract knowledge, but can occur independently, whereas for Kant, neither concepts nor intuitions alone can yield knowledge: knowledge, as such, is intellectual as much as intuitive. Schopenhauer is right when he points out a serious difficulty in Kant's view of the role of the understanding. But once the Kantian conception of knowledge has been given, he underrates the necessity for Kant to proceed to a TOe. It is precisely because Kant is trapped in a paradox concerning the object that a,disambiguation of what it means to know an object as such is required at some point in the Critique, and that the section dealing with it will be central. Of course, if one adopts the viewpoint according to which actual knowledge can take place at the level of our sensibility, the paradox disappears, and there is no need to suppress it through a TOe. This, however, would be a different perspective from that adopted by Kant. Schopenhauer seems to forget that, when he claims to be the sole consistent Kantian after Kant. None of the interpretations of the Critique exhibit the link between the paradox of the object and the TOe, because they look at the paradox either as a mere verbal difficulty, or as a contradiction having a merely local impact in the Critique. But as seen earlier, the paradox results from an internal necessity inherent in Kant's epistemology. My general claim about the two editions of the TOe can be stated as follows: in the first version, Kant emphasizes the joint use of the two faculties to produce knowledge. There is no object given to sensibility which is not thought through categories. If something is given to sensibility as such, it is thus unknowable and can be represented as an X, called by Kant the Transcendental Object. This view, it should be remembered, represents the second alternative of the paradox of the object, that in which some X is given to sensibility, in which, accordingly, the understanding goes beyond the given by synthesizing it as an object. In the second edition of the TOe, the object is said to be already given at the level of sensibility. That raises the question of the usefulness of the intellectual faculty, as stipulated by the first choice offered by the paradox of the object. Kant wishes to get out of the paradox by exploring each possibility in

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its turn. But before entering the maze of the two versions of the TDC, we shall turn to the manner in which Kant proceeds in this Deduction.

II The structure of the TDC

The TDC is undertaken in the Transcendental Analytic. It may sound rather odd that synthesis, which is in fact the very subject matter of the Critique ('synthesis, for the sake of which alone our whole critique is undertaken', A 141B 28), is studied in the section of the Critique called the Analytic. The reason lies in the fact that Kant proceeds there to an examination of the understanding and to its critique. In the TDC, consciousness reflects upon itself, and does so analytically, without going outside itself. When the understanding is reflecting upon its own activity and powers, without making use of sense-experience, it produces only analytic judgements. In the chapter devoted to the TDC, the understanding is at work trying to understand how it can yield a priori synthetic judgements, hence, objective knowledge. That does not mean, of course, that by doing so, the understanding would produce such a synthesis, for there is no synthesis which can arise from an analytic inference. It only stipulates, analytically, under what conditions synthesis obtains, and by clarifying them regardless of actual experience, it demonstrates that synthesis is possible (i.e. conceivable) in an a priori manner. How can one understand synthesis in an a priori way? The answer to this question rests upon what can be called the analytic-synthetic convertibility: a correct analysis necessarily implies a corresponding synthesis. Kant presupposes its validity as a bequest from the Greeks. ls Since the Greeks, regression to the conditions has been called analysis. In an analysis, one assumes the solution of a given problem; furthermore, the solution which is sought or proved is the result of that which is 'discovered' through synthesis. 16 Synthesis, in turn, is the reverse process: the first principle arrived at through an analytic inference is placed first in the order of synthesis, which is therefore the best procedure to present results once they have been reached. This is exactly the way Kant proceeds in the Deduction. He considers the objects of experience as given, i.e. as starting points of a regressive inference which leads the understanding to the conditions of these objects qua objects. The conditions, reached analytically, in turn yield experience and its objects, as the very word 'condition' indicates. They render experience, and the object (A 111), possible, because the argument from which the conditions of experience are derived presupposes experience and the object as given, without demonstrating their reality. The main interest of analysis lies in the existence of a reverse process, synthesis: if some analysis leads us from A to B, A is taken for granted though

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being that which is sought; the reason to conclude the inference with B rests upon the fact that B is known as justifying A in turn, as implying it (by synthesis), so that the truth of A which was merely assumed becomes guaranteed. There would be no other reason to stop the analytic inference at some step B rather than C or any other conclusion, if B were not the proposition accounting for A. The regressive inference has been undertaken in the first place for the sake of establishing A, and not for inferring any known conclusion from a presupposed solution of a given problem, whereas it is this very problem which demands a solution. Formally, then, Kant infers B from A as implying A, B is the condition of A, an a priori condition since there is no need to look into the real world for A (here, the objects of experience) in order to establish the way they are constituted as such. The correctness of the regression to the conditions is necessarily sufficient to demonstrate that our mind has synthetic powers: there is no correct analysis which does not entail a corresponding synthesis. Because B is arrived at from A as being the condition of A, the Deduction manifests a circular structure: A ~ B, B ~ A, then A = B. Each step of the analysis is convertible, and that circular reasoning has often been levelled against Kant, who has been accused by commentators of having committed a vicious circle in his Deduction. But Kant would not have denied operating with analytic judgements in the Analytic, in which he treats the role and true functions of the understanding. The latter alone cannot yield synthetic judgements, since sensibility would be required for that purpose. The Transcendental Analytic aims at making explicit the formal laws of understanding, which are the rules through which our understanding judges whether that which it judges is congruous with its own formal rules. The latter are organized in a canon and not in an organon, which would be constitutive of experience. Should the understanding yield an organon, it would also play the role of sensibility and have constitutive powers concerning sensible objects (A 63/B 88). Kant's chain of reasoning, then, runs as follows: if a correct analysis can be carried out - and it is the job of the Analytic, viz. the Deduction, to carry it out - it must be reversible into a synthesis. Such an analysis cannot take place unless it ends up with a first principle which is the starting point of synthesis. The whole question for Kant is not to know under which actual conditions synthesis occurs, but to seek that which can be analysed about experience through the examination of understanding by itself. For Kant, experience is analytically considered as a synthesis of concepts and intuitions. A priori, experience is then defined as synthesis. As a consequence, since there is no synthesis without some uniting power, and, in turn, no uniting power which is not synthetic, we can say, 'in other words, [that] the analytic unity of apperception is possible

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only under the presupposition of a certain synthetic unity' (B 133). Kant calls the power of synthesizing a manifold into a unity the Transcendental Apperception. It is self-consciousness and it is present in all knowledge, whatever the diversity of our sensible representations may be, and it is also present in the very analytic inference of its own presence. That synthetic power, also called the 'I think', is analytically deduced in the TDC, and its representation has therefore no other reality than the logical (formal) in so far as it is posited by the understanding alone as a result of a reflexive enquiry. Accordingly, 'whether this representation is clear or obscure, or even whether it ever actually occurs does not here concern us. But the possibility of the logical form of all knowledge is necessarily conditioned by relation to this apperception as a faculty' (remark inserted between A 117 and A 118). This remark is of great importance. It clearly indicates that Kant is interested only in the logical status of the faculty of apperception, which is that of being the result of an analysis. It is that which is arrived at as a result of a regression to the conditions of experience, the latter being defined as the unity of a sensuous manifold. In the same remark Kant writes that 'the synthetic (?) proposition that all variety of empirical consciousness must be combined in one single self-consciousness is the absolutely first and synthetic principle of our thought in general', a first principle deduced analytically which is first in the order of synthesis, i.e. with respect to the constitution of experience as such. The nature of that logical power called transcendental apperception is not Kant's concern. This power receives existence only to the extent that it is the power of synthesis, and more than that need not be said about it according to Kant. In conclusion, if synthesis were not implied in the analytic inference itself, Kant would not reasonably think that he had explained how a priori synthesis is possible in a study devoted to the role of understanding. In virtue of the convertibility of analysis into subsequent synthesis, assumed by Kant as much as it has been by the Greeks, a TDC is possible and presents the very structure of an analytic-synthetic movement in its two versions.

III The two versions of the TDe We should bear two facts in mind when we study the TDC: first, its structure, and second, its object, which is precisely the object of knowledge. In the first edition (1781), the object is not yielded solely by the understanding or solely by the senses. We also find a SUbjective deduction along with an objective deduction of the conditions of experience.

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In the subjective deduction, Kant analytically regresses from experience, which is conceived as the unity of a sensuous manifold, to the elements contained in this unity (it is an analysis). Judgements are made of a subject, a predicate and a copula. To these three elements correspond three syntheses, the third one being the synthesis of the two others, since the copula unites the subject and the predicate. The subject of a judgement is itself a concept, though it is not a category of the understanding. But concepts pertain to the sphere of the understanding solely. They provide the predicate of judgements. Hence, the difficulty of knowing how concepts designating the subject of a judgement can exist at all. Kant's solution rests upon his doctrine of schematism: when categories are applied to the sensible world, they are schematized, so that they do not belong any longer to the sphere of the pure concepts of the understanding strictly speaking, though they initially come from there, but to a world of special concepts called schemas in which the sensuous manifold is united into concepts, and this kind of new concepts give rise to the subject of judgements. These concepts are not properly speaking categories - they must even be different from them - but since there is no concept which does not primarily arise in the understanding, they differ in the sense that they are former categories which are schematized by the imagination, the latter uniting concepts and intuitions through the copula. The subject is intuited through sensibility, and it is called the given. In order for a concept to be derived from sense-experience, some synthesis must take place at the level of sensibility. The sensuous diversity is subsumed under forms, i.e. space and time, which provide this first type of synthesis (Kant calls it the synopsis of the manifold at A 94). At the level of the understanding, there is a second synthesis that takes place. The sensuous manifold is perceived according to some rule of perception which gathers it in its multiplicity. The concept called the predicate is that rule of combination according to which the perceived individuals are put together in a judgement. It is a common property that they are supposed to share. According to Kant, all the possible common properties of objects can be regrouped into twelve categories or types of concepts. The third synthesis brings about the judgement, by uniting the sensuous manifold into a concept and relating this concept to another concept, the predicate. Judging requires the schematization of the predicate, being given a sensible object and a third synthesis bringing together the two concepts. As such, this third synthesis is central in the Critique, with respect to the Deduction as well as to the general theory of judgement (Urteilskraft) . In order to see how judgements actually arise, let us consider an

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example. If I say 'all swans are white', it means for Kant that I carry out two types of synthesis. First, I pick up individuals according to a rule. Whiteness is the criterion for selecting them. It is the attribute that the sense-data, whatever they may be, must have in common. On the other hand, I am interested in a certain kind of white things in particular, i.e. the swans, and nothing else. I put these particulars together through a synthesis carried out by sensibility. That was the first type of synthesis we have spoken of. But this synthesis does not provide any concept at all, but is made of mere forms of intuition. Sensible data need to be made intelligible through concepts which will be subjects of judgements. Judging demands concepts, and a third synthesis is required to bring subjects and predicates together through the copula 'is'. This third synthesis occurs at the level of imagination. Imagination unites subject and predicate into a judgement, and subsumes the unity of the perceived manifold under a concept which will be joined to the predicate into a judgement. It achieves such a task through a schema. If we refer to our previous example, swans are perceived in their diversity as individuals, but they are subsumed under one concept 'swan', which renders the given intelligible, as it is required in order to form any judgement about them. The concept of the given intuition recalls the sensible as intelligible, and it reproduces a given sensible reality as being intelligible. That yields a judgement of the form a is b, where a refers to a sensible given conceptualized as being a bY Through imagination, a predicate is applied univocally to an object conceived as being precisely what the predicate affirms it to be. If cinnabar were sometimes red, sometimes black, sometimes light,

sometimes heavy. . . my empirical imagination would never find opportunity when representing red colour to bring to mind heavy cinnabar. Nor could there be an empirical synthesis of reproduction, if a certain name were sometimes given to this, sometimes to that object, or were one and the same thing named sometimes in one way, sometimes in another independently of any rules to which appearances are themselves subject. (A 100-1) Through imagination, an object is recalled as such, independently of the various ways in which it is given to the senses. Whenever the object is given under this or that aspect, through one of its various properties, it is recalled to the mind as this particular object. The faculty of imagination is analytically deduced as the supreme condition of experience, and consequently of the objects of experience (A 111, A lSS/B 197). As analytic unity of synthesis, it is merely reproductive, but since it is deduced as being a priori relatively to knowledge and judgement, it must

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also yield an a priori representation of the object, otherwise it would not be, as it is indeed, the analytic unity of experience (= synthesis). Therefore, the imagination, to be, must also be productive, i.e. a priori and capable of yielding synthesis. Those three types of synthesis are necessary to produce empirical knowledge: Kant calls them the synthesis of apprehension in intuition, the synthesis of recognition in a concept and the synthesis of reproduction in imagination. 18 They have an a priori counterpart to their empirical role, if a priori knowledge is possible. Since it is real, Kant is led to infer that understanding, sensibility and imagination are bound to be synthetic a priori. The transcendental faculty of imagination is not merely reproductive, but is also productive of a priori knowledge. Imagination is that which enables the mind to have a representation of the object when the object is not given (B 151). Imagination is essential to judging - as we have seen when we examined the subjective deduction - since it unites concepts and intuitions in a judgement. As a priori unity of sensibility and understanding, imagination is capable of yielding the object a priori, i.e. the combination of a concept and an intuition. The understanding, which is the faculty of judgement, can do it objectively thanks to imagination, and relates, therefore, to experience, through the unity of consciousness present in the transcendental faculty of imagination. 'The unity of apperception in relation to the synthesis is the understanding, and this same unity, with reference to the transcendental synthesis of the imagination, pure understanding' (A 119). From synthesis, which Kant takes as his starting point and which is the subject of his explanation, he analytically deduces the unity of apperception as being the transcendental imagination, which is the power of knowing the object a priori, i.e. in absentia (from an empirical point of view). The unity of the object is given through the judgement, produced by the transcendental imagination through the application of pure concepts to pure intuition. According to this first version of the TDC - and the following remarks will lead us to the object part of the Deduction - sensibility is not affected by the object as such, since the understanding is necessary in the constitution of the object as object of knowledge. It is the result of the three syntheses: sense-data receive their unity from concepts, and the latter require the use of the categories which are schematized in order to yield those concepts. This operation is the activity of judging for Kant. That explains why objects are always objects of judgement and, consequently, of knowledge. Understanding alone, that is, concepts alone, does not engender any knowledge, any more than sensibility alone. What, then, does affect sensibility, if the object is the final result of the successive 19 threefold synthetic process? It should be the object, though it cannot be the object of knowledge already. It should be other

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than the final product if the intellectual synthesis proves useful, though it must be the same too, in order to avoid any transgression of experience. Kant calls this kind of objects, which are objects though they are not, which are incapable of being expressed in words though Kant speaks of them, transcendental objects. 20 What affects sensibility is in itself unknowable and is bound to remain so, since knowledge requires that concepts be used. At the level of sensibility no object whatsoever is knowable, and being unthinkable as a mere given to the senses, it can only be thought as a mere thing in itself without any other determination, as a mere transcendental object = X. It is not an object as such but solely an object 'by anticipation'. Space and time refer to the matter of the object, and this matter as such belongs to the realm of the unknowable. It results from the analysis of the first version of the TDC that we here face the second alternative of the paradox of the object. In the first version of the TDC, Kant elaborates the second alternative of the paradox of the object, whereas in the second edition, the first alternative is chosen. Kant endeavours to erect a consistent view of knowledge on the alternative he has selected. As a consequence, in the first edition the object is not considered as given already as an object, but only as something belonging to the 'real world'. That something is symbolized by Kant with the capital letter X in order to lay emphasis upon the indeterminate and unknowable character of the given viewed independently of the understanding (A 104-6, A 109). Since some object must be given to the senses in order to have empirical knowledge, the given X must refer to the object, hence Kant calls it the transcendental object. This label is obviously a contradictio in terminis. The purpose of introducing transcendental objects in the argument is to mark the difference between the known object and the object given to the senses (the understanding is thus useful in the knowing process), and to indicate, by calling them both object, that they correspond to one another (knowledge remains, then, empirical). This relationship between these two kinds of objects has evidently raised endless debates, because of the contradiction just pointed out: strictly speaking, objects can be only phenomenal, and not transcendental (A 258/B 314), as required by the Copernican standpoint. If my hypothesis is correct, that is, if the second version of the TDC favours the first alternative of the paradox of the object, we should not be astonished to find that, according to the second edition, the object which is given to the senses is the object qua object, instead of some indeterminate X. In fact, the text of this second version attests to the disappearance of the transcendental object X in Kant's argumentation. Kant speaks indistinctly of the object, thought and known (§22), as if

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the object of knowledge and the object of thought were the same. Consequently, the object is said to be given, whereas in the first edition, the given object was a mere X. Both faculties, the senses and the understanding, seem then capable of relating to objects, even if the former does it immediately and the latter only through the mediation of concepts, independently of one another. As a consequence, the question of the usefulness of the understanding (i.e. the logical power of the mind) becomes the central question of the second version. That accounts for the 'objectivistic' (or positivistic) turn of the second edition that has been noticed by many commentators. The object, though already given to sensibility, is different from the object made up of intuitions and concepts, even if it must be the same in order to remain in the field of empirical knowledge. The usefulness of the intellectual synthesis, in the second edition, is guaranteed by attributing the monopoly of synthesis to the understanding. Since synthesis implies knowledge because it applies concepts to intuitions, the understanding becomes the faculty of knowledge (B 137). Whereas the capacity of synthesis was shared between three faculties in the first edition, it becomes the exclusive privilege of the understanding in the second edition. Another feature of the second edition is that the subjective deduction disappears, 'so that, all things considered, Riehl could say that the only difference between the (two) versions . . . was merely the suppression of the subjective deduction'. But 'that implies that the faculty of imagination is bound to bear the costs of that change in the structure of the deduction' .22 In so far as Kant does not resolve synthesis any more into various syntheses which are all subsumed under one superior type of synthesis, it becomes unnecessary to posit such a synthetic power (i.e. imagination) as the supreme unity of the various syntheses. In the second edition, Kant simply speaks of the 'J think' as (self-) consciousness and as unity of the transcendental apperception, without going into any details. The 'J think' is the analytic unity yielded by analytic deduction from the fact of synthesis, as a result of an act of reflection by the understanding carried out upon itself. The whole weight of the second version of the TDC rests upon the role of the understanding. The understanding, which as transcendental apperception proceeds to an analysis of itself, presupposes that it is also synthetic. A priori, we can infer that 'the analytic unity of apperception is possible only under the presupposition of a certain synthetic unity' (B 133). By saying this, Kant relies upon the convertibility of analysis and synthesis, which he considers an established fact and which, as said earlier, is involved as a presupposition in his Deduction. A priori through

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mere analysis, our consciousness knows that there must exist a synthesis grounded upon this analytic unity that consciousness is to itself. In the first edition of the TDC, Kant had already introduced a special faculty capable of having a representation of the object independently of its givenness, i.e. the transcendental imagination. That role is now subordinated to the understanding. The significance of the TDC is thus completely different in the two editions, in spite of the same structure based on the analytic-synthetic convertibility. In the second version, the TDC aims at showing that the understanding is not superfluous, since the first path offered by the paradoxical alternative is taken by Kant. But much more than this is at stake: the understanding must be shown to be necessary, and this is done by attributing to it all the power of synthesis. Synthesis is here equated with knowledge as well as being indistinctly thematized. Through the understanding, the intuitions of given objects are made objective; by themselves, these intuitions would only provide a subjective form of the sensible object. It is the same object that is given in intuition and thought in categories, but as long as the understanding has not united the given object through a category, no necessity can be supplied, since there is no objective knowledge deprived of necessity. In the first version, Kant emphasizes the objective validity of the sUbjective phantasmata much less and cares more for explaining how those subjective phantasmata are produced. Hence his concern with the transcendental faculty of imagination in the first version. The numerous criticisms directed against Kant's 'psychologism' after the publication of the Critique, in 1781, bear witness to the sUbjective turn of the first edition of the deduction. 23 In the second edition, the general impression which arises from the reading is that the faculties seem autonomous relative to one another, in spite of Kant's general claim. The object is given at the level of sensibility as an object, hence as the product of knowledge, as if there were some intuitive knowledge. However, the object is supposed to result from the activity of judging, applied as a synthesis to sense-data. In this version, the object, being given to the senses, appears in a way which suggests that there was some autonomous power of synthesis which was held by sensibility. In the first edition, even if sensibility was synthetic, it was not capable of producing knowledge by itself. The mere given was unknowable as such, because any knowledge of it would have required the use of some category. At most, the given object was a mere X. In the second edition of the TDC, in which the object is affirmed to be already given at the level of the senses, intuitive knowledge is, however, explicitly denied, though it is implied by Kant's statements. 24 Only the understanding possesses the power of carrying out synthesis, which is identified with knowledge (B l37). But this also is contrary to Kant's

Critical Assessments 221 general view: the counterbalance now granted to the understanding is excessive, to the extent that the understanding has now become the faculty of knowledge. The axiom of the Kantian doctrine, according to which no knowledge can result from either faculty used alone (A 50/B 74), is seriously challenged in the second version of the TDC. Moreover, there are paragraphs common to the two editions of the Critique,25 where one of the two choices provided by the paradox of the object is preferred. Can we still speak of a spirit of Kantism, invoked to reject either of the two choices about the notion of the object, when the letter is so contradictory? Is there not a kind of equilibrium in the Critique which ensures a unity to the whole work, and which enables us to speak of the spirit of Kant's theory of knowledge? Kant develops a double theory of mental activity. In one view, there is a threefold, we might even say dialectic, synthesis, in which the understanding cannot yield knowledge if not used in combination with sensibility by the faculty of imagination. This triadic picture of the mental activity allows each faculty no autonomy at all. On the other view, synthesis is due to the employment of understanding alone, which is autonomous, that is, capable of relating to objects by itself. If the understanding is independent of sensibility, that implies that these two faculties are not required to be used jointly to reach knowledge of the object. That also implies that sensibility can be used alone and none the less relate to objects, though immediately. Sensibility is then capable of synthesis, as indicated in paragraph l3, in spite of the fact that that is a privilege of the understanding. Consequently, sensibility yields concepts (of space and time), just like the understanding. Does not geometry, as a science rooted in sensibility, prove that concepts can be rooted solely in sensibility (A 87/B 120)? Kant even speaks of a possible deduction of the concept of space (A 88/B 121). Hence two versions of the TDC: one, in which the tryptic of knowledge is unfolded and explicated, to show that the understanding does not go beyond the given object of experience through synthesizing it,26 and the other, in which the necessity of the contribution of the understanding in the act of synthesis (i.e. knowledge) of the object qua object must be established, since the synthesis of the manifold given in perception has already taken place at the level of sensibility. In spite of all those contradictions, or perhaps because of them, we can speak of a spirit of Kantism, of a general view held constantly by Kant at any price. It is as if the refinements were brought in each of the two versions only to restore some equilibrium. This equilibrium is based upon one requirement: neither sensibility alone nor understanding alone can yield knowledge, that is, enable us to know objects. The differences in both editions are compensated, at the end, in favour of that general conception known as the Kantian doctrine. The shifts in

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meaning of the same words, carried to extremes in the two versions of the TDC, ensures an internal equilibrium to the whole Critique. The paradox of the object is precisely that which ensures the equilibrium. If Kant were not committed to holding conflicting views at the same time in order to preserve his general conception, there would be no necessity to give ambiguous meanings to terms, nor would it be necessary to produce a TDC in two versions to justify either one of the alternatives, since Kant commits himself to a choice by holding a paradoxical view, which choice is subsequently made. But if one alternative is preferred, the equilibrium seems to be lost. As a fact, within each version of the TDC, the equilibrium is achieved through other means, but not without new difficulties. In the first edition, the object is given, as it must be, but not as an object, since to be an object is to be known. No knowledge can arise at the level of sensibility, and the given object is given as a mere X. The synthesis corresponding to it does not yield any knowledge. The object of knowledge requires that concepts be applied to intuitions. Nevertheless, the given object must be the same as the final product of the threefold synthesis, if knowledge is to be empirical. That is why the given X is notwithstanding called an object. In the second edition, the same difficulty arises, but in other terms. The object is given to the senses as such,27 and here, the given object is explicitly recognized to be the same object which is known at the end of the process, so that the use of the understanding is not transcendent. This view seems to render intuitive knowledge possible, and that is denied by Kant (B 146). Furthermore, if the object is given as such, sensibility must have proceeded to a synthesis. But that is not allowed in the second edition. The equilibrium is restored by saying that it is the understanding which is the faculty of knowledge (B 137). But then, the understanding seems to be the sole power of synthesis (B 137). Kant once again restores the equilibrium, by saying that synthesis must rest upon a manifold. In order to render the understanding an essential contributor to the knowing process, Kant had made it the sole factor of knowledge to the extent of contradicting his own epistemological maxim. That is why he counterbalances the power of the understanding by speaking of the object in terms of manifold versus unity, matter versus form. There is no synthesis without a manifold to which the synthesis applies. The given object is a manifold, and the object which is conceptualized is the unity of that manifold. This additional distinction enables Kant do differentiate the result of knowledge from its starting point, and to render sensibility necessarily complementary to the understanding by supplying the latter a manifold to synthesize. The equilibrium is restored: if the understanding is useful to acquire knowledge, it cannot fulfil its function unless some matter is first given to the senses. In other words, in the first edition, where the object is given, there is a synthesis which takes place at

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the intuitive level, but synthesis is not knowledge. Synthesis is threefold an X and a Y to be synthesized require a Z that synthesizes them; hence the role played by the faculty of imagination. In the second edition, the object is given as such, but in spite of that, Kant denies that there is a synthesis corresponding to it, synthesis being the privilege of the understanding;28 this is knowledge, since there is no synthesis without a manifold corresponding to it. Kant says that the object can only be given provided that an intellectual synthesis has taken place a priori. the object, in both editions, is cut into two pieces: a manifold and a unity of that manifold. This division enables Kant to make the two faculties necessary to each other in order to reach objective knowledge, though obviously, if synthesis is knowledge, it is through the understanding alone that knowledge about real things could be reached by the mind. Does not all this justify the famous patchwork theory? This theory was supposed to provide an account for Kant's inconsistencies and changes in meaning, by contending that the Analytic was written piece by piece, at different times. This would have explained why the general line of thought had allegedly changed according to the passages under discussion. But what does actually remain constant is the general theory of knowledge. There is a harmony in the Critique which is never broken. The noticed inconsistencies and the various shifts in meaning undoubtedly cause one to feel that there is lack of unity in Kant's conception of knowledge, and time may appear to be the last resort to avoid the accusation of inconsistency, as if time were the sole link between chapters and sections which sound contradictory and puzzling. In fact, they stem from a paradoxical view which, in turn, reveals Kant's will to hold a unitary theory of knowledge, even when conflicting demands make the goal unattainable. Would there be a paradox if Kant did not maintain a unique theory throughout the book, in spite of various theoretical claims which are nevertheless incompatible? All this incites Kant to get rid of the paradox, and when he does, as in the TDC, he seems to realize that he has lost something essential along the way. Probably from that stem his attempts to keep the opposite views altogether through shifts in meaning for identical terms in order to preserve the basic unity of his thought. But, as we have seen in each version of the TDC, when Kant univocally chooses either alternative theory of the object, he overemphasizes some aspect of his theory that contradicts other aspects of it, since the paradox is essential to the whole Kantian theory of knowledge. The very paradox itself bears witness to the unitary theory which is often formulated by Kant, and which is always implicitly held throughout the Critique: the understanding alone generates illusions of knowledge, and the understanding cannot be used alone and cannot, therefore, generate anything at all. This double requirement is central to what Kant always

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claims about knowledge. Without denying that he has fallen into inconsistencies, my own interpretation has aimed to explain their content and their cause, leaving room none the less for the unity of thought of the Critique. The spirit of Kantism, constantly ensured by measured ambiguities, is what makes the two editions complementary to each other, and as such, it renders their reading necessary to a full understanding of the unity of the Critique.

Notes

* An earlier version of this essay was presented at the University of Toronto, McGill University, the Johns Hopkins University, the University of Rochester and the University of Wisconsin during the winter term 1978. I wish to express my special thanks to Profs. Lewis W. Beck and Donald Crawford for their helpful comments and suggestions. 1. 'Now there are two conditions under which alone the knowledge of an object is possible, first, intuition through which it is given, though only as appearance, secondly, concept, through which an object is thought corresponding to this intuition' (A 92,93/B 125, trans. Kemp Smith). See also B 146 and A 258/ B 314. 2. 'As I thought through the theoretical part', writes Kant, speaking of his project of a book which will turn out to be the Critique of Pure Reason, 'considering its whole scope and the reciprocal relations of all its parts, I noticed that I still lacked something essential, something that in my long metaphysical studies I, as well as others, had failed to pay attention to and that, in fact, constitutes the whole secret of hitherto still obscure metaphysics. I asked myself: What is the ground of the relation of that in us which we call "representation" to the object?' (Letter to Marcus Herz, 21 February 1772; trans. A. Zweig, University of Chicago Press, 1967). 3. Otherwise, there would not be such a paradox. By definition a paradox in a given theory presents an insuperable dilemma through putting forward one alternative which cannot be discarded in favour of the other without causing damage elsewhere in the theory. 4. 'Le Paradoxe de l'objet chez Kant', Kant-Studien 3 (1977). In that article, I described the paradox without explaining why Kant fell into it, nor did I exhibit the links betwen the alternatives and the two editions of the TDC. My aim was mainly to examine the impact of Kant's paradoxical conception on subsequent German Idealism, viz Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. See also my paper in Dialectica 1-2 (1981). 5. See also A 95, A 1561B 195, A 2391B 290. 6. Hence, 'the most [reason] can do is to free a concept of understanding from the unavoidable limitations of possible experience, and so to endeavour to extend it beyond the limits of the empirical' (A 429/B 435). The products of the autonomized understanding as pure reason are not concepts as categories but concepts as ideas. 'I understand by idea a necessary concept of reason to which no corresponding object can be given in sense experience' (A 327/B 383). 7. This can be considered as the mainspring of Kant's saying that his Critique of Pure Reason was in fact a critique of pure understanding (A 289/B 345).

Critical Assessments 225 8. The famous patchwork theory, addressing itself more specifically to the TDC, will be considered later on. 9. Vol. 1 (Stuttgart, 1881), p. 177. 10. That is, however, what Paton claims when he writes that 'a more fruitful source of obscurity is carelessness in the use of language .... Thus, for example, the word "object" is used by Kant in at least four senses. It is used for the thing as it is in itself and for the thing as it appears to us; or, in a more technical language, it is used for the thing in itself and for the phenomenal object. Furthermore, the phenomenal object, is itself composed of a matter given to sense and a form imposed by thought and each of these is called Kant the object' (Kant's Metaphysics of Experience, vol. 1. (London: Allen & Unwin, 1936), pp. 50-1. 11. Ewing claims: 'I seem to find that of verbal contradictions there are a good many, and this is no doubt [sic] due partly to the haste with which the work was composed' (A. C. Ewing, A Short Commentary on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, 6th printing (University of Chicago Press, 1938), p. 4). 12. The World as Will and Representation, Appendix, 'Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy', trans E. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), p. 446. 13. 'The style and language of the doctrine of the categories afford an indication of its groundlessness. What a difference in this respect between the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental Analytic! .... The entire second and third sections of the Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding are completely changed in the second edition, because they did not satisfy Kant himself, and have become quite different from those in the first edition, although no clearer' (p. 446). As a result, Schopenhauer 'rejects the whole doctrine of the categories' (p. 452). 14. 'Now time and space, the latter in all its three dimensions, are continua, i.e. all their parts are originally not separated but combined. But they are the universal forms of our perception; hence everything that exhibits itself (is given) in them also appears originally as continuum, in other words, its parts already appear as combined, and require no additional combination of the manifold' (p. 447). 15. 'Kant gives no proof at all for the assertion that analytic and synthetic unity arises from the same operations, and that the first can therefore be used as a key to the second' (R. P. Wolff, Kant's Theory of Mental Activity (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 69). 16. Euclid, Elements XIII, Pappus, Collections VII, pp. 634-5. 17. The philosophy of Martin Heidegger has received a wide audience in America in recent years. The importance of his thought is now generally acknowledged. None the less, one of its most questionable aspects is his interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason. But he sometimes has illuminating views. Some commentators have even claimed that no reading of Kant could now take place without reference to Heidegger. In my notes, I shall therefore mention the evidence which, in the Critique, supports his views. Kant's doctrine of predication forms the historical basis of Heidegger's conception of language. According to Heidegger, the fundamental structure of language is to be understood as an AlsStruktur (as-structure). There is the hermeneutical as and the apophantic one: the first indicates the use of the essent relative to a determinate human project in which something is referred to as enabling this or that, whereas the second reveals the essent itself as it is (white or black, heavy or light, large or small ... ), and it yields a judgement with a predicate attributed to the essent itself. The distinction is drawn in M. Heidegger's Logik, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 21, pp. 135-62 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1976), and in Sein und Zeit, pp. 154-8.

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18. Heidegger calls them respectively the predicative synthesis, the apophantic synthesis and the veritative synthesis. See his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. J. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962), pp. 32-4. 19. The notion of succession will lead Kant to give time a central role in the constitution of experience. This clearly militates in favour of Heidegger's interpretation. 20. The main reason for Kant's semantic inconstancy in the use of the word 'object' is clearly to be found not in Kant's alleged 'carelessness', but in the basic requirement of the Critique itself: if progress in knowledge is accounted for in terms of synthesis, yielding objectivity, then that which is known by synthesis must be unknown before the synthesis takes place. Hence, the object given to the senses must be unknown (it is a mere noumenon if knowledge requires the use of concepts. It must be different from the phenomenal object corresponding to the synthesis finally carried out by the understanding. This phenomenal object is the known object, the genuine object of knowledge. But the latter must also coincide with that which is given, if knowledge is to preserve its empirical content; the given is then an object too; considered independently, it is a mere noumenal object or pure matter. 21. H. De Vleeschauwer, La Deduction transcendentale dans I'CEuvre de Kant, vol. III, (Gand: Travaux de la Faculte des Lettres, 1937), p. 20. Such an assertion is somewhat exaggerated, as De Vleeschauwer points out: besides the fact that there are other differences beyond the disappearance of the Subjective Deduction, in so far as the existence of a subjective deduction was necessitated in the first edition by the analytic requirement of decomposing the synthesis of experience according to the subjective elements conditioning its constitution. The subjective element remains present in the second edition but as a whole, i.e. as an I think. The emphasis laid upon the subjective element disappears: pure subjectivity is no longer analysed but merely posited as the unity rendering synthesis possible. 22. ibid., p. 37. The fact that the role of imagination is minimized in the second edition has provided the main argument for all the criticisms directed against Heidegger's interpretation of Kant. Heidegger rightfully objects against those criticisms that the first edition is more in accordance with the spirit of Kantism than the second. In the first edition, neither the understanding nor sensibility can relate directly to objects. This is the general maxim which underlies Kant's whole conception of knowledge. In the second edition, the understanding seems, on the contrary, to have the whole power of knowing the object. Kant has to restore the equilibrium between the two faculties by correlating a manifold to the intellectual synthesis, by splitting the object into a matter given to the senses and a form produced by the understanding. 23. For further details of those criticisms, see De Vleeschauwer, op. cit., vol II, pp. 533-82. 24. The only way out is to affirm that all objects are not necessarily objects of knowledge, that there is some other type of object. But this also is in contradiction with the general Kantian view of knowledge (A 258/B 314). 25. For example, paragraph 13, which clearly goes in the direction of the second edition. 26. Heidegger will characterize it by saying that it is an exposition of our human finitude. 27. Do space and time refer to a multiplicity or to unity? 28. Many commentators of Kant, including Schopenhauer, have pointed out that there was no theory of perception in the Critique of Pure Reason. Is the

Critical Assessments 227 given object in the second edition a unity of a manifold or the manifold itself? The object is indeed unity (B 137), but synthesis is carried out solely by the understanding.

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12 Synthesis and Transcendental Idealism Ralph C. S. Walker

In trying to give an account of transcendental idealism one is quickly faced with a difficult question. Transcendental idealism is designed to avoid two extremes: on the one hand complete idealism, whereby everything except perhaps our minds· themselves is claimed to be somehow mind-dependent or ideal, and on the other the realism of common sense, which holds that many familiar things around us exist quite independently of minds or of anyone's cognitive capacities. Transcendental idealism seeks to take a middle path, by distinguishing between the world of appearances and the world of things-in-themselves and also by relating them. The world of appearances is not wholly ideal, not wholly a creation of our minds, and though different from the world of things-in-themselves is yet not separable from it: 'the intelligible world contains the ground of the sensible world and therefore also of its laws'.1 The difficult question is, just how do the two relate? Some answer must be given before it is clear what transcendental idealism is. Kant evidently considers that things-in-themselves are responsible for that element in our experience which can only be discovered empirically. They are the source of the data which we receive in sensible intuition, and on which our minds impose the categories and the forms of space and time, thereby constructing the world of appearances. The data cannot be known in their raw unworked state, but all our empirical knowledge derives from them. This includes such knowledge as we may have of particular causal laws, for although the general truth that every event has a cause is a priori and read into the world of appearances by our constructing minds, 'empirical laws, as such, can never derive their origin from pure understanding' (A 127). This account of the matter raises difficulties at every turn. At best further elaboration is needed, and it is not clear how the further elaboration is to go. Most importantly, how can our minds impose the truth

of 'every event has a cause' without equally imposing the particular laws that fall under it? And if the data of intuition are unknowable by themselves, how can they still determine the course of our experience and give it a content which does not come from us and which makes it constantly capable of surprising us? I think there are two principal ways in which Kant could answer these questions. One of them can be associated, with a reasonable degree of confidence, with the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. The other is perhaps to be associated with the second edition, though somewhat less confidence is warranted here. It fits quite a lot of the evidence and goes some of the way towards explaining the changes between the editions. More than this, I think, is hardly to be looked for, since in neither edition is Kant's thought on the matter altogether firmly fixed: in neither case had he fully worked out the implications of his position at the time he was writing. But it is important for an appreciation of what transcendental idealism amounts to, and therefore for any philosophical assessment of it, to see that these are the solutions available and to see what their implications are. Before looking at the Critique, however, and the fully developed transcendental idealism which it contains, it is worth looking at the earlier theory of the Inaugural Dissertation of 1770. As often happens, that work helps us to see the issues as Kant approached them himself. In 1770 he already held that space and time were ideal, and that they constituted the form of the sensible world. The sensible world was thus a construction, like the world of appearances in the Critique, but it differed in that it was only space and time that the mind provided in effecting the construction. As yet there was no mention of the categories. We do possess such concepts as causality, though how we come by them is not explained;2 by the exercise of reason we can discover how they apply in the real, intelligible world. Substantive knowledge about the intelligible world is thus perfectly possible, provided one avoids the fallacy of bringing together in one judgment a subject term which refers to something in the intelligible world and a predicate which involves space or time. Kant regards it as quite legitimate to draw conclusions about the intelligible world from the character of the sensible, and in fact does so. 3 The intelligible world as he describes it consists of a plurality of contingently existing substances, all of which depend upon a single common cause, and which are in mutual interaction with one another. It is very much like the world of Leibniz's monads, except that Kant has doubts about the pre-established harmony and prefers to think of the interaction as a more genuine one that Leibniz can allow; though he also admits himself unable to prove Leibniz wrong. 4 Leibniz's monads, like the substance in Kant's intelligible world, were supposed to be non-

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spatial and non-temporal entities. Space and time for Leibniz were only phenomena, appearances to us, though they were phenomena bene fundata. 5 They were bene fundata because space was our confused way of perceiving a real order, the order of the clarity and distinctness of our own representations of one another and of other monads; time was again our confused way of apprehending a series of states that we ourselves and other monads genuinely possess. He said little about how this was to be worked out in detail, and one may strongly suspect that it could not be, but what matters for us is just that although for Leibniz space and time were phenomenal, our spatio-temporal ordering of things corresponded to a real, though non-spatio-temporal, ordering in the monads themselves. Presumably the Kant of 1770 would have agreed with this. He would have considered that unless a real ordering in the intelligible world underlay phenomenal space and time, the phenomenal orders would have had to be imposed by our minds in a quite arbitrary way, and if that were so, any conclusion from the character of our experience to the nature of the intelligible world would fairly clearly be mistaken. If the spatio-temporal ordering of the data had no foundation in reality it would be unwarranted to say, for example, that they derived from a plurality of substances and not just one, and unjustified to argue as Kant does that a mutual interaction of substances is required to explain the spatial order. Indeed, he actually says that the interrelation of all substances 'is called space when seen intuitively'.6 It is possible, no doubt, that he had not thought the matter very far through. But not likely. And it is clear that if he had not thought it through in 1770, he was made to do so by the criticisms of his work which Lambert and Mendelssohn made.? In the letter to Herz of 21 February 1772 the main problem he sees himself facing is the need to explain what guarantees the correspondence between our intellectual representations and the real nature of things, but he recognizes also the need to ground the changes we are aware of in some feature of the underlying reality. 'Now, that change is something real, I deny as little as that bodies are something real, although I simply understand by that merely that something real corresponds to the appearance.'8 By 1781 the first problem had been dealt with by the full theory of transcendental idealism, but there is no reason to suppose his answer to the second had altered. Our minds impose not only the forms of space and time but also the categories on the data they receive from outside. But they do not impose them arbitrarily: the way they are brought in must reflect an order of things that obtains quite independently of us, and must therefore be in some way conditioned by it. The difficulty, however, is to see why if this is the case Kant can no longer countenance conclusions about how things are in themselves, as he did in the Inaugural Dissertation, and how he can avoid saying that the noumenal world must

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be as it is in certain important respects - in particular that it must exhibit certain regularities - if experience is to be possible for us. He seems in fact to face a dilemma here. If to space, time and the categories there correspond features of the noumenal world, our knowledge ought to extend beyond the world of appearances, for we must be entitled to say that the noumenal world possesses the relevant features. But if nothing noumenal corresponds to them, or if there is no way of knowing whether anything does or not, then nothing that is wholly independent of us can limit the arbitrariness of the mind's action in ordering the data. In that case there is really no room for data at all, for any character the data may themselves possess prior to our synthesis of them has become quite irrelevant. Our decision to say that a occurs and then 13 rather than the other way round, or that several a-type events occur rather than just one, is entirely up to us and not constrained by independent factors. Later I shall argue that there is a third alternative position, lying between these two and avoiding some of the objections to them; I shall suggest that it may be Kant's position in the second edition of the Critique. But at the time he wrote the first edition I suspect the dilemma presented itself to him in this way, for otherwise he would hardly have adopted the first of these two unattractive alternatives. And, so far as he consistently takes up a position, this is the one to which he commits himself. In the Transcendental Deduction in A there is an important distinction between two kinds of synthesis, transcendental or a priori synthesis on the one hand and empirical synthesis on the other. The distinction is drawn in two ways. In the first place a synthesis may be either 'derived from experience', in which case it is empirical, or else due entirely to the mind's own resources, in which case it is transcendental. In the second place it may be an empirical fact that the synthesis takes place in the way it does - the kind of fact that could not be known a priori - or it may be something that has to be presupposed as an a priori condition for the possibility of experience and is therefore transcendental. 9 It is the first of these ways of distinguishing that is the more important one. Synthesis is the putting together of different representations, and the rules which govern synthesis are provided by concepts;lO empirical concepts are concepts derived from experience, in contrast to a priori concepts, which the mind itself supplies, and since this distinction between empirical and a priori concepts is fundamental, one would expect the distinction of the kinds of synthesis to match it. An empirical concept like the concept of redness or the concept of a man functions to collect together a whole lot of particular instances, of red things or of men, and it does so not arbitrarily but according to a rule; the rule, however, can only be acquired from experience, and is learnt by abstracting one feature from others presented along with it. Empirical synthesis

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is then the putting together of representations in accordance with such an empirically derived rule. Synthesis which is empirical in this sense will presumably also be empirical in the other; that it takes place in precisely this way is not something that can be known a priori. Otherwise the rule would not have to be derived from experience. By the same token, if a synthesis is transcendental in the sense that it can be shown a priori to be required for experience, it will have to be a synthesis in accordance with an a priori rule. So the two ways of distinguishing empirical and transcendental synthesis are in fact closely related: synthesis that is transcendental in the second sense is transcendental also in the first. (The converse does not hold, though - a point we shall return to.)l1 Now if the rules governing empirical synthesis are rules we have not ourselves made up but have learned from experience, it is clear that the data given to us in intuition must possess a character of their own. If they did not, their qualities would be wholly due to us, and there would be nothing in experience that did not derive from us, except perhaps its bare givenness. 12 In that case neither rules for synthesis nor anything else could be, in Kant's sense, empirical; all of our concepts and all the knowledge that we take to be empirical would actually be as much a priori as the categories and the principles of pure understanding. There are times, even in A, when Kant seems to think that the data cannot possess an independent character of their own, but his official view must be, as he says, that 'the quality of sensation, as for instance in colours, taste, etc., is always merely empirical, and cannot be represented a priori' (A 175/B 217). If this is so it would seem to follow that whatever regularities we can observe in the world of appearances must be grounded in corresponding regularities in things as they are in themselves - regular patterns within the noumenal ordering which underlies what we perceive as space and time. Officially all that Kant allows we can know about things-in-themselves is that they are somehow the source of the data we receive in intuition, and therefore underlie the appearances. But if the world as we know it is to be governed by causal law, and if causal laws require empirical regularities - and the schema of the category of cause is 'the real upon which, whenever posited, something else always follows' (A 144/B 183) - the data must fit appropriate patterns of regularity which they cannot derive from us and which must therefore be grounded, somehow, in the an sich. And of course Kant frequently emphasizes that it is an empirical matter to discover what causal conjunctions there are in nature. It is a task for science, and not to be decided a priori. The trouble is that it seems difficult to reconcile this with the claim that 'the order and regularity in the appearances, which we entitle nature, we ourselves introduce' (A 125); and more importantly, to reconcile it with

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the claim that the category of causation is something we ourselves provide, and provide in such a way as to guarantee that every event in the world of appearances does have a cause. The solution is to say that although we provide such concepts as causal necessity, there are also conditions for the possibility of experience that we do not and cannot supply. There are also conditions which the noumenal world must satisfy if experience is to be possible for us. In a way Kant is committed to that in any case, for he recognizes that thingsin-themselves must exist and that the I, the active knowing subject, must be something more than its own construction.13 But he is anxious to deny that we can have any knowledge about things-in-themselves, even if we can be aware that there are such things. Yet the logic of his position, here as in the Inaugural Dissertation, commits him to the view that certain conclusions may properly be drawn about the noumenal world. Things-in-themselves must be orderly, and they must exhibit regularities which closely correspond to the rule-governed orderliness of the world of appearances, even though we cannot justify subsuming them under a priori concepts of causation or necessity. It would be wrong of course to say that qualities like redness belong to things-in-themselves, for redness is a colour we ascribe to the objects we know, and these are our own phenomenal constructions, but there must be something in the things-in-themselves which corresponds to redness and is responsible for the similarity of our recurrent sensations of red. In the same way, although space and time are forms of our intuition and order the phenomenal world, the things-in-themselves must be ordered in a fashion that somehow corresponds to space and time; otherwise there would be nothing in them to ground the regularities we observe. Kant recognizes this, though with an obscurity consequent on his awareness of a conflict with his official position on what we can know, in those first edition passages in which he speaks of affinity or association. The regularity and orderliness of the data, independent of our synthesis of them, is what he calls their affinity, and it is what makes possible our association of them together and consequently our formation of empirical concepts. More exactly it is called their empirical affinity, for it is a relatedness that is given to us and not produced by us. Admittedly he says this empirical affinity is a 'mere consequence' of the transcendental affinity of appearances, where 'transcendental affinity' seems to be a name for the law-governed regularity of the phenomenal world and is clearly said to depend upon us and 'our subjective ground of apperception' (A 114; see also A 122f.). This, however, does not mean that the empirical affinity is wholly a creation of our minds - which being empirical it could not be - or even that the transcendental affinity is, but only that it depends upon our minds for the concepts of necessity and law, while equally presupposing that the data given to us are regular enough

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for us to apply these concepts to them in the ways that are needed. Because he thinks that so much orderliness is required for experience, Kant holds that data insufficiently regular could not 'conform to the unity of apperception' (A 122; see also A 113), i.e. could not meet the conditions for being apprehended by a self-conscious subject, but the fact that there are data which do meet these conditions is not under our control. Thus there is a sense in which we 'introduce nature', if nature is a law-governed and necessary order, but it would be less misleadingly put by saying that we introduce its Gesetzma{3igkeit (cf. A 114). The understanding is the 'lawgiver of nature' (A 126) - Kant's phrase is 'Gesetzgebung fUr die Natur', not 'Gesetzgeber' - not in that it creates regularities out of nothing, but in that it provides the concept of law. The understanding provides the categories, and the pure productive imagination schematizes them in time, but we cannot from our own resources guarantee all the principles of pure understanding, because they depend also upon appropriate data. This point is obfuscated where it should be made most clear, where Kant addresses himself to the question directly at the end of the Anticipations of Perception (A 175f.1 B 217f.). But it is clear enough that there is nothing we can do to construct the world of appearances in such a way that every agent has a cause, if the data given in intuition do not manifest the appropriate regularity. It is a pity that Kant does not state his position in a more straightforward and unequivocal way; but the reason his formulations are so obscure and ambiguous lies in his unwillingness to concede that we can know more about things-in-themselves than just that they exist. In 1770 he was perfectly willing to allow this, so why has he changed his mind? The answers, of course, is that he now thinks he can explain how (synthetic) knowledge is possible, but in a manner that confines it to the world of appearances. Knowledge may be read off from the world, in which case it a priori, although still synthetic. 14 The claim that things-inthemselves must exhibit a fairly substantial regularity cannot be either read off or read in. What he overlooks, however, is that he has himself found an alternative way in which synthetic a priori knowledge is possible. In the years after the Inaugural Dissertation, when he extended the Copernican Revolution to the categories as well as space and time, he found himself faced with the problem of distinguishing those concepts genuinely read into experience by us from merely fictional concepts like the concept of fate or of witchcraft; and resolved it by providing arguments to show that the categories must be applied for experience to be possible, while the concepts of fate and of witchcraft do not have to be ,15 This solution is generalized in the Critique into a method of establishing truths that are synthetic but not empirical. One establishes them

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by transcendental arguments: one shows that their truth is a condition of the possibility of experience. What Kant never clearly saw was that there is no general reason why truths established in this way should always have to be read into the world: instead they may be conditions which must hold independently of us, but without which experience would be impossible for us, His rather grudging admission that there must be things-in-themselves and active subjects of experience, and his obscure remarks about the empirical affinity of the manifold, show that when the need arises he can see that certain conclusions about the independent character of things-in-themselves can be established by transcendental arguments, And once this has been seen, the way is open for inferring to the character of things-in-themselves, not just from the premiss that experience is possible in general, but from the observed fact that our experience takes a certain specific course ,16 That the regularities we observe must match regularities in the an sich is something we can tell a priori; that there must therefore be regularities to match these I am now aware of is a consequence that follows directly. Kant's hesitancy and ambivalence are due to his conflicting feeling that all such claims to knowledge must be illegitimate, because neither straightforwardly empirical nor mind-imposed. So far as he has a reason for feeling this, it is that otherwise there would be nothing to guarantee the possibility of experience. If amongst the conditions required for experience are some that are not under our control, and that depend upon how the world happens to be independently of us, these will be conditions which hold only contingently and as the result of some fortunate accident, and Kant considers this unsatisfactory. Like Strawson I think he is entirely mistaken to consider it so, but that, perhaps, is another matter. What is important here is that neither in B nor later does he take the obvious line suggested by the first edition deduction and openly admit the possibility of knowing a certain amount about the orderliness of things-in-themselves. Instead his reluctance to admit such knowledge leads him to think again about empirical affinity. I said earlier that Kant appears to face a dilemma. Either he should accept that we can have a certain limited amount of knowledge about things as they are in themselves, or else it would seem he ought to accept that neither things-in-themselves nor data of intuition have any substantive role to play in determining the character of the world of appearances. The phenomenal world is then a pure phenomenon, wholly the product of the mind's activity. I have argued that in A he commits himself, not very enthusiastically, to the first alternative; in B he has changed his position, and some of the things he says suggest that he has adopted the second. They suggested it to some of Kant's followers, most notably Fichte, for the second alternative is a radically idealist one. Kant had no wish to go so far, as he made clear by his emphatic repudiation

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of Fichte and of those who thought like him.!7 He wanted to adopt an intermediate position, the availability of which is not at first sight obvious. But at least he rejected in B the view he had held in A, in the hope of preserving the inscrutability of the an sich. The most noticeable thing is that the talk of affinity disappears. By itself this might only be a sign of the wish to drop a confusing bit of terminology, but looking more closely we find that the distinction between transcendental and empirical synthesis has changed. A distinction is still drawn, but it is drawn only in the second of the two ways mentioned before. A synthesis is now said to be empirical if and only if it is an empirical fact that it takes place .16 The possibility of synthesis being empirical in the first way appears to be firmly ruled out right at the start of the deduction in B. A synthesis was empirical in the first way - the way that I suggested was dominant in A - if it was governed by a rule derived from experience and not provided by the mind from its own resources. But the B deduction places the greatest of emphasis on the mind's spontaneity in synthesis of every kind. The combination (conjunctio) of a manifold in general can never come to us through the senses, and cannot, therefore, be already contained in the pure form of sensible intuition ... To this act the general title 'synthesis' may be assigned, as indicating that we cannot represent to ourselves anything as combined in the object which we have not ourselves previously combined, and that of all representations combination is the only one which cannot be given through objects. Being an act of the self-activity of the subject, it cannot be executed save by the subject itself. (B. 129f.) Again, Combination does not ... lie in the objects, and cannot be borrowed from them, and so, through perception, first taken up into the understanding. On the contrary, it is an affair of the understanding alone, which is itself nothing but the faculty of combining a priori, and of bringing the manifold of given representations under the unity of apperception. (B. 134f.) Kant still speaks of a 'manifold of given representations', but its function has been reduced. It no longer provides us with a source of concepts. Instead, the mind can classify data together in whatever manner it determines. This applies to their ordering in space and time, and it applies also to their classification in every other respect as well. The most

Critical Assessments 237 straightforwardly descriptive concepts, like the concept of redness, represent classifications which have been fixed upon by us, not classifications given to us from outside; items can be put into sets in endlessly many different ways, and the concepts we use merely indicate the ways we have adopted. This makes it look as if there is no role left for the given to play, and as if our minds have become responsible for the whole course of the phenomenal world; though actually, as I shall argue shortly, this does not follow, so that Kant is not committed to such thoroughgoing idealism. My interpretation of B may be challenged, even leaving this last point aside. As I said at the outset, I am less confident about B than about A. But it does seem fairly clear that an important change has occurred in the conception of synthesis, and I would like to suggest - without being able to develop it here - that my characterization of the change is borne out by a comparison of the two versions of the deduction. For not only does 13 not bring in the notion of affinity. In A, a central step in the argument was to show that not all synthesis was empirical: there must be transcendental synthesis, which the mind carries out from its own resources. (Then since the twelve functions by which the mind can spontaneously unite its representations are the categories, it must employ the categories.) In B this step is no longer necessary, because all synthesis is now held to be transcendental in the sense used in A, i.e. spontaneously effected by the mind. The task has become the very much simpler one of showing just that experience does require synthesis, and that I can be aware of nothing except as a product of synthesis and so of the employment of the categories. Consequently much of the argument in A, which was designed to show the need for an a priori contribution of the mind in our conception of the self and our conception of an object, has strictly become irrelevant. Afterwards there only remains, as there did before, the task of showing that this synthesis which the mind carries out must be governed by the twelve categories, and this time it is done in two steps - in secs. 19 and 20 for the kind of synthesis that can be called judgement, and in sec. 26 for the synthesis of apprehension. 19 This is not the place for an examination of the Transcendental Deduction, and in any case my remarks about the text are not intended to be more than tentative. What matters here is to see how it is possible for Kant to hold his new view about synthesis without being committed to an idealism which dismisses as vacuous and redundant the thing-in-itself and the raw data upon which the synthesis of apprehension works. How, then, can the character of the given still make a difference to what happens in the world of appearances, if there is no limit to the ways in which the mind can arbitrarily synthesize data? The groupings of things together which we naturally make, however much they may seem to be forced upon us, are all the product of our own activity. This

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applies to our groupings of items as being of the same colour, or same shape, or same size; however similar a set of things may seem to be to one another, and in whatever respect, their appearing similar is only the result of our synthesis. It applies also to their spatial and temporal locations. That a set of items appear close to one another in space, or follow one another in a determinate sequence in time, is due entirely to our imposition of the forms of space and time, in a manner that is in no way dictated for us by the existence of any corresponding order among things-in-themselves. It would therefore seem that we could create the world of appearances in whatever way we liked, so as to contain whatever kinds of objects and whatever sequences of events we chose though strictly we ought not to speak of choice or of liking here, since there is no suggestion that our synthetic activity is under our voluntary control in any ordinary sense. (One might well ask Kant why not, but that would lead us into deeper waters that we need not enter here. 20 ) In his correspondence with Beck and with Tieftrunk Kant does not make his answer clear,21 but it must be that in a sense this is true and in a sense not. What is true is that for any given set of data we could have ordered things in such a way as to produce any given pattern that follows from the fact that there is no limit to the possible ways of ordering them. But given the ways of ordering that we do use, what the world of appearances turns out to be like depends on the character of things-in-themselves. Of course if things-in-themselves had no properties, the phenomenal world would be entirely our creation; but the conception of things-in-themselves without any properties is simply absurd, and the recognition that they have properties commits one to nothing more than one was committed to anyway in allowing their existence. The conclusion Kant found awkward in the first edition was not that they had properties but that certain things could be inferred about what these properties were like. If things-in-themselves have properties, it seems at first sight plausible to suppose that we recognize them and that empirical synthesis is guided by them. Empirical synthesis would then be a grouping together by us of items that genuinely share a property in common. But between writing A and writing B Kant came to see a point that was not appreciated after him for quite a long time, and is now chiefly associated with Wittgenstein or with Nelson Goodman. However similar two items, e.g. two red pillar boxes, may strike us as being, that is no guarantee that they are similar intrinsically. When things strike us as similar and when they strike us as different depends upon us: on what is sometimes nowadays called our quality space, or what Kant would have called our propensity to synthesize in certain ways and not in others. Someone for whom Goodman's predicate 'grue' is a primitive predicate synthesizes differently from the rest of us, as does someone who (without suffering from any abnormality

Critical Assessments 239 of the sense-receptors) sees no similarity at all between the two red pillar boxes but is unable to distinguish between the first of them and a block of white marble. We may feel that our way of synthesizing is the right one, but these people will no doubt feel the same about their own ways of doing it. It is impossible to discover who is right - impossible in principle. We may find that one way is more convenient than another for our purposes, but that depends what our purposes are, and there is no reason to suppose that the one which happens to be most useful to us will also be the one that matches the intrinsic properties of things-inthemselves. Thus if grass remains green and does not remain grue, so that our inductive expectations about the colour of grass are fulfilled and the 'grue'-user's are disappointed, that is no reason to conclude that our way of synthesizing is closer to the truth than his. We would have reason to think that only if we had reason to think that the noumenal world was uniform in the relevant way, which obviously we do not. 22 It is possible, no doubt, that the qualities we distinguish do match the properties of things-in-themselves, but we have no way of telling that they do. The synthesis we perform in apprehending a series of items can be thought as governed by a function which maps the intrinsic properties things have in themselves into our own quality space. One possibility is that it should always map a single intrinsic property into what we think of as a single quality; but equally a single intrinsic property might under varying circumstances go over into what we consider a whole range of unrelated qualities, and what we think of as one quality might be derived from a great variety of intrinsic properties. If the 'grue'-user were right about the intrinsic character of the things we call green, the synthesis we use in apprehending colours would group together as having the same colour two intrinsically different kinds of thing: grue things observed before midnight tonight, and bleen things observed at or after midnight. Indeed there is no limit to the complexity of the relationship that may obtain between the properties of things-in-themselves and the qualities we ascribe to things, provided that some relationship does obtain. It may be that we naturally call something green if it is either (in reality) F under circumstances C1, or G under circumstances C2 , or H under circumstances C3 , etc. indefinitely, where F, G and Hare noumenally very different properties. So long as some relationship does obtain there is still a substantive part to be played by things-in-themselves, and the given element has not dropped out as otiose. What happens in the world of appearances is dictated not by ourselves alone but by the character of the an sich together with our principles of synthesis, which in effect translate from features of things-in-themselves into features of phenomena. When Goodman set out to make the point that it is up to us how we synthesize, he began with colour concepts. This was a sensible heuristic

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move, because colour concepts are fairly straightforward and relatively isolated from others, so that someone who used 'grue' instead of 'green' as a primitive concept would still be able to find common ground with us on all sorts of matters even after midnight; there are all sorts of matters that have nothing to do with the colours of things. The point applies equally, however, with descriptive predicates of any kind, as Goodman was well aware, though someone who did not have our concepts of size and shape but 'grue'-type analogues of them instead would no doubt find it hard to discover any common ground with us at all after the critical time. There might be even more difficulty if his example related, not as 'grue' does to a temporally disjoined pair of concepts of ours, but to a more complicated set of them disjoined spatially or in some other way. Still the point remains the same: how we synthesize is up to us: 'Combination does not lie in the objects, and cannot be borrowed from them.' So far as I know Goodman never explicitly extends it to cover spatial and temporal predicates as well, but clearly parallel considerations will apply here too, though this is more difficult to think about because someone whose temporal or spatial ordering was radically different from ours - or who ordered things in some altogether novel fashion - would be quite impossible for us to communicate with. Kant of course had decided on the ideality of space and time long before he came to see to what extent our other descriptive concepts are dependent on us, but in coming to see this he found a new and (one might venture to suggest) very much better argument for his position. In the Inaugural Dissertation, and if I am right, also in A, Kant thinks that although space and time themselves are ideal, there is some corresponding order among things-in-themselves that underlies the spatio-temporalorder. Clearly this order would lack the phenomenal properties of space and time; it could lack their metrical properties and some of their geometrical ones; but it would at any rate be topologically isomorphic with them. Once it is recognized that there is no limit to the complexity of the relationship that can hold between a predicate of ours and the properties of things-in-themselves which ground its application, it is no longer necessary (or indeed desirable) to hold this. The expression 'at 4 p.m. on 1 February 1982' applies to a large variety of events. The old view was that underlying all of them there must be noumenal entities that shared a common position in the order which corresponded to time. But there is no need for this. Just as the noumenal properties underlying 'green' may form a very disparate set, so the noumenal properties underlying 'at 4 p.m. on 1 February 1982' may be very diverse: for item A it may be the conjunction of noumenal characteristics W, X, Y and Z, whereas for item B it may be H, J, Q and S. Moreover, even for one particular item that continues in existence, the properties underlying 'at 4 p.m .... ' need have nothing in common with those underlying 'at

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4.01 p.m .... ', 'at 4.02 p.m .... ', etc., in any way that suggests a linear ordering. This sounds strange - it would be strange enough for space, but is even more so for time. Yet if what was said in a Goodmanesque way about predicative concepts was in general correct, this must be right too, for 'at noon', 'in Manchester', 'three feet to my right', and so on are all predicative concepts. Though I do not think the arguments of the Transcendental Aesthetic for the ideality of space and time especially convincing, I do think that these considerations about synthesis constitute a powerful argument for it. They give us grounds for distinguishing between things-in-themselves and their real characters on the one hand, and on the other the appearances which we think of in terms of the concepts that come naturally to us. Amongst these concepts are spatial and temporal ones, so that the spatial and temporal orderings we use, and which are fundamental to our conception of the world, belong to appearances and not to the underlying an sich. Admittedly there is nothing in this to support Kant's view that space and time are intuitions rather than concepts, but I also think that when that view is rightly interpreted, there is no conflict with it either. It has often been felt, in any case, to be more a survival from the Inaugural Dissertation than an integral part of his later philosophy. We were troubled initially with the problem of relating the mind's contribution to the contribution made by an independent reality. It seemed hard to reconcile the two in the way Kant wanted to, for the mind had to be able to guarantee the truth of the principles of pure understanding while at the same time our detailed knowledge of the phenomenal world had to be a posteriori, and derived from what is given to us in sensible intuition. We saw that on the view I thought predominant in A it is necessary to admit that although the mind supplies the concept of cause, it cannot, by itself, guarantee the truth of the principle 'Every event has a cause'; this must depend also on the presence of intrinsic regularities among things-in-themselves. And if, as Kant maintains, the principle is a precondition for our experience, we can infer that these regularities must obtain, which gives us a piece of information about things as they are in themselves. How, then, do matters stand on the view I am claiming to be predominant in B? In one key respect the position is unchanged: the truth of 'Every event has a cause' cannot simply be read into the world by us. If it is to be true in the world of appearances, it can be so only because things-inthemselves have appropriate properties. Causal laws for Kant require regularities among phenomenal events, regularities which can only be discovered empirically, and to these empirically observed phenomena something noumenal must correspond. It might be thought that since time as well as space is transcendentally ideal there is no longer any role to be played by empirical discovery, but that is not so. If the transcen-

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dental ideality of time meant that the noumenal subject were in some sense confronted by the whole body of its experience in one go, and then applied its rules of synthesis and ordering to produce the phenomenal experience of a life extended over many years, then certainly we could hold the subject responsible for the entire character of its experience; whatever the data, it could have synthesized them in such a way as to produce whatever regularities one likes. But the transcendental ideality of time does not mean this; far from it. Every event that occurs in time has something noumenal underlying it, and since my experiences are events in time they must also be grounded in the an sich, in properties of my noumenal self. Hence I am by no means confronted by the whole body of my experience in one go. The data I think of myself as receiving now are the data noumenally associated with my noumenally being W, X, Y and Z, where these are the properties that underlie my existing at this time; the data I think of myself as receiving a minute hence are those associated with my noumenally being H, J, Q and S, where these underlie my existing at that time. So there remains a part for experience to play; the ordering and synthesis depends on me, but given the rules of ordering that I have adopted it is an empirical question whether the phenomenal world exhibits regularities, and if so of what sort and how much. And if it does that must be because if something in the nature of the an sich. Thus far: things are as before. But we can no longer draw disturbing conclusions about the an sich world. All we can say is what I have just said: somehow, it must have whatever character is required to produce the appearance of regularity, given the principles of ordering and synthesis that I use. We are quite unable to specify these principles, and have absolutely no way of telling what that character may be. In particular we cannot infer - as we could before - that there must be regularity of any sort amongst things-in-themselves, for we have seen that what appears as a regularity may be grounded in what is very disparate. All we can infer is that things-in-themselves must exist and must (therefore) have properties; and, no doubt, that some of them are subjects of experience. This much knowledge about the noumenal world is indispensable for transcendental idealism, if it is to retain its transcendental character and keep itself distinct from idealism of a more radical, but less satisfactory, kind.

Notes 1. Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, 2nd (1786) edn, p. 111, cited in the English translation by H. J. Paton, published as The Moral Law (London: Hutchinson, 1948). Quotations from the Critique of Pure Reason are taken from the translation by N. Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929).

Critical Assessments 243 2. This is the ground of his criticism of his own position in the letter to Herz of 21 February 1772, vol. X, p. 125 in the Prussian Academy edition of Kant's gesammelte Schriften. (English translation in G. B. Kerferd and D. E. Walford, eds., Kant: Selected Pre-Critical Writings (Manchester University Press, 1968), pp. 112f.) 3. Inaugural Dissertation, section IV (translated in Kerferd and Walford, pp. 74ff.). 4. ibid., §22 (in Kerferd and Walford, pp. 77f.). 5. Thus Leibniz's letter to Arnauld of 9 October 1687, in C. 1. Gerhardt, ed., Die philosophischen Schriften von G. W. Leibniz (Berlin: Weidmann, 1875-90), vol. II, p. 118. 6. Inaugural Dissertation, §16 (in Kerford and Walford, p. 75). 7. See the letters from Lambert of 13 October 1770, and from Mendelssohn of 25 October 1770 (both translated in Kerferd and Walford). 8. Vol. X, p. 129 in the Prussian Academy edition of Kant's works; in Kerferd and Walford, pp. 116f. 9. For these two readings contrast A 118 with A 102. Other passages, like A 77/B 103 and A 121, can be taken either way. 10. A 106; d. AlB. 11. See below, p. 236. The discovery that no synthesis is empirical in the first sense, i.e. derived from experience, does not prevent us distinguishing between synthesis that is required for experience and synthesis that is not. 12. On this possibility d. C. 1. Lewis, Mind and the World Order (New York: Scribners, 1929), chap. 2. 13. On this see further my book Kant (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), chap. 9; and cf. B 422. 14. Thus (e.g.) A 92/B 124f. 15. A 84ff.!B 116ft. 16. On this see P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense (London: Methuen, 1966), esp. Part I, chap. 1; and also my Kant, chaps. 1 and 9. 17. Apart from his Erkldrung in Beziehung auf Fichtes Wissenschaftslehre (in vol. XII of the Prussian Academy edition) see Kant's letter to J. S. Beck of 4 December 1792, Beck's letter to Kant of 24 June 1797 and Kant's letter to Tieftrunk of 5 April 1798. 18. B 152; d. B 150f. 19. This of course requires elaboration. But see further my Kant, chap. 6; and cf. D. Henrich, 'The Proof-structure of Kant's Transcendental Deduction,' Review of Metaphysics 22 (1968-9). 20. It would take us into his moral philosophy. The synthetic activity which constructs the world of appearances must be activity of the real, noumenal self (it can hardly be the product of its own construction, as it would have to be if it belonged to the phenomenal world). But of course Kant also holds that the action of the noumenal self is paradigmatically free and for that reason capable of providing the basis for moral responsibility. 21. Besides the letters cited in n. 17, see those to Beck of 16/17 October 1792 and of 1 July 1794, and to Tieftrunk of 11 December 1797. 22. N. Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, 2nd edn (New York: BobbsMerrill, 1965), chap. 3. See further my Kant, chap 12, and the recent discussion in S. Holtzman and C. Leich, eds., Wittgenstein: To Follow a Rule (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981).

Critical Assessments

13 Thought and Intuition in Kant's Critical System Daniel C. Kolb

Kant's critics invariably focus on the distinction between thought and intuition as the weak link in his system. Kant's rationalist contemporaries and his early successors, the so-called Absolute Idealists, 1 as well as contemporary philosophers and historians of philosophy, 2 offer criticisms of the thought-intuition distinction which are strikingly similar. The distinction is generally criticized along two lines. First, it is objected that in order to establish that thought and intuition are really distinct faculties it must be shown that we have some access to intuitions apart from conceptual representation. No intuitive element, however, can be isolated in experience. All experience is conceptually mediated, so it is nonsense to speak of thought and intuition as two independent faculties. Second, it is objected that Kant's inability to establish certain fundamental characteristics which distinguish intuitions from concepts renders the Deduction of the Categories unintelligible. The distinction between thought and intuition is architectonically prior to the Deduction; for the problem of Deduction, i.e. establishing the necessary unity of thought and intuition in experience, arises only after it is established that thought and intuition are really two distinct and independent faculties and that both play essential roles in knowledge. Given its centrality to the entire Kantian system, it is surprising that Kant nowhere undertakes a sustained, rigorous defence of the distinction. From his passing comments as well as from his more extended discussion of the distinction in his correspondence, it is clear that Kant is aware both of its importance and the problems associated with it. His comments indicate two lines of defence of the distinction. First, we find him maintaining that certain 'marks' or characteristics which are absent in the conceptual representation of an object are always present in its intuition. These allow us to identify separately the intuitive and conceptual element in our consciousness of objects. Second, he argues that it is a fundamental

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characteristic of our intellect that it is neither actively nor passively intuitive. We can be brought into relation with objects only through a intuitive faculty distinct from the faculty of conceptual representation. It should be noted that these two lines of defence are independent of one another. The first is a phenomenological account of the differences in our awareness of objects; the second is a transcendental account of the possibility of representations like those with which we find ourselves. In what follows I shall examine both of these defences of the distinction. I shall argue that while there is some phenomenological sense to separating concepts and intuitions in experience, this is not sufficient to establish that there is a real difference between the faculties of thought and intuition. The transcendental argument for the distinction, on the other hand, is both more philosophically interesting and defensible. This argument is of central importance for understanding Kant's thought. It is his defence of the central metaphysical thesis of his system that the human intellect is finite and lacks all power of intellectual intuition. This. limitation of our intellect leads Kant to conclude that knowledge of objects is possible only if they are given through a faculty distinct from the intellect. Understanding Kant's defence of the thought-intuition distinction is essential for comprehending why he is committed to exposing the limitations of the human intellect and why his philosophical system retains the 'two-world' structure reflected in the distinction between phenomena and noumena.

I Singularity, immediacy and intuition

Kant suggests two contrasts which might be used to distinguish concepts and intuitions. Intuitions are said to be singular representations. '[I]t must rather be given in us (space and time) and must therefore be a single representation and not a concept.'3 Concepts, on the other hand, are general representations of objects. 'Now every concept must be thought as a representation which is contained in an infinite number. of different possible representations (as their common character), and WhICh therefore contains these under itself. 4 The singularity-generality contrast is explicated by Kant through an analysis of the relationship between part and whole in each sort of representation. Singular representations are given as wholes which contain their parts within themselves. The whole is capable of continuous division, and each division defines the part through the limitation of the whole. Since every intuition must have either duration and/or extension, the division of the intuition is a quantitative limitation of the whole. Conceptual representations are unified in a different manner. The whole of a concept is the unity of the elements which can be gleaned from the concept by means of analysis.

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The unity of the concept is a qualitative unity which does not allow for division. 'In all knowledge of an object there is unity of concept which may be entitled qualitative unity, so as far as we think by it only the unity in the combination of the manifold of our knowledge: as for example, the unity of theme in a play, a speech, or a story. 5 In addition to the manifold unified 'in' a concept, there is a manifold unified 'under' each concept.

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the concept, e.g. the elements of rationality and animality are unified in the concept of man. Second, the general unity of elements in a concept is capable of determining the manifold of intuition through judgements which yield knowledge of an object by subsuming an intuition under the concept, as in the judgement. 'This featherless biped is a man.'

II The insufficiency of singularity and immediacy Every concept contains a manifold under it in so far as the manifold agrees, but also in so far as it is different. The determination of a concept in respect of everything possible contained under it, so far as the elements are opposed to one another, i.e. differ from one another, is called the logical division of the concept. The higher concept is called the 'dividend concept' and the lower concepts are called the 'members of the division'.6 The members or divisions of a higher concept are ordered under a more general concept. The concepts of 'ash', 'oak' and 'maple' are in this way to be considered as parts of the concept 'tree'. Since there are, according to Kant, no lowest species, each concept is always divisible. The unity of the manifold contained under a concept is divisible by specification rather than by limitation. In addition to the singularity-generality contrast, concepts and intuition are contrasted as immediate and mediate representations. The singularity-generality contrast is a logical distinction between species of representations. 7 The mediacy-immediacy contrast is a critical distinction between ways in which objects are related to us. Intuition is the mode of awareness by which we are immediately aware of objects. 'Sensible intuition is either pure or empirical intuition of that which is immediately represented, through sensation, as actual in space and time.'8 Immediate representation is always of a particular object. 'Intuition is the immediate representation of a single [ein-zeln] object. 9 The mediacy of a conceptual representation is first characterized by its generality. A concept 'refers to its object by means of a feature which several things have in common'.10 Second, it is characterized through the role which concepts play in judgements. 'Concepts, as predicates in possible judgments relate to some representation of a not yet determined object. Thus, the concept of body means something, for instance metal, which can be known by means of the concept. It is, therefore, a concept solely in virtue of its comprehending other representations, by means of which it can relate to objects. It is therefore the predicate of a possible judgment. ll The two characterizations of the mediacy of a concept represent two different sorts of manifold which are synthesized through concepts. First, a concept represents the general unity of the elements included in the definition of

While both these ways of distinguishing concepts from intuitions have some initial plausibility, there are serious problems with both the singularity-generality and the immediacy-mediacy distinctions if they are intended as definitive characterizations of the difference between intuitions and concepts. Their failure is instructive in bringing to light Kant's commitment to the irreducibly synthetic nature of all representations of objects. Singularity is not sufficient in itself to differentiate intuitions from conceptual representations. Intuitions may be singular representations, but the class of singular representations is not limited to intuitions. The concept of God as well as the concepts involved in the cosmological ideas are singular representationsY The notion of the whole of experience, which plays an essential role in Kant's thought, is also a singular representation.B Individual objects, whether identified through proper names or not, are also conceived of as singUlar. We know that John Doe is a single being, but we also have a conceptual representation of him. This representation of John Doe combines all the elements which are attributed to him. The concept of an individual is 'completely determined' with regard to all possible predicates. 'The principle of complete determination ... concerns the content and not merely the logical form. It is the principle of the synthesis of all predicates which are intended to constitute the concept of a thing. '14 The concept of a singular representation is, then, too broad a notion to serve as a criterion for distinguishing intuitions from concepts, since both intuitions and many concepts may be characterized as singular representations. The problems involved with the notion of singularity might lead us to suppose that what Kant has in mind with the singularity criterion is a much more stringent type of singularity than that which might be used in ordinary talk about objects and persons. This view is proposed by Manley Thompson. He argues that the notion of singularity involved in identifying intuitions can be narrowed in such a way as to exclude any conceptual representations. [E]ach intuition is given on an occasion temporally distinct from that of every other and is, thus, simply as intuition, without regard for

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concepts, different from every other intuition .... For apart from concepts an object is merely a spatio-temporal something correlated with a given intuition, so that restricted to our intuitive cognitions we cannot speak of different intuitions of the same object. Hence, if we take proper names as linguistic representations solely of our intuitions, we cannot speak of applying and reapplying the same name. When we speak thus, we treat names as conceptual rather than intuitive representations. Names can be applied, reapplied, and misapplied; so can concepts, but not intuitions. IS This construal of singularity has points in its favour. First, it is in agreement with what Kant says about the divisibility of intuitions. Singular conceptual representations, while not containing any subordinate species, are not divisible by limitation in the way in which intuitions are divisible. Singular conceptual representations are, consequently, able to maintain their identity in different applications. Second, it is closer to what Kant seems to mean when he speaks of an intuition not as a singular, but as a single representation. Empirical representations, as they are given, are non-repeatable and spatially and temporally limited. While this clarification of the singularity criterion does serve to separate the sort of singular representations which are to be considered intuitions from those which are conceptual, it has the disadvantage of achieving this at the cost of dissolving the singularity criterion into the immediacy criterion. By construing intuitions as those singular representations which cannot be used repeatedly, i.e. which cannot be considered predicates in possible judgements, the clarification limits the use of the term 'intuition' to those singular representations which are immediately given. The immediacy criterion, however, raises another set of problems. It is a basic tenet of Kant's treatment of empirical consciousness that all appearances must be structured by concepts. If they were not so structured they could not be brought under the transcendental unity of apperception and could never be considered as objects of possible experience. 16 If even the simplest appearances must be structured by the forms of judgement, it is not clear which sense of the term 'immediacy' is meant to distinguish the intuitive element from the conceptual element in experience. The concept of an empirical intuition, or an appearance, is a complex one for Kant. Intuition cannot be understood through a passive faculty of reception alone. Intuition itself cannot be the source of the unity of an appearance given in intuition. Appearances are given to us as aggregates. The 'parts' of an appearance are composed of parts, which are composed of parts, etc. There is nothing foundational in appearances themselves which can stop this regress and from which the unity of

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appearances might be constructed. 17 'Only through the successive synthesis of part to part [in the process of] its apprehension can it [an appearance] come to be known. All appearances are consequently intuited as complexes of previously given parts. '18 The unity of an appearance is not, then, derived from the material elements of perception or sensation; but neither is it to be traced to the formal unity of the forms of sensibility, space and time. 'The combination (conjunctio) of a manifold in general can never come through the senses and cannot, therefore, be already contained in the pure form of sensible intuition. '19 If the unity of appearances were derived from space and time, it would be present in the mere intuition of objects, since these formal elements are present in all intuition. The combination of the manifold is, however, something over and above the intuition of its elements; and therefore it cannot be traced to the minimal condition of the awareness of the elements of the manifold. The unity of the manifold of appearances is derived from an 'act of spontaneity of the faculty of representation'. 20 The function of bringing the various elements of a manifold to unity is the function of judgement. Through the spontaneous act of gathering a spatially and temporally disparate manifold under the unity of a single concept or rule, the act of judgement makes possible our cognitive awareness of experiential unities. 'The same function which gives unity to the various representations in a judgment [i.e. a concept] also gives unity to the mere synthesis of various representations in an intuition. '21 The understanding is the source of unity in appearances through which they become objects of cognitive awareness for us. '[S]ince this faculty [the faculty of spontaneity], to distinguish it from the sensibility, must be entitled the understanding, all combination - be we conscious of it or not, be it a combination of the manifold of intuition, empirical or nonempirical, or of various concepts - is an act of the understanding. '22 The way in which the activity of synthesis takes place in the synthesis of apprehension may never become an object of our awareness. 23 In our knowledge of objects this synthetic unity cannot be treated as an aggregate and dismantled. 'Sensibility and reason are so closely bound to one another that they cannot be separated from one another when we know something.'24 Perhaps some sense of the irreducible element of immediacy in intuition can be gained by examining the role that concepts and intuitions play in judgements. Concepts are predicates in possible judgements. 2s If concepts are defined by their ability to serve as predicates in judgements, it follows that a purely intuitive element would be that element in judgement which could never be a predicate. With regard to empirical judgements, only demonstratives satisfy this criterion. What is designated only by demonstratives, then, turns out on this line of reasoning to be the intuitive element in experience.

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Kant seems to endorse this formulation of the notion of intuition in his correspondence with Beck. 'The difference between a connection of representations in a concept and one in judgment, for example, "The black man" and "the man is black" ... lies, I think, in this: In the first, one thinks of concepts as determined; in the second, one thinks of the determining activity of this concept [die Handlung meines Bestimmens dieses Begriffes] ... in the first, the man is merely thought as black, and in the second, he is recognized as black. '26 The difference between the unity of a conceptual representation and that of a judgemental representation is that the latter is grounded in the recognition of the object in intuition. The application of the concept 'black' in the judgemental representation 'determines' the manifold and thus enables us to bring this or that object to consciousness. The determination of the difference between intuition and concepts according to the role that each plays in judgement is not, however, sufficient to distinguish between concepts and intuitions. Judgemental representation differs from conceptual representation in the way in which elements in each are synthesized. The phrase 'the black man' differs from the phrase 'this black man' as well as from the propositions 'This is a black man' and 'This man is black' in that the three latter clusters of words can be validly uttered only in a context in which they refer to an object which is actually present, whereas the first phrase can be used in propositions which require no such possibility of reference. Yet even in the proposition 'This is a black man' in which the denotative reference is strongest, the 'this' referred to is not a bit of unsynthesized raw data to which the conceptual element of the predicate is added. It is an individuated whole, and this individuation is achieved only through the use of concepts. 27 Objects given in intuition are given immediately, and it is essential for Kant that there be such a distinctive awareness of objects. The immediacy of an object in intuition is not, however, due to the intuitive element in knowledge alone. It is achieved only through a special use of concepts. A marginal note in Kant's correspondence is instructive in this context. To make [Bestimmen zu] a concept, by means of intuition, into a cognition of an object, is indeed the work of judgment; but the reference of intuition to an object in general is not. For the latter is merely the logical use of representations in so far as a representation is thought as being a cognition. When on the other hand, a single representation is referred only to the subject, the use is aesthetic (feeling), in which case the representation cannot become a piece of knowledge. 28 The reference of a given representation to an object is achieved in

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intUItIOn. This is seen by Kant to be a special way in which 'single' representations are used, i.e. one in which they are used cognitively by being referred to the concept of an object. The demonstrative use of 'this', when it is used in judgements about immediately present objects, requires the conceptual mediation of all that is contained in the concept of an object in general. Thus, through the use of concepts in judgements we achieve the immediate representation of an object in intuition; and, while intuition and concepts may perform different roles in judgement, it is through their synthetic unity in judgement that the experience of objects is first made possible.

III Thought and intuition as transcendentally distinct

Our inability to isolate an intuitive element in our knowledge of objects means that the first objection to the thought-intuition distinction must be admitted. The distinction between thought and intuition cannot be construed as a distinction between two separately accessible elements of our experience. This concession does not, however, establish the second criticism. The fact that it is impossible to distinguish between thought and intuition in experience does not necessarily mean that they are not really distinct faculties. Nor does it establish the claim that any deduction of the unity of thought and intuition in experience must proceed from an intuition of their original unity, as the Absolute Idealists maintain, or that reference to intuition as a necessary element in knowledge can be dispensed with altogether, as the rationalist would have it. The question of the source of the unity of thought and intuition as well as the question of their difference becomes a transcendental question about the a priori conditions of experience. In what follows I shall argue that Kant does have a response to the criticism that thought and intuition are not originally distinct faculties. This response is found in the Kantian critique of the notion of intellectual intuition. If it can be established that our intellect is neither actively intuitive, producing the objects of our knowledge, nor passively intuitive, being made aware of things-in-themselves by means of their immediate effect on our intellect, then there would be good reason to believe that there must be two sources of our knowledge. If our intellect can be neither actively nor passively intuitive, then the content of our knowledge must be derived from a source other than the intellect; and the term 'intuition' could be used to characterize the way in which the basic incompleteness of our intellect is completed in experience. This argument involves a fundamental change in perspective from that of the treatment of the relationship between thought and intuition found in the Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason. In the Critique Kant

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follows what he calls the 'synthetic' method, in which thought and intuition are treated as fundamentally different and then are shown to be necessarily unified in our knowledge of objects. It is this initial assumption which leads Kant to present the Deduction of the Categories in two steps, assuming first the synthetic unity of the object in intuition and demonstrating first the necessity and then the universality of a conceptual element in that synthesis. The change in perspective which I am proposing would lead us to begin with the unity of thought and intuition in experience and then establish the limits of the contribution which each could make to the completed synthesis. 29 Kant is not unaware of alternative methods of presenting the Deduction of the Categories. In a revealing admission in a letter to Beck, he grants that the givenness of the object of experience might initially be dispensed with without any loss. 'Perhaps at the outset you could avoid defining "sensibility" in terms of "receptivity", that is, the manner of representation in the subject in so far as he is affected; perhaps you can locate it in that which, in a cognition, concerns merely the relation of the representation to a subject. '30 This is to say, we can ignore, initially, the relation of our representations to an object. A sort of deduction of the categories could even be constructed for representation so considered. Yet even the subjective awareness of a representation implies an openness to representations which are not created by the subject. We must, consequently, admit a faculty of receptivity. 'That this subjective thing constitutes only the manner in which the subject is affected by representations, and, consequently, nothing more than the receptivity of the subject, is already implied by its being merely a determination of the subject. '31 The merely subjective representation can only become the representation of an object if the synthesis of the understanding is added to the SUbjective aspects of the relation of the subject to its representations. [O]ne might ask: How can a complex content of representations be presented? Not simply through the awareness that it is given to us; for a content requires a synthesis of the manifold. The content must thus (as content) be created by an inner activity, which is valid for a given manifold in general and which preceded a priori the manner in which the manifold is given; that is, the content can only be ... thought in a concept .... And this concept, applied to the object in general is the category. 32 Even when the representation is considered as a merely subjective phenomenon, the combination of a manifold represented requires the synthetic capacity of the understanding as well as the power of receptivity. In treating the object as no more than the 'content of a represen-

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tation', we leave open the question of whether we are concerned with the relationship of the representation to the subject or rather with the relationship of the representation to the object of which it is a representation. Both are necessary aspects of the synthesis found in any representation. Since even the subjective awareness of our representations requires a categorial synthesis, if we are to grasp a manifold in its content, it is always possible to ask whether or not the subjective synthesis of the representation, as it happens to be synthesized in our consciousness, reflects the objective order of events. Thus, the notion of a synthesis as it exits in an objective underlies the possibility of the subjective synthesis of representation. The difference between the two orders of synthesis is accounted for by the conceptual relation we have to objects in thought and the intuitive relation we have to objects in intuition; and, while reference to the notion of a dual root of our knowledge might be initially avoided, any account of our awareness of the synthesis of a manifold in our representations leads us back to it. In later correspondence with Tieftrunk, Kant outlines how a deduction of the categories might proceed from the simple grasping of a manifold in our representations. The occasion for Kant's discussion of the problem is a criticism of the structure of the Critique of Pure Reason suggested by Beck. According to Beck, the structure of the Critique serves to obscure rather than enhance the true meaning of Kant's thoughtY Beck had argued that by beginning with thought and intuition as two separate faculties Kant lends credence to talk about 'objects affecting us' and 'concepts given in the understanding', which sounds more like talk about things-in-themselves and the innate ideas of the dogmatists than like a truly Critical account of the faculties of thought and intuition. Beck proposes that we begin instead with the original source from which both the forms of intution and the concepts of the understanding are derived. The 'ursprilngliche Vorstellung' is the true 'standpoint' from which the Critical philosophy must be judged. In the actual use of the intellect the original standpoint differentiates itself into the categories on the one hand and into space and time on the other. Beck contends that this reconstruction of the Deduction has the advantage of allowing for a complete deduction of the categories, while the actual deduction given by Kant leaves open questions concerning the source of objects and the origin of concepts. A deduction, Beck contends, cannot succeed if we suppose that objects are anything other than our representations of them; and, by assuming the original unity of thought and intuition, we are able to construct an adequate deduction of the categories. Kant could not accept all of this and was resolved to have Beck publicly disassociate his views from Kant's own. It is interesting, however, to note how much of Beck's reconstruction of the Deduction Kant is willing to accept. A deduction, he concedes, could be constructed from the mere

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fact of apperceptive awareness of a manifold. It would begin by considering the categories as forms of synthesis of any manifold of representation. It would then show that intuitions are required in order to explicate the synthetic nature of this unity. Concepts alone are incapable of yielding objective knowledge. 'For I cannot use my concept of an object to reach out a priori beyond the concept of that object. '34 Since the synthetic unity which the Deduction sets out to explicate is an a priori unity, some sort of a priori access to intuition would have to be established. For us, this can be done only through the formal aspects of our sensible knowledge. Because no sensible intuitions outside of these formal conditions are possible for us, a demonstration of the applicability of the categories to these forms is the only way in which we can establish the universality and necessity of the categories. Thus, while Kant conceives of a deduction of the categories as a possible starting point for the exposition of the Critical philosophy, he also contends that because our knowledge is not made possible through the analytic function of the understanding alone, our merely conceptual knowledge does not 'reach out' beyond the mere concept of an object. We must ultimately return to sensibility as a form of receptivity. Because of this eventuality, Kant prefers the actual order of presentation found in the Critique.

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that it may be subsumed under it. This accordance must be very contingent and without definite principle as concerns the judgment .... In fact our understanding has the property of proceeding in its cognition ... from the analytical-universal (concepts) to the particular (the given empirical intuition).36 It is only in intuition that our concepts obtain a synthetic use, and the

synthesis which we are capable of achieving is one which moves from part to part in intuition in order to achieve recognition of the whole which is thought through the concept. A creative intellect which determines the parts of its representations through the mere act of thinking them is one whose thinking is at the same time intuitive. 'We can, however, think an understanding which being, not like ours, discursive, but intuitive, proceeds from the synthetical-universal (the intuition of the whole as such) to the particular, i.e. from the whole to the parts.'37 If our intellect were of the latter sort, we could dispense with the notion of there being two sources of our knowledge and proceed with a deduction in the manner which Beck and the idealists would have it.

IV Kant's criticism of intellectual intuitions Let me remark at this point that when he [Beck] proposes to start out with the categories, he is busying himself with the mere form of thinking, that is, concepts without objects, concepts that are as yet without any meaning. It is therefore more natural to begin with the given, that is, with intuitions in so far as these are possible a priori, furnishing us with synthetic a priori propositions that disclose only the appearance of objects. For the claim that objects only are intuited in accordance with the form in which the subject is affected by them is seen to be certain and necessary. 35 The synthetic method which Kant uses in the Critique, then, rests on two claims. First, it depends upon the claim that our representations have only a contingent relationship with objects themselves. Second, it is inseparably associated with the claim that our concepts alone are able to yield only analytic judgements. In the Critique of Judgement Kant underscores the relationship between these two claims. The analytic nature of our 'universals' is grounded on the 'fact' that we do not determine the object of our thought through the act of thinking it. Our understanding has then this peculiarity as concerns the judgment: that in cognition by it, the particular is not determined by the universal and cannot therefore be derived from it; but at the same time this particular in the manifold of nature must accord with the universal ...

Kant's distinction between thought and intuition rests on the contention that our intellect is not intuitive and that we must consequently rely on some other faculty for our access to objects. Why must we consider our intellect as devoid of any power of intuition? If Kant is able to provide a sufficient answer to this question, he can offer a justification for both his architectonic and the structure of his presentation of his doctrine in the Critique of Pure Reason. The clearest statement of the problem of intellectual intuition is found in a letter to Marcus Herz from the period immediately following the Dissertation in which Kant first formulates the problem of synthetic a priori judgement. In discussing the problem of accounting for the relationship that our representations are thought to bear to objects, Kant notes that on either of two models of the intellect this relationship would not be a problem. If a representation is only a way in which a subject is affected, then

it is easy to see how the representation is in accord with the object, and it is easy to see how this modification [Bestimmung] of our mind can represent something .... In the same way, if that in us which we call 'representation' were active with regard to the object, that is if the object were created by the representation (as when divine cognitions are conceived as the archetypes of all things), the conformity

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of these representations to their objects could be understood. Thus the possibility of both an intellectus archetypus (on whose intuition things in themselves would be grounded) and an intellectus ectypus (which would derive the data for its logical procedure from the sensuous intuition of things) is at least intelligible. However, our understanding is not, through its representations, the cause of the object (save in the case of moral ends), nor is the object [Gegenstand] the cause of intellectual representations in the mind (in sensu real.J38 An intellectus ectypus derives its knowledge of objects directly from passive intuitions of things-in-themselves, unmediated by the forms of intuition and the synthetic activity of the understanding. An intellectus archetypus is productive in its thinking, creating the objects of its knowledge through the act of thinking them. Both of these models account for the relationship of representations to objects through a direct relationship between things-in-themselves and our intellectual faculty. Any such relationship is described by Kant as an intellectual intuition. 39 Since our representations of objects are neither wholly passive nor creatively active, Kant contends that neither of these models is an accurate conception for the human intellect. 40 Kant's contention that these alternative models of the intellect are inadequate in accounting for human knowledge is nowhere the sustained topic of discussion. His thought on this topic can, however, be pieced together from various fragmentary treatments which it receives in the Critiques and in Kant's correspondence. The intellectus ectypus is considered by Kant to be an inadequate model for the human intellect for two reasons. First he takes it as a fact that we are in possession of a priori knowledge. If our intellect were completely ectypical, if we were cognizant only of impressions received directly from things themselves, such knowledge would not be possible. 'There are only two possible ways in which synthetic representations and their objects can establish connection, obtain necessary connection to one another, and, that is, as it were, meet one another. Either the object alone must make the representation possible or the representation alone must make the object possible. In the former case the representation is only empirical, and representation is never possible a priori. 41 Our possession of a priori knowledge, consequently, is a sufficient ground for ruling out a completely ectypical model of the human intellect. Kant's second reason for considering the ectypical model of the intellect inadequate is that he regards all awareness of objects to be dependent upon the a priori structures of thought. While our representations do not produce the objects of our knowledge in so far as their existence is concerned, our a priori representations do determine the objects of our knowledge. It is only through our a priori conception of an object that

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we are able to understand the concept of knowledge. Knowledge for us consists in the relation between our representations and objects. If our knowledge were strictly ectypical, we would never be able to represent this relationship to ourselves. Our philosophical concept of knowledge is possible because we have an a priori understanding of the formal elements of the relation between subject and object in knowledge. It might be objected at this point that Kant's argument is directed at an ectypical model of mind which has never been seriously considered by anyone. A more realistic ectypical model of mind would consider only some of our representations to be ectypical. Our representation might be thought to consist of two types, one which is concerned with the relation of ideas in thought and is strictly a priori and another which is derived from the immediate intuition of objects. Such a model of mind is not unlike Hume's, in which the mind is considered to be passively aware of the impressions of sense, while it actively relates ideas. Kant discusses the problems involved in this model of the intellect in a letter to Marcus Herz. In response to the connection raised by Solomon Maimon that our perceptions must be of things-in-themselves if we are to explain the agreement between our representation and their objects in knowledge, Kant asserts that even if we had direct perceptions of things-in-themselves, they could play no role in our knowledge. Even if we were capable of an intellectual intuition (for example, in such a way that the infinitely small elements of intuition were noumena), it would be impossible to show the necessity of such judgments in conformity with the nature of our understanding in which concepts such as 'necessity' exist. For such intuitions would still be mere perceptions; for example, the perception that in a triangle two sides taken together are longer than the third side - [this is] not the recognition that this property would have to belong to a triangle necessarily.42 Mere perception is not knowledge, even if that perception were to be of a thing-in-itself. For us it is always possible to distinguish between the way in which a thing seems in perception and the way the thing actually is. It is only when we are able to understand our perceptions as somehow possessing a necessary order or structure that they become elements in knowledge, and this order or structure is never an element in the immediacy of perception. Kant is not content, however, with contending that perception is not knowledge. He argues elsewhere that even the mere seeming of objects in perception would not be possible for us on the ectypical model of mind. The relationship of a subject to an appearance is possible only if the appearance is unified in a single consciousness and that consciousness is capable of relating that appearance to itself. An ectypical model of

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mind cannot account for this act of apperceptive awareness. Without the synthetic unity introduced into appearances through the categories and the concept of an object thought through them, we could not account for our awareness of appearances as distinct unities; and we would be unable to bring individual appearances to synthetic unity in consciousness. Referring to the categories and sensibility as the conditions of all our conscious awareness of objects, Kant affirms that both are needed to account for the distinctive nature of our representations. [A]ll sense data for a possible cognition would never, without those conditions, represent objects. They wuld not even reach that unity of consciousness that is necessary for knowledge of myself (as an object of inner sense). I would not even be able to know that I have sense data; consequently, for me, they would be absolutely nothing. They could still (1 imagine myself to be an animal) carryon their play in an orderly fashion, as representations connected according to empirical laws of association, and thus even have an influence on my feeling and desire, without my being aware of them .... This might be the case without my knowing the slightest thing thereby, not even what my condition is.43 The element of self-consciousness or apperceptive awareness is necessary for our awareness of an appearance. This aspect of our consciousness of an appearance cannot be impressed upon our minds by the object. It involves judgement which unifies the data of sense and brings them as a particular unity to a particular consciousness. If the ectypical model of the intellect fails as a model for the human intellect, so does the archetypical. First, the model of an archetypical intellect is ruled out because an archetypical intellect would be creative in the mere act of thinking its object. Our thought is distinguished by the characteristic that what we think is not necessarily the case. it is indispensably necessary for the human intellect to distinguish between the possibility and the actuality of things. The ground for this lies in the subject and the nature of our cognitive faculties. Such a distinction between the possible and the actual would not be given were there not requisite for knowledge two quite different elements, understanding for concepts and sensible intuition corresponding to them. If our understanding were intuitive, it would have no objects but those which were actual. 44 Because we can distinguish between the possibility and actuality of the objects of our representations, between objects as they are conceived in thought and objects as they exist, the relationship between our thought

and our knowledge of objects and the objects themselves must be contingent. Perhaps the most striking instance of this contingency is found in the phenomenon of false judgement. Since we are capable of thinking what is not as actual, the relationship between our knowledge and its objects cannot be one of archetype and copy. Consequently, we must presuppose some source outside of our thought in any account of our knowledge. The second consideration brought to bear against the archetypical model of the intellect is the recognition that our perspective on objects is always partial; and our intellectual grasp of objects is discursive, moving from part to part in the construction of wholes. An intuitive intellect, on the other hand, would conceive the manifold of its knowledge through the concept of the whole and would know the parts as subordinate to and necessarity structured by the idea of the whole. Since our knowledge is invariably partial and subject to revision and reinterpretation, it cannot be accounted for by means of the archetypical model.

V Conclusion

Kant's response to critics of his distinction between thought and intuition is that our intellect is not intuitive and that some faculty of intuition is required in order to account for the access which we do have to objects of experience. Our faculties and their powers lead us to draw a distinction between what we think and what is. Not only can we entertain the thought of possibilities which are not actual, but we can also entertain the thought that they are in fact actual. This in turn is, in Kant's view, possible only because our intellect has but a partial grasp of its objects and does not know them fully in all their manifold properties and relations. In the act of discursively combining the manifold, error and ignorance become real possibilities. The distinction between thought and intuition is not, then, established by Kant according to phenomenological differences which are evident in our various representations or in elements of the same representations. Nor is the distinction founded upon direct insight into the nature of our mind. It is, rather, established through reflection on the nature and origin of our representations, a sort of reflection characterized by Kant as 'transcendental'. 'The act by which I confront the comparison of representation with the cognitive faculty to which it belongs, and by means of which I distinguish it as belonging to the pure understanding or to the sensible intuition that they are to be compared with one another, I call transcendental reflection. '45 Transcendental reflection concerns itself with the conditions of an experience like our own. Reflections on the

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basic facts common to all our experience leads us to the distinction between thought and intuition. If we construe the notion of 'empirical truths' sufficiently broadly to include truths of the sort which hold for all representations in general, we can agree with commentators who construe the distinction between thought and intuition to be an empirical one. W. H. Walsh, for example, contends that 'Kant does intend us to take the proposition that ours is a discursive intelligence as a contingent empirical proposition. '46 The truth of the claim that our understanding of our intellect is contingent must be understood only from the point of view which considers our intellect as one amongst other possible intellects. For us it is a necessary truth that our representations are discursive, and this serves to distinguish all of our forms of awareness. 47

Notes 1. See, e.g., J. A. Eberhard, Philosophische Magazin 1 (1789), for a rationalist critique of the Kantian distinction; relevant passages are cited and translated by H. E. Allison, The Kant-Eberhard Controversy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), pp. 15-46. Typical criticisms from the early idealists are found in J. G. Fichte, Science of Knowledge, trans. P. Heath and J. Lachs (New York: Appleton Meredith, 1970), p. 48; F. W. J. Schelling, 'On the I as the principle of philosophy', in On the Unconditioned in Human Knowledge, ed. and trans. F. Marti, 64-73, and G. W. F. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, trans. H. S. Harris and W. Cerf (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977), pp. 65-69, 82. Two recent articles provide insightful discussions of the philosophical climate surrounding these developments. These are: D. Breazeale, 'Between Kant and Fichte: Karl Leonhard Reinhold's "Elementary Philosophy" " Review of Metaphysics 35 (1982), 785-882, and I. M. Wallner, 'A new look at J. S. Beck's "Doctrine of the Standpoint" " Kant Studien 75 (1984), 294-316. 2. In 'The world well lost', Journal of Philosophy 69 (1972), 649-65, Richard Rorty criticizes the distinction and presents an insightful analysis of why many of the recent trends in philosophical analysis and philosophy of science rest on the collapse of the distinction. See also Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 131-9, 148-55. For a contemporary discussion of the centrality of the distinction in Kant's system, see H. E. Allison, Kant's Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 63-115. 3. Letter to Beck, 3 July 1792, Kant's Philosophical Correspondence, trans. Arnulf Zweig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 193. References to Zweig's translation of Kant's correspondence are hereafter cited as 'Zweig'. See also letters to M. Herz, 26 May 1789, J. H. Tieftrunk, 5 April 1798, and the Open Letter on Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre, 7 August 1799. 4. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St Martin's Press, 1929), B 40. Kant, Inaugural Dissertation, trans. J. Handyside (Chicago: Open Court, 1929), p. 35; Cf. Akademische Ausgabe, 2:387. All references to Kant's works other than the Critique of Pure Reason (hereafter CPR) are to the Akademische Ausgabe ('AA') and are given by

Critical Assessments 261 volume and page numbers. An English translation is also given if one is readily available. See also CPR, B 35, B 377. 5. CPR, B 114. . 6. AA 9: 146 (sec. 110); Kant, Logic, trans. Hartmann and Schwarz (IndIana.. .. polis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974), pp. 146-7. 7. In the discussion which follows I shall limit myself to dealing With senses of 'immediacy' used by Kant in discussing representations which car~y with them the possibility of objective reference. Pure~y. ~ubjectiv~ representatiOns such. as pleasure and pain carry with them no pOSSibility of bemg ref~r~ed ~o an object even though they are said to be 'immediately' given. The dIstmctiOn. between subjective representations and objective intuitions ra!ses a hos~ of Im~ortant issues concerning the role of sensation in representatiOns of objects which are beyond the scope of this essay. For a detailed discussion of these, see Gerold Prauss, Erscheinung bei Kant (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1971), pp. 25-38. 8. CPR, B 146. See also CPR, B 33: 'In whatever manner and by wha~ev~r means a mode of knowledge may relate to objects, intuition is that by which It is in immediate relation to them'. 9. Lectures on Metaphysics, AA 28: Part 2, 1: 546. 10. CPR, B 377. 11. ibid., B 94. 12. ibid., B 604. . . 13. See, e.g., CPR, B 265: 'The unity of the world whole, m which .all appearances have to be connected, !s evidently a mere c~nsequence o~ the ~acltly assumed principle of the commumty of substances which are co~xlstent. Or, CPR A 110: 'There is one single experience in which all perceptions are represe~ted as in thoroughgoing and orderly connection, just as. there is .one space and one time in which all modes of appearance and all relatiOn of bemg or not being occur.' See also CPR, B 263. 14. CPR, B 600. 15. 'Singular terms and intuition in Kant', Review of Metaphysics 26 (1972), 328. 16. W. Bartuschat, Zum systematischen Ort von Kants Kritik der Ur{(:ils~raft (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1972), pp. 23-3~; argues co.nvmclr:gly that the Transcendental Deduction must remove the possibIlity of any ImmedIate access to an unsynthesized given in either pure or empiri~al intuition if .it is to succeed. The success of the Deduction can only be achIeved by blurnng the sense in which we have any independent access to concepts and intuition. 17. The fundamentally anti-foundationalist orientation of K.ant's trea.tment of intuition and many of its implications are explored by Prauss m Erschemung bel Kant, pp. 292ft. 18. CPR, B 204; see also CPR, A 99. 19. ibid., B 129-30. 20. ibid. 21. ibid., B 104-5. 22. ibid., B 130. 23. ibid., B 103, B 334. 24. Lectures on Metaphysics, AA 28, Part 2, 1: 587. 25. CPR, B 93-4. 26. Letter to J. S. Beck, 3 July 1792; Zweig, p. 193. 27. Wilfrid Sellars develops this point in Science and Metaphysics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968). See especially pp. 1-12. . 28. Marginal note on Letter from J. S. Beck, 20 January 1792; ZweIg, p. 193.

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29. Kant himself seems to suggest at times that in experience the difference between thought and intuition is derivative from the original unity while considered transcendentally their difference is original. See, e.g., CPR, B 317. Alternative methods of carrying out the Deduction are discussed by Dieter Henrich, 'The proof structure of Kant's Transcendental Deduction', Review of Metaphysics 22 (1969), 647-50, and by E. Adickes, German Kantian Bibliography (New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), pp. 172-5. 30. Letter to J. S. Beck, 20 January 1792; Zweig, p. 183. 31. Letter to J. S. Beck, 20 January 1792; Zweig, pp. 183-4. 32. Letter to J. S. Beck, 20 January 1792; Zweig, p. 183. 33. J. S. Beck, Grundriss der Kritischen Philosophie (Halle: Rengerschen Buchhandlung, 1796); Einzig moglicher Standpunkt (Riga: Johan F. Hartknoch, 1796). 34. Letter to J. H. Tieftrunk, 11 December 1797; Zweig, p. 247. 35. Letter to J. H. Tieftrunk, 13 October 1797; Zweig, p. 238. 36. Critique of Judgement, trans. J. Bernard (New York: Hafner Press, 1951), p. 255; AA 5:506-7. The Bernard translation is hereafter cited as T. 37. AA 5: 407; J, p. 255. 38. Letter to M. Herz, 21 February 1772; Zweig, pp. 71-2 39. M. S. Gram, 'Intellectual intuition: the continuity thesis', Journal of the History of Ideas 42 (1981), 287-304, provides a valuable discussion of the various senses of the term 'intellectual intuition' in Kant and his successors. 40. The reader familiar with the Critique of Judgement may be puzzled by Kant's later classification of the human intellect as ectypical. 'It is not here at all requisite to prove that such an intellectus archetypus is possible, but only that we are led to the idea of it . . . in contrast to our discursive understanding, which has need of images (intellectus ectypus), and to the contingency of its constitution.' AA 5: 408; J, pp. 256-7. This passage, however, seems to mark a change in terminology rather than a change in thinking from the earlier classificatiron. The criticisms of the model of the intellect characterized in the letter to Herz of 21 February 1772 as ectypical are again the topic of criticism in a letter to Herz dating from the time of the composition of the Critique of Judgement (letter to Herz, 26 May 1789; discussed below, pp. 257ff.) Although Kant may have broadened the notion of an ectypical intellect between 1772 and 1789 to include any intellect which has need of 'images', he retains the distinction beetween an intellect which is directly, intuitively aware of objects through images which are unmediated by the forms of sensibility and the principles of the understanding and our intellect which has no such faculty of intuition. 41. CPR, B 124-5. 42. Letter to M. Herz, 26 May 1789; Zweig, p. 153. 43. Letter to M. Herz, 26 May 1789; Zweig, pp. 153-4. 44. AA 5: 401-2; J, pp. 249-50. 45. CPR, B 317. 46. W. H. Walsh, Kant's Criticism of Metaphysics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1975), p. 253. 47. Kant characterizes the claim that our intellect is discursive as a truth of philosophical anthropology. See Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, AA: 141. In Conflict of the Faculties Kant characterizes philosophy as the study of man, AA 7: 69. For a treatment of the basically anthropological orientation of Kant's thought see R. Low, Philosophie des Lebendigen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), p. 138.

14 Things-in-Themselves Lauchlan Chipman

In this essay I spell out what I believe to be defensible in Kant's notion of a thing-in-itself. First, I shall select and juxtapose a number of Kant's scattered claims about things-in-themselves. From these I shall select three which seem to form the major part of an argument for postulating them; an argument which, although more plausible than may appear at first sight, is inconclusive. None the less the notion of a thing-in-itself figuring in and partly defined by this argument is, I shall argue, a coherent one. In the latter part of the chapter I shall attempt to show that all of Kant's primary claims about things-in-themselves, including those which form no part of any argument for postulating them, must be held, at least provisionally, to form a consistent set. The following seem to me to be the twelve most important of Kant's claims concerning things-in-themselves, and will therefore provide the hard data against which any attempt to formulate Kant's notion must be tested. They are taken both from the Critique of Pure Reason and the Prolegomena. (References to the Critique are given in the standard way. References to the Prolegomena (Prol.) are to the pages of the P. G. Lucas translation (Manchester University Press, 1953).) I have listed first the three which I believe partially constitute an argument in favour of positing things-in-themselves. The next eight constitute an enumeration, which I have left in fairly Kantian terms, of what Kant believes can be said about them, while the last forges a link between the argument and the account via Kant's requirement of objectivity in knowledge. (1) Things in themselves are not represented among our sensory data or representations, which are representations of how things appear (Prot. 43). In fact we (i.e. humans, or beings with a sufficiently human-like intuition) do not apprehend things-in-themselves in any fashion whatso-

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ever (A 43/B 60). Nor could we, e.g., were our intuition to be clarified (A 44/B 62). (2) None the less we are committed to things-in-themselves, the understanding being unavoidably forced to admit their existence in its accepting appearances (Prol. 76) on pain of affirming the absurdity that there can be appearances without there being anything which appears (B xxvii). (3) Since the understanding knows the objects of experience as appearances (Pro!. 128), it must also countenance things-in-themselves, as a presupposition of the intelligibility of this claim to knowledge (Pro!. 121). (4) Things-in-themselves ground appearances (Pro!. 75, 121), being the true correlates of sensibility (A 30/B 45). (5) Things-in-themselves have properties (Pro!. 54) which are not and cannot be taken into account when considering things as objects of a possible experience (A 36/B 52), things-in-themselves being 'wholly heterogeneous' with the appearances whose grounds they are (Prol. 121). (6) Things-in-themselves cannot be said to be subject to the categories, since in speaking of them one makes no reference to a possible sensible experience (Pro!. 68, 71-3), and any such application of the categories is illegitimate. (7) Properties having to do with space and time cannot be ascribed to things-in-themselves (A 36/B 52); hence the bodies which appear in spatial representations are not things-in-themselves and cannot be said to exist outside my thoughts as bodies in nature (Prot. 101). (8) Things-in-themselves are subject to necessary laws (Prot. 52) and are necessarily subject to laws of their own to which only they conform (B 164). But experience cannot tell us what must be so, and hence experience cannot teach us the nature of things in themselves (Pro!. 52). (9) Although things-in-themselves are correlated with appearances (A 30/B 45), they cannot be known merely through relations (A 49/B 67). (10) Things-in-themselves are essentially unknowable (A 30/B 45). They can never be known for what they are in themselves (Prot. 122) and represent an essentially insoluble problem, given the nature of our understanding (Prot. 78). (11) The same thing can be referred to as appearance and as it is in

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itself (Prol. 110). The thing-in-itself is one side of appearance (A 36/B 53), lying outside appearance (Prol. 43), presupposed by it and grounding it (Prol. 121). (12) The thing-in-itself is the object of an appearance, and is properly called a transcendental and non-empirical object, since in principle it cannot be intuited by us. The concept of a thing-in-itself is the concept of an object unknown; i.e. an object whose own nature is entirely unknown, in which all the various members of some set of sensory representations are united, given objectivity (by being fixed to an object) and thereby made into the appearance of a non-transcendental empirical object (A 104, 109). The argument for positing things-in-themselves contained in the above is simply this: (a) The objects of experience exist only as spatio-temporal appearances. (b) In so far as we judge that there are appearances, we must be prepared to judge that there are things appearing. (c) To speak of a thing appearing is, by implication, to make use of the concept of a thing-other-than-as-it-appears. Ergo, (d) Objective experience requires us to postulate things-other-than-asthey-appear, or things-in-themselves. The third premiss is not explicit in any of the passages cited, nor is the assimilation of things-in-themselves to things-other-than-as-theyappear, the latter phrase being one which has no equivalent in Kant's writings. I make these interpolations partly in the belief that they are necessary if the argument is to have any plausibility, and partly because with qualifications, they seem to correspond with beliefs which Kant held. I shall elaborate and examine each of (a) to (d) in turn with the object of reconstructing the argument sketched as sympathetically as I can. (a) The first premiss of the argument, that the objects of experience exist only as spatio-temporal appearances, is not obviously true. Interpreted carefully, it is defensible. It is analytic that objects in space and time are directly or immediately experienced by us only in so far as they manifest certain appearances - analytic, since the claim serves as nothing more than an elucidation of what 'direct' or 'immediate' means in this context. Taking as one's sole premiss the fact of direct or immediate experience of what are uncritically regarded as spatio-temporal objects, all that can be inferred about the existence of such 'objects of experience' is that they are things which appear. Incautiously, we might express this by saying that objects of experience exist only as spatio-temporal apearances, meaning no more by this than that the existence of such

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objects in appearance is the strongest existential conclusion concerning them licensed by direct or immediate experience alone. From the standpoint of direct experience, this is all they are. We could not conclude that they are nothing more than appearances, but we would be right to conclude that direct experience alone assures us of nothing beyond appearances. (b) The second premiss requires us to agree, in general, that if there is an F-ish appearance, then it is possible that something is appearing F, or presenting an F-ish appearance. This is unexceptionable. If there is a daggerish appearance, then it is possible, although by no means necessary, that something is appearing as a dagger. Perhaps it is a dagger which is so appearing, in which case the experience is veridical. Perhaps it is something, not a dagger, which appears to be a dagger, in which case the experience is illusory. Perhaps there is nothing at all presenting a daggerish appearance, in which case the experience is best classified as hallucinatory. There are only two ways in which this second premiss might be attacked. It might be objected that the distinction between an F-ish appearance and something appearing F is nothing more than a quirk of grammar: i.e. that the distinction is a pseudo-distinction resting on what is merely a grammatical transformation. Or it might be objected that although the distinction is a real one, it has still to be established that whenever there is an F-ish appearance, then it is possible that something is appearing F. All that has been offered is one favourable example. I deal with each objection in turn. If there were no substantial difference between an F-ish appearance and something appearing F, then: (I) There is a daggerish appearance would co-entail: (II) Something is appearing as a dagger. However, although (II) entails (I), it is not deducible from it. For (II), unlike (1), entails: (III) Something is either perceived or misperceived. There can be a daggerish appearance in the absence of any perception, as in dreams and some 'forms of hallucination. But if something appears as a dagger, then something is perceived or misperceived: viz. that, whatever it is, which presents a daggerish appearance. The distinction between an F-ish appearance and something appearing F is thus not merely grammatical. What guarantee is there that whenever there is an F-ish appearance,

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it is possible that something is appearing F? Kant would argue that this is secured by the Transcendental Deduction of the categories which, if sound, shows that it is necessary to employ objective concepts in synthesizing the manifold of representations into something experiential in form. Synthesis by the imagination using concepts, including pure concepts (or, more precisely, their schemata) is supposed to result in the manifold of representations being brought to objectivity, which Kant takes to be a condition in which the subject-object distinction is a thinkable one. This distinction can only be entertained in thought if the concept of what Kant calls an object in general has application, enabling us to think of things appearing F instead of merely being subject to an unordered flow of representations. Any manifold which admits of synthesis at all must admit of synthesis in such a way that the concept of something or, in Kant's terms, an object in general, figures in the product. Appearance is more than a flow of unordered representations and accordingly must satisfy the requirements for objectivity, i.e. must be amenable to the application of the concept of an object in general. An argument which depends upon acceptance of the Transcendental Deduction cannot be presumed to produce instant conviction, so it is fortunate that the same conclusion can be reached by at least one alternative route. We have seen that there is a real distinction between an Fish appearance and something appearing F. This difference is in no way an apparent difference, for there is no difference internal to the appearing between an F-ish appearance and something appearing F. Considered qua appearing they are indistinguishable. This means that given the fact of an F-ish appearance, it is only by recourse to auxiliary information that one is able to determine whether or not something is appearing F. The premiss that there is an F-ish appearance - whatever F may be can never by itself entail that it is not the case that something is appearing F, which is just another way of saying that whenever there is an F-ish appearance, it is possible that something is appearing F. Any appearance is thus amenable to the concept of an object in general, which suffices to establish premiss (b) of the argument. (c) I propose to divide my elaboration of the third premiss into two parts. I shall argue that it is always possible that there is more to what appears than what appears. Whenever it is the case that something appears F, it is possible that there is more to what appears F than its simply appearing F. Second, I shall argue that this entitles us to introduce the concept of a thing-other-than-as-it-appears, and that this concept is implicitly invoked whenever we speak of something appearing F. (i) We saw in connection with (b) that whenever there is a daggerish appearance, it is possible that something is appearing as a dagger. What I am now claiming is that whenever something does appear as a dagger, it is possible that there is more to what appears as a dagger than what

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appears. I shall show first of all that if the concept of an object in general is to play the role in 'making experiences possible' which Kant assigns to it in the Transcendental Deduction, an object must be thought of as something essentially logically inexhaustible, in a sense to be explained. As was done in considering (b), I shall then show that the same conclusion can be reached without depending on the shaky foundation of the Transcendental Deduction. For Kant, an object is 'that in the concept of which the manifold of a given intuition is united' (B 137). The concept of an object in general is more or less the concept of a collector of characteristics, its generality consisting in the fact that there are no particular representations or types of representations which have to be present before we have an instance of the concept of an object in general, and its objectivity consisting in the fact that its instances are supposed to be bearers of characteristics and not characteristics borne. A manifold has been brought to synthesis only if this concept is applicable, i.e. only if it makes sense to suppose there to be something appearing. Anything which answers to the concept of an object in general must be logically inexhaustible. That is to say, there must be no upper limit to the number of distinct representations which can be united or brought together as representations of some one object. Were there any restrictions of this sort, the concept of an object would lack the generality necessary to ensure that it admits of application in connection with any synthesized sense manifold whatsoever. Instead it would be the concept of a limited object, and hence a concept of limited applicability, its applicability being limited to just those manifolds of representations which comply with whatever restriction or restrictions it contains. There is of course no incoherence in the supposition that there is such a concept. What is incoherent is the supposition that Kant's concept of an object in general could incorporate some such restriction, as can be brought out from consideration of the following dilemma. Either the restriction in question admits of statement or it does not. If it does admit of statement, then there would seem to be no bar to the construction of a concept in all respects similar except for not containing the restriction. On the other hand, if there is no way of stating the restriction, then in what sense is there a restriction? It is without sense to speak of something as incorporating a restriction if there is no way of specifying in what the difference between incorporating the restriction and not incorporating the restriction consists. Even if this latter point is not accepted in its full generality, it is clear that any restriction on the number of representations which can be brought together as representations of some one object is a restriction which does admit of statement, in which case the first horn of the dilemma applies, and it must be possible to specify a concept in all

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respects similar except for not containing the restriction in question. The latter concept would obviously have a more general applicability than the former, and would therefore necessarily have a superior claim to the title of concept of an object in general. In other words, any concept which incorporates some restriction on the number of representations which can be brought together as representations of some one object cannot be the concept of an object in general. A corollary of this, expressed in the material mode, is that anything which answers to the concept of an object in general must be, in our sense, logically inexhausible. Thus, if the Transcendental Deduction is sound, we must make use of the concept of an object in general, which incorporates no restriction on the number of representations which can be united as representations of some one object. It is always possible that there is more to something which appears daggerish than meets the eye. What if we do not accept the Transcendental Deduction? The logical inexhaustibility of objects must still be accepted. We have already seen that an F-ish appearance can occur without something appearing F; given an F-ish appearance it is always at least logically possible that nothing is appearing F. It is a purely contingent matter that a given daggerish appearance is to be accounted for in terms of something appearing as a dagger. It is also a purely contingent matter that if something is appearing as a dagger, it is a dagger that is so appearing. Just as we cannot conclude from the fact of an F-ish appearance to there being something which appears F, so we cannot conclude from the existence of something which appears F that what appears F is F. This is the familiar point that no number of statements about what seems to be the case entails any conclusion about what is the case, the gap being comparable with that between statements about what is the case and statements about what ought to be the case. We could express this simply by saying that appearances underdetermine objects. Although it does not follow from the above, it is also true that it is a purely contingent matter that something which is a dagger presents a daggerish appearance. Take any object you like, it is logically possible that the object never has and never will present anything other than deceptive appearances - appearances which mislead those who discriminately respond to its presence into believing that an object of quite a different character is what is before them. Not only do appearances underdetermine objects, but objects underdetermine appearances as well. No number of statements about what is the case entails any conclusion about what appears to be the case. Hence, the logical inexhaustibility of objects. However many appearances a given object has presented, it is always possible that it will present some further appearance. To deny this is to maintain that there are antecedently specifiable limits to the ways in which what is real may appear: a doctrine

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which manifestly lacks the a priori justification of which it stands in need, for we have seen that in simply positing an object one makes a claim which has no logical consequences whatsoever so far as appearances are concerned. Of course we might respond to any further appearance a given object presents by reclassifying the object in question, i.e. by assigning it to a different type, but this observation does not represent any sort of qualification to the thesis of underdetermination. It is meant only to cover the point that although there is no upper limit to the number of appearances a given object which we have classified, perhaps correctly, as a dagger might present, there could none the less be a variation in their character sufficient to incline us to call it, reasonably but perhaps wrongly, something other than a dagger. The underdetermination of appearances by objects is obviously comparable with the conclusion drawn earlier on Kant's behalf, that there is no upper limit to the number of representations which can be united in the concept of an object in general. The logical inexhaustibility of objects, whether supported by Kantian or more general considerations, is thus just their capacity to appear in an essentially unlimited variety of ways. (ii) To concede that objects are logically inexhaustible is to concede that it is always at least logically possible that there is more to what appears than what appears. In any given case in which there is more, the more will necessarily be the thing in so far as it does not appear (or has not appeared). The thing in so far as it does not appear is not the same as, but includes, the thing in so far as it potentially appears. To treat them as identical is to assume that any object is exhaustible in appearance, given a sufficiently long succession - perhaps infinitely long - of appearances. Such an assumption is unwarranted. The logical inexhaustibility of objects is not something which is a consequence of the contingently limited extent of our exposure to them, but is due rather to the conceptual truth that there is nothing about objects in general which makes it necessary for them eventually to disclose themselves entirely in appearance. Associated with the concept of an object is a pair of companion concepts comprising (A) that of a thing-in-so-far-as-it-appears, and (B) that of a thing-other-than-as-it-appears. Of any object we can ask whether it has, does, or will appear, and of any object which appears, we can ask whether there is in fact any more to it than is given in appearance. To suppose an object to be more than what appears - a supposition which always makes sense - is to make use of the concept of a thing-other-than-as-it-appears. Thus whenever we speak of something appearing F, we implicitly invoke the concept of a thing-other-than-asit-appears, for it is ultimately the possibility of this latter concept's applying which distinguishes something appearing F from an F-ish appearance. (d) The conclusion drawn on Kant's behalf is that objective experience

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depends for its possibility on our postulating things-other-than-as-theyappear, or things-in-themselves. We can break this conclusion into two components, to be considered in turn. First, does the argument establish that objective experience requires us to postulate things-other-than-asthey-appear? Second, if we do postulate things-other-than-as-theyappear, is there any point in calling them things-in-themselves? The answer to the first question is no, and to the second, yes. (i) It should be clear that nothing in the foregoing requires us to postulate things-other-than-as-they-appear, if our experience is to be objective. What has been established is that if we countenance things appearing, as opposed to mere appearances, then we must acknowledge the possibility that there is more to what appears than what appears. In other words, if we hold that the concept of an object in general has application, then we must acknowledge that it is possible that the concept of a thing-other-than-as-it-appears has application. Acknowledging that a concept may have application is one thing, however, and holding that it has application is another. The 'necessary application' of the concept of a thing-other-than-as-it-appears has been established only in the former and weaker sense. There may be arguments for postulating thingsother-than-as-they-appear - for example, arguments designed to show that we can bring a theoretical unity to our experience by supposing it to be dependent upon stable and independently existing particulars - but these go far beyond the considerations actually alluded to by Kant, despite their Kantian flavour. To repair Kant's argument one would need to show that the distinction between subject and object of experience is ultimately not a thinkable one unless one acknowledges that, at least sometimes, there is more to what appears than what appears. I know of no convincing argument for that conclusion. (ii) Kant's concept of a thing-in-itself is a contrast concept, and the contrast is obviously with a thing considered in relation to other things. To consider a thing as it appears is to consider it in so far as it relates to beings with a perceptual capacity of some sort; hence a thing-in-itself can only be a thing other than as it appears. It does not follow from this, of course, that to consider a thing without reference to any conditions of appearance is ipso facto to consider it as it is in itself, for it might be considered qua term of some relation or relations other than the relation of appearing. But if we also accept those arguments of Kant's which, if sound, establish that any meaningful talk about an object must ultimately involve reference to ways in which it could appear (for we must employ the categories, and categories are limited in their employment to the experiential), then considering an object without reference to any conditions of appearance entails considering it other than in its relations to other things. The reason is that the only relations of which we can speak

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meaningfully, given the rest of Kant's theory, are those which can in some way manifest themselves in appearance. We can thus safely identify things-in-themselves with things-other-thanas-they-appear. We have seen that, so understood, Kant has not succeeded in establishing that we must postulate things-in-themselves as a necessary condition for the possibility of objective experience, but that their possibility must none the less be countenanced. Kant's concept of a thing-in-itself is often dismissed as nonsense. Understood in the above way, however, it is possible to give a reasonably clear sense to each of the twelve assertions concerning things-in-themselves listed at the beginning of this essay, and summarized below. This task is left to the reader. In what remains of the essay I shall attempt to show that apparent inconsistencies within Kant's claims are resolvable on the basis of an identification of things-in-themselves with things-otherthan -as-they-appear. Kant's twelve main assertions concerning things-in-themselves can be summarized in five theses. These are (i) things-in-themselves cannot be represented among our sensory data, (ii) they are not spatio-temporal, (iii) they are essentially unknowable, (iv) the same thing can be referred to as appearance, and as it is in itself, and (v) things-in-themselves are not subject to the categories. Taken together and without qualification, these five theses seem to constitute an inconsistent set. For example, (v) seems to be plainly inconsistent with the others. Unless the first category of quantity, viz. unity, applies to things-in-themselves, it is difficult to see how (iv) could be intelligible, for (iv) requires that things-in-themselves and things appearing can sometimes be said to be one. Unless the first category of quality, viz. reality, applies to things-in-themselves, none of (i), (ii), (iii) and (iv) could be true, for they all presuppose that there are things-in-themselves; indeed much of the argumentation we have considered has been designed to show that there must be things-inthemselves and hence, presumably, that the category of reality applies to them. The same considerations show that the distinction between existence and non-existence, which belongs to the second category of modality, must also be taken to apply. It is also arguable that the categories of substance and, less convincingly, causality must apply. It is not possible to meet this line of objection by simply denying (v),

and holding that Kant should have conceded the categories do apply to things-in-themselves, for the denial of (v) is inconsistent with (i). If the categories apply to things-in-themselves after all, then things-in-themselves must in some way manifest themselves among our sensory data, contrary to thesis (i). Furthermore, if it were held that the categories do apply to things-in-themselves, (ii) would have to be denied, for it is

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strictly speaking never the category, but only the schematized category, which has immediate application to instances, and since the schema of a category is 'a transcendental product of imagination, a product which concerns the determination of inner sense in general according to conditions of its form (time)' (A 142/B 181), whatever instantiates a category must be in time. We thus seem to be in a dilemma. If we accept thesis (v), the theses concerning things-in-themselves are prima facie mutually inconsistent. If we deny thesis (v) - a thesis which Kant obviously regarded as quite essential - we simply shift the problem of inconsistency without removing it. The reason why acceptance of thesis (v) leads to trouble is that certain of the categories seem undeniable with respect to things-in-themselves. The reason why denial of thesis (v) leads to trouble is the doctrinal inconsistencies which result from conjoining the negation of (v) with (i) and (ii). One way of avoiding this dilemma while holding all five theses would be by amending the list of categories. In particular those concepts which are more aptly regarded as purely formal must be expunged from the list. Existence (reality) and identity (unity), for example, are commonly and plausibly so regarded. To know what an existential expression means, and hence to possess the concept of existence, is to be aware of such things as that the statement that a exists is true if, and only if, some statement of the form 'Fa' is true, and that if any statement of the form 'Fa' is true, then, and only then, it is true that there exists at least one thing which is F. To know what an expression of identity means is similarly to have mastered the inference patterns in which expressions of identity essentially figure. To substantiate these accounts would necessitate a lengthy and irrelevant excursus. It is sufficient for my present purposes to establish that if the list of categories is amended, perhaps along the lines indicated above, then the dilemma could be by-passed. Rather than by-pass the dilemma, however, let us subject it to closer scrutiny. In particular, let us see whether it really is the case that acceptance of thesis (v) generates inconsistency. I shall argue that in fact it does not, and hence the first 'horn' of the dilemma can be embraced without vicious consequences. In particular, I propose to argue (a) that acceptance of thesis (iv), w~ic.h states that the same thing can be referred to as appearance and as It IS in itself, does not require us to subsume things-in-themselves under the category of unity, and, more paradoxically, (b) that countenancing thingsin-themselves does not require their subsumption under the category of reality. (a) We often consider an object qua possessor of some property, or qua term in some relation. In doing so, we conveniently overlook the fact that it also bears other properties, and enters into other relations.

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It is important to notice that whereas 'Fa' is a sentence, the expression 'a qua F is more like a name. I say more like a name because it lacks one of the features which might be thought a definitive characteristic of names, and that is the capacity to enter into statements of identity. The reason for this is not hard to find. To consider an object qua possessor of a certain property is to regard it only in so far as it possesses that property. In contrast, to make an assertion of identity concerning an object is to make an assertion with implications concerning all of its properties, and which is true only if all of those implications are true. It is in general the case that the very same object can be considered qua possessor of a certain property, and can also be considered other than qua possessor of that property, but we cannot derive from this some such nonsense as, the object in so far as it possesses the given property is identical with the object other than in so far as it possesses that property! In calling an object a thing-in-itself we are making what might conveniently be called a qua-predication: the object is being considered other than as it appears or, in other words, qua non-apparent (given our earlier identification of things-in-themselves with things-other-than-as-theyappear). We were originally tempted to think that things-in-themselves must be subject to the application of the category of unity because of thesis (iv); however, in the light of the above remarks about qua-predications, it should be clear that from the fact that some one object can be considered now as appearance, and now as it is in itself, it does not follow that the object as it is in itself is identical with the object as it appears or, indeed, that it is identical with anything. Qua-predications cannot enter into identities. (b) Similar considerations give point to the denial that the category of reality applies to things-in-themselves. If qua-predications cannot enter into identities, then we should not be surprised to find that they cannot be the subjects of existential affirmation or denial. Just because it makes sense to ask whether a exists, or whether there are any Fs, it does not follow that we can give sense to the question of whether a qua F exists. But it is only if questions of this type do make sense that it makes sense to affirm, or deny, the reality of things-in-themselves. To this it will no doubt be objected that, like Kant, I have in fact used existential expressions when speaking of things-in-themselves; in particular, that I have considered whether it is necessary to postulate (declare to exist) things-in-themselves, and asked whether Kant has succeeded in establishing that there are things-in-themselves. But there would seem to be no difficulty in principle in paraphrasing these questions and statements in such a way that the existential pressure is conveniently shifted. For example, in the light of the explication offered in this essay, the question of whether things-in-themselves are real could be understood

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as the question of whether it is necessary to suppose that there is always something more to what appears than what appears. What I have offered is not a proof that Kant's notion is consistent. I am not sure that I know what such a proof would have to be like. I have attempted to show that certain apparent inconsistencies in Kant's doctrines concerning things-in-themselves are not real inconsistencies given the interpretation recommended in this essay. Whether Kant's notion, so understood, coheres with the remainder of the Critical Philosophy, and whether it possesses a utility in metaphysical thinking which transcends its origins in that philosophy, are questions which I believe must be answered affirmatively, but which are beyond the scope of this essay.

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15 The Complementarity of Phenomena and Things-inThemselves W. H. Werkmeister

The title of this essay clearly shows that its subject matter is once more the problem of things-in-themselves in Kantian epistemology. But it also shows, I hope, that I attempt here a new approach to the problem that may well dissolve the problem as a philosophical issue.

I

Anyone who has ever consulted the immense literature on the topic of Kant's conception of 'things-in-themselves' knows how much this topic has been discussed over the years, and how much confusion characterizes the discussions. As Ralf Meerbote has put it: 'Little agreement about either the meaning or the truth of Kant's claims concerning [the notion of things-in-themselves and of their knowability] has ever been reached. '1 Detailed discussions of this confusion may be found in Gerold Prauss, Kant und das Problem der Dinge an sich,2 who deals primarily with Kantian texts and German interpreters, and in Gisela Shaw's Das Problem des Dinges an sich in der englischen Kantinterpretation. 3 Although the confusions and disagreements in interpretation as such are here not under consideration, it may be helpful, nevertheless, to mention at least some of the conflicting interpretations. Echoing G. E. Moore's thesis that 'if we know anything about the objects of experience, then we know what properties the objects of experience have, as they are in themselves',4 H. A. Prichard maintained that 'we know what things are; not merely what they appear to be but are not'.s But what are the things-in-themselves? Oscar W. Miller insists that 'the "Thing-in-itself", is, in essence, like, or similar to, the Moral Will'.6 And even George Schrader has said that

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'in holding that things in themselves are thinkable . . . Kant has the moral part of his philosophy clearly in mind'.7 Friedrich Delekat, on the other hand, argues that 'we cannot know the things as they are "in themselves", namely as prototypes (Urbilder) in the representation of God'.8 But Weldon insists that the thing in itself is 'a mere vestigial relic which could be dispensed with to the great advantage of criticism'.9 Norman Kemp Smith, the translator of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, who should have known better, states boldly: 'The thing in itself is regarded as the sole true substance and as a real cause of everything which happens in the natural world.'IO H. J. Paton, on the other hand, argues that 'strictly speaking, there are not two things, but only one thing considered in two different ways: the things as it is in itself and as it appears to US'.l1 Bella K. Milmed maintains that the concept of things-in-themselves 'alone provides Kant's effective refutation of idealism ... there the chief importance of the conception lies' .12 And 'it is this same conception of "things in themselves" that gives to the system of knowledge its existential anchorage'.13 By contrast, Alfred C. Ewing states: 'The thing-in-itself I cannot admit to be a very important concession to realism seeing that it is totally different from physical objects, which are in space but only exist as phenomena. '14 And one final point. According to George Schrader there is 'a fundamental inconsistency' in Kant's 'conception of the thing-in-itself as the cause of appearance' and the 'critical distinction between appearances and things in themselves' .15

II

But the controversies and confusions concerning Kant's conception of things-in-themselves are not now at issue;16 I am interested rather in what Kant himself had to say about such things and to what extent what he said takes on its full meaning when we see it in the perspective of modern physics. Let me begin, then, by considering some of the relevant and crucial statements in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Thus we read (B xxvii) that the Critique has shown that it is necessary to distinguish 'between things as objects of experience and those same objects as things-in-themselves' (my italics); and that 'the object is to be taken in a twofold sense, namely, as appearance and as thing-in-itself' (italics in the original). Although in one respect 'external objects' are 'mere appearances', they 'exist as well as I myself' (A 370). Although we cannot know the objects of experience outside their

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relation to our sensibility, we can nevertheless think them because 'the categories extend further than sensible intuitions' (B 309). But 'if the senses represent to us something merely as it appears, this something must also in itself be a thing, and an object ... of the understanding' (A 240). In the second edition of the Critique Kant put it this way: 'The understanding, when it entitles an object in relation [to our sensibility] a mere phenomenon, at the same time forms, apart from that relation, a representation of an object in itself, and so comes to represent itself as also being able to form concepts of such objects' (B 306; italics in the original). Putting it more specifically, Kant said: 'Appearance ... always has two sides, the one by which the object is viewed in and by itself (without regard to the mode of intuiting it [as it is in the empirical sciences] . . . ), the other by which the form of the intuition of this object is taken into account [as it is in transcendental philosophy)' (A 38/B 55; see also A 258/B 313). It seems clear from the passages quoted (and from others that could be added) that in most of the relevant statements Kant uses the terms 'thing-in-itself' and 'things-in-themselves' as abbreviations of the expression 'things viewed (or contemplated) without reference to our experiencing them in sensory intuition'. That is to say, the distinction between objects of experience as phenomena and as things-in-themselves is not an ontological distinction but one of the perspective for viewing the objects. Kant thus refers quite explicitly to 'things when they are considered in themselves through reason' (A 28/B 44), and says 'when I view all things not as phenomena but as things-in-themselves' (A 206/B 257; my italics). This implies, I submit, that 'in itself' and 'in themselves' are adverbial rather than adjectival determinants and should be read: 'thing-considered-in -i tself' and 'things-considered-in -themselves' hyphenated.

HI

This interpretation of the Kantian position is clarified and strongly supported in Kant's Opus Postumum.1 7 It is, of course, a well-known fact that, in a sense, the Opus Postumum is 'just a jumble of ideas' which Kant jotted down as they occurred to him and which, in the diplomatic text of the Opus, are given neither in a temporal nor in a logical sequence. Still, there are two basic themes which permeate the whole and give a modicum of coherence to the fragments. One of these themes is the attempted transition from the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science to physics proper .18 The other is the projection of what Kant himself called 'the highest form of transcendental philosophy' .19 From these efforts we can learn much that

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is relevant for a correct understanding of Kant's conception of things-inthemselves (noumena) as distinguished from objects of sensory experience (phenomena). For one thing, we find here indisputable proof of the correctness of the interpretation of the distinction I have given above. Let us begin with Kant's straightforward assertion that 'the distinction of the conceptions of a thing-in-itself and of one in appearance is not objective but subjective only' (II. 26). And if this is so, then why make the distinction at all? Kant's answer is again straightforward: 'If it is to be possible a priori to go on from the metaphysical foundations of natural science to physics, then external objects of the senses can be represented as appearances only, not as things-in-themselves' (II. 347). And why is this so? The answer to this question is, of course, Kant's whole conception of transcendental philosophy. But let me explain. Kant points out that analytic judgements have an a priori validity which empirical judgements lack. But, he asserts, 'there are also synthetic judgements having the same dignity' of a priori validity. In order to show that this is so, 'not only are examples demanded, but an explanatory ground of their possibility is also demanded' (II. 47). 'The theme of transcendental philosophy [therefore] includes the problem: "How are synthetic judgements possible a priori?" The solution is this: they are possible only in so far as the objects of the senses are represented merely as appearances, not as things-in-themselves' (II. 419). And this is so, Kant maintains, because 'we do not derive our cognition from objects; rather the concepts and principles to which the objects and the forms of their combination conform lie in the faculty of cognition. For this reason [Kant goes on] the objects are representations in appearance, and their difference from things-in-themselves is not a difference of the objects as things but is only a scientific (or ideal) difference for the subject, not one for the object' (II. 74; II. 436; II. 335). In one sense it is perfectly true that the objects of experience and the things in themselves are distinct; but their distinction is an 'oppositio sine correlatione reale' (II. 421). That is to say, their distinction 'does not lie in the objects' but only in 'the different ways in which the subject apprehends them' (II. 43). Whereas the phenomenal object is one of sensory intuition and therefore of appearance only, 'the thing-in-itself is merely an ens rationis, an object of thought' (II. 420; II. 27). But this must not be misunderstood; for 'the object itself = X is itself the object of the senses but not as another object, only as another mode of representation' (II. 414; II. 42; II. 46). How, then, is the relation of the thingin-itself to the objects of sensory experience ultimately to be understood? To this question Kant gives three different but complementary answers. 1. Statements of the first type of answer vary slightly in the several passages in which they occur; but their identity in ultimate intent is clear. We thus read that the thing-in-itself or noumenon is 'not a special object

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as counterpart to the phenomenon' but 'is nothing other than a rational representation [of an object] in general' (II. 46). And in this sense the thing-in-itself = X means 'only the principle that nothing empirical contains the determining ground (Bestimmungsgrund) of the possibility of experience' (II. 24). 'The thing-in-itself is [thUS] a thing of reason (ens rationis) for uniting the manifold [of sense impressions] into the unity to which the object [of experience] constitutes itself' (II. 414). That is, 'all objects of the senses are things in experience (objecta phaenomena) to which a noumenon corresponds as basis of their combination but to which there corresponds no special intuition (no noumenon aspectabile)' (II. 33). Quite clearly, then, 'the object in itself = X is not a separate thing but the mere principle of the synthetic cognition a priori which contains within itself the formal aspects of the unity of the manifold of [sensory] intuition' (II. 20). And finally: 'The thing-in-itself = X is not an object given to the senses but only the principle of the synthetic cognition a priori of the manifold of sensory intuition in general and of the law of co-ordination of that manifold' (II. 33). 2. The second answer to the question raised above is given in one statement only: 'The thing-in-itself is = X, and is the mere representation of its own activity' (II. 37). 3. The third answer is likewise given in only one statement. The thingin-itself (ens per se), we read, is 'an object of appearance that is affected by another such object' (II. 33).

IV It may be well to remind ourselves at this time that in the Critique of Pure Reason Kant had specifically said that we 'cannot know' things-inthemselves but 'must yet be in position at least to think them' (B xxvi). The passages I have quoted from the Opus Postumum stress and eluci-

date this point. But the questions now is: 'how does Kant's distinction between objects of sensory experience (phenomena) and things-in-themselves == X (noumena) fit in with the development of our most exact physical sciences? Let me begin with a reference to Johannes Kepler's breakthrough in his Dioptrics of 1611. What Kepler accomplished was the sharp separation of our sensory impressions of light and the 'objectively real rays' of light which alone are the subject matter of physical optics as a science. Consider as a concrete example the appearance of a rainbow in the sky. We are all familiar with this phenomenon. But when we now ask for an explanation of it, we leave the realm of what is given in our immediate sense-impressions - and we do so regardless of whether the explanation of what we experience is given in terms of God's symbol of

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Grace or in terms of the refraction of rays of light in raindrops. Now, surely, when we see a rainbow neither the raindrops nor the rays of light (not to mention God) are objects of our experience; but we can and do think them as 'the determining ground' of the phenomenal object rainbow. And now let us ask quite pointedly: just what is a 'ray of light'? According to Maxwell's electromagnetic theory, light is propagated as a wave-like disturbance characterized by continuity; and this theory serves well as an explanation of the directly observed phenomena of light refractions that are the rainbow as we experience it. But with reference to Maxwell's theory we must now ask: a wave-like disturbance of what? The ether theory had to be abandoned because it could not be reconciled with the phenomena irrefutably disclosed in the Michelson-Morley 'ether drift' experiment and with other facts of direct observation. 20 Moreover, the phenomena of emission and absorption of light could be accounted for only in terms of the Max Planck-Einstein theory of discrete and discontinuous 'light quanta' or 'photons'. Within limits, however, the wave theory and the quantum theory of light were both supported by facts of observation; and in 1927, Niels Bohr proposed that both be accepted as complementary interpretations,2! It must be noted, however, that both theories transcend the realm of phenomena. We can know neither the 'light-waves' nor the 'light-quanta' as we know objects of sensory intuition. We can only think them as ens rationis in the Kantian sense. But let us go a step further. I mentioned a moment ago that we think the raindrops as 'the determining ground' of the phemonenal object known as rainbow. If it should now be argued that, after all, raindrops can be phenomena of our sense-experience, we must also consider the fact that raindrops consist of molecules which, in turn, consist of atoms. But with a reference to atoms we again pass beyond the realm of objects of sensory experience or phenomena. That is to say, we can think atoms, but we cannot know them. They, too, are in the Kantian sense ens ration is , things-in-themselves. Let me elaborate. In 1896, Becquerel discovered the spontaneous disintegration of uranium. There was no explanation for the phenomenon. The uranium atoms had revealed themselves simply as things-inthemselves = X in the Kantian sense of 'mere representations of their own activity'. 22 But the disintegration also compelled the physicists to think of atoms, not as indivisible bits of matter but as internally complex and fractionable grounds of phenomena of sensory experience. And the question now was how is the internal structure of atoms to be conceived? Sensory experience of that structure was and is impossible. Rutherford was the first to suggest that the atom be thought of in parallel with the solar system: a central body of nucleus around which

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electrons move like planets in their orbits. But this model, implying a continuous emission of light and therefore a shift of the spectral lines towards infra-red, was irreconcilable with the facts of observation. It was at this point in the development of modern physics that Niels Bohr, taking into consideration Max Planck's observation that energy is emitted and absorbed in little packages or 'quanta' (e = hv), introduced the idea of 'privileged orbits' and 'quantum jumps' into the model of an atom. 23 Sommerfeld then introduced ellipical orbits also and applied Einstein's law of relativity to the electron orbits. From the point of view of Newtonian mechanics and Maxwellian electrodynamics the BohrSommerfeld conception of the atom was quite absurd; but the almost unbelievable success of their conception in solving some of the most baffling problems in the realm of phenomena brought about a radical change in the point of view in physics that fully supports Kant's distinction of the objects of experience and the thing-in-itself = X as ens rationis - as 'a thing of reason for uniting the manifold of sense-impressions into the unity to which the object of experience constitutes itself'. Further discussion of the development of modern physics is unnecessary. Enough has been said, I am sure, to illustrate and find confirmation for Kant's general view of the complementarity of phenomena and thingsin-themselves as given in his first answer to the question: what is a thing-in-itself? And in passing - in my reference to the radioactive disintegration of uranium - I have also given at least an example from modern physics that is in harmony with Kant's second answer to the question: what is a thing-in-itself? But I would like to discuss - if extremely briefly - at least one example that is illustrative of Kant's third answer. Metaphysico-theological tradition had it that all 'heavenly bodies' must be perfect; and that, since the circle was conceived to be the perfect geometrical figure, all planets had to move in circular orbits. On this assumption, however, actual observations of planetary motions could not be accounted for. Even when epicycles were superimposed upon basic circular orbits, the observed motions of the planets still appeared to be erratic. It was again Johannes Kepler who achieved the breakthrough that made the modern point of view possible. Convinced that the real world is one of mathematically statable harmonies which man can discover despite all apparent confusions, he stubbornly pursued this course of discovery until he found the solution of all irregularities in planetary motions in the idea that planets move not in circular but in elliptical orbits - with the sun placed in their respective foci and the radius vector for each planet sweeping equal areas in equal times. The planetary motions could now be described completely, simply and perfectly. But also there was as yet no explanation of the facts other than to say that God willed it so. It was Newton who provided a scientific explanation by introducing

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gravitation as the activating force. As he himself said: 'From these [gravitational] forces, by other propositions which are also mathematical, I deduced the motions of the planets, the comets, the moon, and the sea. '24 But, surely, gravitation as such is not a sensory object. It is rather a principle of law. Still, as affecting one another gravitationally, and considered in this perspective only - that is, in the 'transcendent' perspective of science rather than in the 'transcendental' perspective of philosophy involving the object's relation to an experiencing subject - the sun, the stars and all the other objects in the sky acting upon one another gravitationally may be said to be things-in-themselves in the sense of the third answer to the question: what are things in themselves? But the example also shows that Kant's third answer is in perfect harmony with his first. As we look back upon the explication of Kant's conception of the complementarity of phenomena and things-in-themselves, it may not be amiss to quote Einstein, who, having disavowed the Ernst Mach inspired positivism of Phillip Frank and the Wiener Kreis, wrote in reply to criticism: The theoretical attitude here advocated is distinct from that of Kant only by the fact that we do not conceive of the 'categories' as unalterable (conditioned by the nature of the understanding) but as (in the logical sense) free conventions. They appear to be a priori only insofar as thinking without the positing of categories and of concepts in general would be as impossible as is breathing in a vacuum. 25 One final thought: as phenomenal objects viewed in the objective perspective of our natural sciences, things-in-themselves must not be confused with noumena. Kant's statements on this point are quite clear. Thus he says: 'If we assume things that are merely objects of the understanding and which, as such, can be given on to to a non-sensible intuition (i.e. can be given only coram intuitu intellectualis) - such things would be called noumena (intelligibilia), (A 249). And again: If we have in mind only objects of a non-sensible intuition, in respect of which our categories are admittedly not valid . . . then noumena

in this purely negative sense must indeed be admitted. (A 286/B 342)

However, thought is limited by sensible intuition and, 'unaided by sensibility', is 'without an object'. We therefore cannot call the noumenon an object of the understanding because the term 'noumenon' is 'the problematic concept of an object for a quite different intuition and a quite different understanding from ours' (A 287/B 344).

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Notes 1. Ralf Meerbote, 'The unknowability of things in themselves', in Lewis White Beck (ed.), Kant's Theory of Knowledge (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1974), p. 166. 2. 2nd edn (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1977). 3. Kant-Studien Erganzungsheft 97 (1969). 4. G. E. Moore, 'Kant's Idealism', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society IV (1903/4), 136. 5. H. A. Prichard, Kant's Theory of Knowledge (Oxford: University Press, 1909), p. 93; p. 76. 6. Oscar W. Miller, The Kantian Thing-in-Itself or the Creative Mind (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), p. xix. 7. George Schrader, 'The thing in itself in Kantian philosophy', in Robert Paul Wolff (ed.), Kant, A Collection of Critical Essays (Notre Dame & London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967), p. 180. 8. Friedrich Delekat, Immanuel Kant (Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1969), p. 113. 9. T. D. Weldon, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, 2nd edn (Oxford: University Press, 1958), p. 194. 10. Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, 2nd edn (London & New York: Macmillan, 1963), p. 217. 11. H. J. Paton, Kant's Metaphysics of Experience (London & New York: Macmillan, 1936), vol. I, p. 61. 12. Bella K. Milmed, Kant and Current Philosophical Issues (New York: New York University Press, 1961), p. 227. 13. ibid., p. 230. 14. Alfred C. Ewing, A Short Commentary on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938; Phoenix edition 1967), p. 194. 15. Schrader, op. cit., p. 174. 16. I have dealt with them in my book, Kant: The Architectonic and Development of his Philosophy (LaSalle & London: Open Court Publishing Company, 1980), pp. 77-83. 17. The two volumes of the Opus Postumum are volumes XXI and XXII of the Akademie-Ausgabe of Kant's Gesammelte Schriften. Since all but two of the relevant passages are found in volume II, I shall here omit any reference to volume I and refer to volume II only; and in order to save space I shall give the page references as insertions in my text rather than in notes. 18. I have dealt with this theme in Kant's philosophy and modern physics, in W. H. Werkmeister (ed.), Reflections on Kant's Philosophy (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1975), pp. 109-33; and in The Critique of Pure Reason and physics, in Kant-Studien 68 (1977), 33--45. 19. I have dealt with this rather extensively in chap. IX of Kant, op. cit. 20. W. H. Werkmeister, A Philosophy of Science (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1940; paperback edition, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), pp. 200f. 21. Niels Bohr, 'The quantum postulate and the recent development of atomic theory', reprinted in Bohr's Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature (New York & London: Macmillan, 1934). 22. See Kant's second answer (given above) to the question: what is a thingin-itself?

Critical Assessments 285 23. I have dealt with all relevant facts and further developments in atomic physics in chap. VIII of my Philosophy of Science, op. cit.,. especia.lly pp. 235-77. 24. Florian Cajori, Newton's Principia: Motte's TranslatIOn Revlsed (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1946), p. xviii. 25. Paul Arthur Schilpp (ed.), Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, (Evanston, Ill.: The Library of Living Philosophers, Inc., 1949), p. 667.

Critical Assessments

16 The Schematism and Empirical Concepts Robert B. Pippin

287

I Rules and rules for rules

Kant claims, at the beginning of the first edition Deduction, that genuine knowledge (Erkenntnis) can be defined as 'ein Ganzes verglichener und verkntipfterVorstellungen' (A 97); to claim to know is to assert a 'whole' of some kind. But, besides defining knowledge as objective connection, Kant also begins (again with Hume) by claiming that such unity or connection is never perceived, 'seen', or immediately apprehended in any way. Allein die Verbindung (coniunctio), eines Mannigfaltigen tiberhaupt, kann neimals durch Sinne in uns kommen, und kann also auch nicht in der reinen Form der sinnlichen Anschauung zugleich mit enthalten sein; denn sie ist ein Actus der Spontaneitat. (B 129-30; my italics)

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason suffers perhaps more than any other work from numerous, varied, and not always consistent characterizations of its 'central purpose', or 'fundamental problem'. For our limited purposes in the following, we shall tentatively indulge one such perspective: namely, viewing as a major 'critical' concern the problem of universals, of how a concept (empirical or pure) can claim to be a 'one-over-many', and thus serve as 'knowledge'. 1 Narrowing our focus even further, we shall be interested in the following in isolating one area of this problem, an area particularly obscure both in Kant and in the literature: the status of empirical concepts as formal universals within Kant's radical, 'transcendental' interpretation of 'formality'. Our question is that of empirical concept universality; the relation of such concepts, as universals, to the manifold of individuals. In short, we seek one aspect of the Kantian answer to the ancient problem of the 'one and the many'.2 Since Kant is quite explicit about where we should look in the Critique for an explanation of how universals relate or 'apply' to a sensible manifold, we shall follow his lead and examine the most perplexing of sections, the Schematism. Our purpose in doing so is, first, simply to shed some light on a very obscure claim in the Critique, the thesis that there is a distinction possible between empirical concepts and their schemata, their 'application rules'; and, second, to suggest by means of this analysis some difficulties with Kant's exclusively 'critical' interpretation of form and formal universality. But before explicitly raising the question, 'Must empirical concepts be schematized, and if so, how?', we need to determine the general context of a schematism as it is first raised by Kant (with respect to pure concepts and transcendental schemata), and to understand this question within the Kantian theory of concepts as 'rules'.

To know some thing or some series of events is to know it as one; but to know it as one is to have to think it together 'spontaneously' as one; unity is never apprehended, but always effected. But, always involved in such claims to know are concepts, and their nature must reflect this definition of combination as always an 'Actus der Spontaneitat'. Kant's explanation of concepts involves two central notions, Funktion or Regel, and Synthesis. In the section 'Von dem logischen Verstandesgebrauche tiberhaupt' (A 67/B 92), he makes a familiar critical distinction in new terms; 'Alle Anschauungen, als sinnlich, beruhen auf Affektionen, die Begriffe also auf Funktionen.' There then follows the decidedly Kantian interpretation of these 'functions'. Ich verstehe aber unter Funktion die Einheit der Handlung, verschiedene Vorstellungen unter einer gemeinschaftlichen zu ordnen. Begriffe grtinden sich also auf der Spontaneitat des Denkens, wie sinnliche Anschauungen auf der Rezeptivitat der Eindrticke. (A 67/B 93) I note especially that a function is understood as 'die Einheit der Handlung'. Quite clearly, Kant's definition of conceptual universality already represents a radical departure from 'class-character' or 'paradigmatic' interpretations prominent throughout numerous pre-Kantian versions of 'Platonism' or medievalist 'concept realism'. etc. 3 To know is to claim correctly objective connection; that unity is effected by concepts, which concepts 'rule' the unity of the subject's activity in thinking together the disparate, given 'parts' of the manifold. Expressed more broadly, all unity in knowledge is fundamentally 'synthetic', and concepts are 'rules' which govern synthetic activity.

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Kant makes clear in a number of places that this definition of concepts as rules or functions is an interpretation of empirical as well as pure concepts. At A 106, the concept of 'body' is chosen as an example of how an empirical concept serves as a rule to condition the synthetic unity of an object. And, at a footnote to B 134, he quite explicitly claims a primarily 'synthetic' unity for the empirical concept-rule, 'red'. (By the 'unity of a concept', I only mean the unity of the components of a concept, its 'markers' (Merkmale) that together function as a rule for cognizing something as a this, as distinct from a that. 4 ) Such concepts, when correctly understood as rules, do not represent or refer to 'Bodyness' or 'Redness', or even the 'general types' of body and red, but 'die notwendige Reproduktion des Mannigfaltigen derselben, mithin die synthetische Einheit in ihrem BewuBtsein' (A 106). Or, as he had stated a few pages earlier, a concept-rule simply is the 'BewuBtsein dieser Einheit des Synthesis'S (A 103). This all, of course, means that knowing 'by means of concepts' cannot simply be a matter of class inclusion judgements. Kant does speak of 'recognition' in a concept, but only logically, 'after' a synthesis of apprehension and reproduction. We know from'the above that Kant defined a concept as the 'consciousness of the unity of synthesis', and this must mean that he defines 'recognition', not as a reflection of an original by an image, or as an inclusion of an instance in a universal (neither of which would make sense for Kant since concepts are themselves only rules for the production of unity), but rather as the consciousness of the unity effected by the application of a rule. Kant's replacement of a 'Concept-Instance' model by one which calls for a concept as a rule determining the cognitive unity of an individual can be seen especially well in the statement of the famous Restriktionslehre that the categories have only an empirical use (B 165ff.). Although he seems there to describe concepts having instances corresponding to them, he quickly demonstrates that he means by this that concepts are only knowledge in so far as they 'auf empirische Anschauungen angewandt werden konnen'.6 Knowledge by means of universals occurs when a universal rule is applied to the material of intuition, and determines it in this or that way, not when individuals are recognized as instances of a general type. A manifold, just as a manifold, is always 'uninterpreted', and becomes interpreted only when 'thought', only when the rule is applied. This sketch of Kant's transcendental interpretation of subjective formality obviously requires a good deal more explanation. For Kant, the major difficulty occurs in 'proving' the objectivity of the categories as pure rules for the synthetic unity of any manifold. But within Kant's explanations and proofs, there are also broad questions raised as to the status of these concepts themselves, as to their 'nature' as the foundation of all knowledge. That is, we may reasonably ask a kind of Platonic " ,'~"

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'Ideas question' of Kant (how are many also one?) and see what follows. To do so, we must return to the Schematismuskapitel. The first paragraph of this account (A 137/B 176) seems to return to a non-functionalist view of concept unity. The first sentence speaks of the 'subsumption' of an object under a concept; of an object being 'contained' under a concept, and of thus the necessity for a Gleichartigkeit between concept and object. We seem now to be describing concepts as 1TCXQCXOEL"YI-LCXTa or E'(0'Yl, for which there are ELKOVCX; all of which raises for Kant the problem of das Dritte as surely as the Tpi.70S avOpu>1TOS is raised for Plato. According to our characterization above, Kant should be concerned, not with how an object is subsumed under a concept, but with how a concept as a rule can determine some Erkenntnismaterie. The question should be: by virtue of what can the immediate be mediated; what is das Dritte between Bestimmende and Bestimmte7 ? In fact, we soon see that there is no return to a more traditional view of concepts, that Kant means 'subsumption' in the 'determining' sense just mentioned. (Or, as he had made clear at A 132/B 171, the question is how rules for recognition are applied, not how already recognized instances are subsumed). It soon becomes evident that Kant's 'OneMany' problem is not 'by virtue of what are many subsumed under one', but how one rule can determine a manifold to produce the unity that makes speaking of 'many under one' possible (recalling here that the analytic unity of any concept presupposes a synthetic unity.8 Again a concept is a universal as a rule for synthesis, not as a genus or universal type. Hence, the question of subsumption, the question of the schematism, must be how a sensible manifold can be conceptually determined; not how instances can be recognized as having some common predicate. Indeed, Kant's argument is that the latter kind of analysis presupposes the former. It is thus that we first arrive at the most obvious transcendental issue of the Schematism: how, by virtue of what, pure concepts can do what the Deduction maintained that they do; how such concepts determine the manifold, or 'objects in general' a priori. 9 That is, with one eye always on Hume, if we have shown in the Deduction that there are categories which are not reducible to the non-conceptual, are 'pure', but yet also insist that they are objective since they condition the possibility of what is most heterogeneous from them, the 'empirical', we must now show in what way pure concepts can so determine the manifold. In short, Hume must be turned on his head: the categories must each be explained, not by looking for their foundations in impressions, but, after the legitimacy of doing so has been established in the Deduction, by showing how each of the categories can determine the intelligibility of any 'impression'. As its position in the text indicates, the Schematism is the transition point from the Analytic of Concept~; to"th:~"~na:t)t;ti<;,gf "",,:
'.

'.:;"}::,~~Jl~;"~'1~1'Sj,tf.t;., ",:~';'~;:"

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Principles; once the Deduction has warranted the principle of a priori objectivity, the principle of judgement by means of which these objective concepts can be correctly employed must be outlined. We can see this problem of judgemental application more clearly in the introductory remarks, 'Von der transzendentalen Urteilskraft tiberhaupt' (A 132/B 171). This passage indicates that the problem to which the Schematism chapter is addressed might be called that of the 'conditions for the possibility of judgement', and that by 'the possibility of judgemental subsumption under a concept', Kant means 'whether or not a rule is applicable'. But the more one reflects on Kant's formulation of this issue, the more odd that seemingly straightforward account becomes. That is, as Kant himself stresses, if the issue is 'under what conditions' (where, as will be clearer later, 'under what conditions' = 'schemata') rules are applicable, i.e. if we attempt to specify these conditions, our only possible results seem to be further rules, which again need judgement's guidance to be correctly employed. As Kant himself insists, it seems here to be the nature of rules always to require guidance from judgement, not to be capable of giving guidance to judgement. (Indeed, the more Kant describes judgement in this manner, the closer it approximates Plato's apparently very un-Kantian V01)O"L'>.) How, then, we might ask, is a demand for schemata, which are nothing but limiting rules for application, possible? To understand how this could be, we need to determine the unique sense in which the schematism question is appropriate for pure concepts. lO That is, by emphasizing that the central task of the understanding in knowledge is the subject's connection according to rules, synthesis, Kant always immediately raises the problem of objectivity, of how we are justified in thinking together cognitive connections. If the Copernican Revolution is to work, and if we are to legislate to nature in a way that allows for knowledge (contra Hume's psychological legislation), then we must always be prepared to show that the synthetic connections effected by the subject are objective. Thus, transcendental logic is committed to demonstrating the possibility of application, since the application of the categories in determining various unities in experience justifies their objectivity. We are, then, asking in our schematism question, not for rules which will tell us whether this or that is a causal connection (a decision which always requires that mysterious faculty or judgement), but for the rules which specify the conditions under which this could ever be a question (or, how, the terms in which, this is a legitimate question to pose empirically). We know already, in a general way from the Deduction, that the broad schematism for pure concepts is the 'possibility of experience'; this chapter, for the sake of possible transcendental judgements, makes clearer how that principle 'works'. As just indicated, judgement is still required in any empirical investigation, but now we

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must show how that empirical judgement could be possible; in what way the categories set the limits within which an empirical judgement can come into play. Since the task for a transcendental schematism is to explain how there can be a universal determination of objects in general, such a schema must be a universal feature of all appearances, and must also be 'purely' universal, not some mere empirical predicate. His solution, which cannot be fully examined here, is the pure form of all intuition - time. This schema will explain the terms in which the categories can apply to appearances because it is both a necessary component of all sensible appearances, and yet is a purely formal feature of those appearances, and is thus conceivable as the a priori method of categorial application. The categories are objective only as 'affecting' inner sense, and since the form of inner sense is time, they are only 'modes of time consciousness'. We find here that what it means for objectivity to be a mediation of 'apperception' and 'inner sense' is for subjective temporal appearances to be thought objectively by means of the understanding's synthetic activity. It is because the manifold, in order to be a manifold for us at all, must immediately conform to the subject's form of intuition that it can be thought by the subject. As Kant emphasizes throughout, it is because there is no immediacy, because immediacy is always already mediated, that knowledge is possible. In this case (A 138/B 177-A 1401 B 179), it is because the manifold is not a pure 'other', because it immediately conforms to a subjective condition, that there can be a transcendental judgement based on purely subjective conditions,u Kant makes clearer this 'schematic' explanation of a concept's objectivity by contrasting it with an 'image' as such an explanation. The difference at first seems straightforward enough. A schema is a 'Produkt der Einbildungskraft', but is not, for that reason, a 'Bild'. The most significant reason it isn't is that a schema has no 'einzelne Anaschauung' as its 'Absicht', but does aim at 'die Einheit in der Bestimmung der Sinnlichkeit'. A schema is a Methode, not, as an image must be, a particular representation. This is all in keeping with Kant's interpretation of 'formality'. If concepts are rules, or functions, then any discussion of their sense, significance or application can occur only in terms of the method of using them. (Thus, to say that the categories have only a 'sensible meaning' is not to say that they have only sensible instances; they don't have instances at all, but can only be applied to a sensible manifold.) It makes no sense to speak of some causal connection as an 'image' of a causal rule; it is rather known as a result of the application of the causal rule. Thus, the question of objectivity is a question of our judgemental use of the rule. That is, for pure concepts, the imagination specifies schemata in order to explain their objectivity, not images. In sum, we have three terms related to one another: (a) concept - a rule

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Immanuel Kant

for synthetic unity; (b) schema - a method projected by the imagination for specifying the conditions under which the rule can be used; and (c) image - an individual content, resulting from the use of the rule, as specified by the schemata. Thus, we can describe the fully unique sense in which a schematism question is appropriate to pure concepts. Such schemata do not provide rules which help us in deciding which series in a manifold is causally connected and which not. That question, for Kant, is always an empirical one, since there is never any possibility for determining an individual content as simply 'causal', or a 'substance', or a 'unity', etc. (Pure concepts have no images.) We shall see in a moment how Kant might approach that empirical question. The task for a transcendental schematism is rather that of determining the relation between pure concepts and 'objects in general', or experience as a whole. In other words, the determination of the manifold by the categories is a priori. All experience always already stands in some causal relation with some other. The category and its schema only prove that, and how, such could be the case. If we then want to distinguish in concreto objective from subjective succession, we must determine whether some empirical rule applies. The category of causality, as proven objective in the Deduction, thus warrants the empirical search for causal connection, and the schema for that category demonstrates how that category could warrant that enquiry. The concept is objective (the Deduction) as an a priori mode of time consciousness (the Schematism). Thus, these rules for rules specify the way in which objects in general can be thought of as determined by pure concepts. But, if this is so, how are they so determined in particular? If transcendental schemata demonstrate how the determination demanded by the Deduction can be effected, how is it effected in empirical instances? If I know that there must be causal connection (and not mere habitual associations), and I know the terms of that connection (objective succession), how do I determine when an empirical rule of causation does apply? In short, what is the relation between an empirical concept and its schema?

II Empirical concepts and application rules Kant is not very helpful in answering this question, as the various, conflicting interpretations of that relation evidence. Indeed, he seems to vacillate between contradictory extremes, all the way from claiming that concept and object in the empirical sciences are so homogeneous as to require no discussion of applicability (A 138/B 177), to claiming that concrete instances are so heterogeneous with their concepts as always to

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require schemata in order for there to be correct application (A 1411B 180). His first statement on this schema-concept relation is problematic for a number of reasons. In allen anderen Wissenschaften, wo die Begriffe, durch die der Gegenstand allgemein gedacht wird, von denen, die diesen in concreto vorstellen, wie er gegeben wird, night so unterschieden und heterogen sind, ist es unn6tig, wegen der Anwendung des ersteren auf den letzten Er6rterung zu geben. (A 138/B 177; my italics) In other words, categories are a priori; we begin by insisting that they have originally nothing to do with the empirical, and so, to justify a claim of applicability to the manifold, a schematism is called for. Empirical concepts, on the other hand, are derived, a posteriori. Consequently, their 'application' to that from which they arose would seem much less problematic. There simply doesn't seem to be a problem with regard to what empirical concepts apply to; any answer other than the empirical manifold just wouldn't make sense. But it is hard to see how Kant's account can end here, and even harder to understand what this apparent exclusion of a 'third' for empirical concept and instance does, in fact, mean. Consider the 'von denen' italicized in the above quotation. A loose translation of the first few phrases might read, 'In all other sciences, where the concepts, through which the object is thought universally, are not so different and heterogeneous from those which represent this (object) in concreto, as it is given, etc.' Obviously, the difficulty is what Kant might be referring to by the pronoun denen. Does he mean, as he certainly seems to, concepts which represent the individual in concreto? If so, then there is certainly no problem of heterogeneity between concept and instance (since they are both concepts), but it is extremely difficult to imagine what one of these 'individual concepts' might look like. It seems a contradiction in terms to say that a concept can represent in concreto, although it certainly can be used in concreto. I believe that what Kant must have in mind here are what he calls 'images', but for now we can postpone a discussion of what the 'two terms' are in this claim for homogeneity. But further, that Gleichartigkeit itself is not as obvious as Kant seems to think it is. For one thing, the contrast between a concept taken allgemein and one used in concreto suggests a heterogeneity strong enough to raise classical Aristotelian problems of 'schemata'; how knowledge always of universals can be adequate to beings always in particular (i.e. the relation between a X(d}6~ov and the ,.60E n). Also, from the

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fact that empirical concepts have their ongm in experience, it does not then necessarily follow that these universals have an unproblematic application to the manifold. For this to be strictly true, empirically conditioned universals would have to be nothing but strung-along memories of numerous similar individuals. This position, of course, is not only not Kant's (empirical concepts as rules are necessary for there to be individuals), but it doesn't make much sense unless we can describe that similar in many instances by virtue of which the concept can be applied. In short, while the origin of these universals may be empirical, their status as universals, and thus the question of their judgemental application, is still problematic. So, our list of problems grows. There is now some obscurity surrounding: (a) what Kant might mean by an individual content, or even an 'individual concept' (i.e. what the 'von denen' refers to); (b) why he seems to think that there is no serious heterogeneity between allgemein and in concreto; and (c) since empirical concepts have no direct intuition corresponding to them, as is the case with pure concepts, why they too do not need a schematism, at least in the 'how is judgement possible?' sense. Kant begins to answer these questions in the seventh paragraph of the schematism chapter, where he claims, 'In der Tat, liegen unsern reinen sinnlichen Begriffen nicht Bilder der Gegenstande, sondern Schemate zum Grunde' (A 140-1/B 180). He will quickly, and given what he had said earlier, paradoxically, extend this claim to empirical concepts as well (A 141/B 180), claiming that there is even less ground in this latter case for the sense of a concept ever being given by an 'image' of it. Images are always individual; they are in fact what it means to speak of concepts in concreto, and hence they can never explain the concept itself and its method of application, all pointing to the need for empirical schemata. Now, with this explanation, the above three problems seem less confusing, as Kant apparently moves in the opposite direction from his earlier claim. Now, 'images' only result from the application of the conceptrule, and thus can only be interpreted as concepts used in concreto, rather than as individual concepts; and the lack of a homogeneity between the universality of a concept and its individual use does demand some doctrine of a schematism. This account also coincides with my general view of the Schematism chapter. I claimed that it was an attempt to explain a concept by what I called standing Hume on his head; not 'reducing' it to the non-conceptual, but showing how it is meaningful in the way it conditions the intelligibility of the non-conceptual order. Such a procedure is obvious here even with respect to empirical concepts. Kant refuses to reduce either mathematical or empirical concepts to their 'images' (roughly, to 'sense-impressions' of them), their particular manifestations. Hume is wrong here as well as on the transcendental level;

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concepts are meaningful not by virtue of their images, but by their schemata, their rules of application. But this explanation is leading us into some rather 'grey' areas, to say the least. For, we now reach the central question of this essay: can Kant describe this now required 'schematization' of empirical concepts? We need to quote at length here from one of his frustratingly rare examples of an empirical concept and its schema. Der Begriff vom Hunde bedeutet eine Regel, nach welcher meine Einbildungskraft die Gestalt eines vierftiBigen Tieres allgemein verzeichnen kann, ohne auf irgend eine einzige besondere Gestalt, die mir die Erfahrung darbietet, oder auch ein jedes mogliche Bild, was ich in concreto darstellen kann, eingeschrankt zu sein. (A 1411B 180) Kant goes on to call this delineation of a Gestalt the concept's 'schema'. This rather opaque claim immediately suggests two problems, though: first, how Kant thinks he has adequately distinguished an empirical concept from its schema, and second, what the status is of this strange new term as a definition of a schema, a Gestalt. Apparently, we have a concept, 'dog'; then, as a result of the work of the imagination, some delineation 'in general'12 of the figure of a fourfooted animal; and, finally, an image of an individual dog, always in concreto. The first difficulty raised is whether there is any real difference between the first two terms, whether Kant can distinguish concept and schema, and what he conceives is the significance of this question. In other words, the rule which specifies the synthetic unity that makes up 'dog', being a four-footed animal, having certain other properties is the concept, 'dog'. The imagination cannot provide a Gestalt for these qualities in a synthetic whole, unless already determined to do so, in a specific way, by the concept-rule. The delineation of a four-footed animal, a delineation that somehow occurs 'universally', is the concept 'dog', not a schematic representation of it. We recall from the first edition Deduction's definition that a concept is the 'consciousness of a synthesis'; obviously, in order for the concept to have any determinateness sufficient to distinguish it from any other concept, it must already possess a unified synthetic connectedness before any question of schematic employment is raised. But, of course, commentators as diverse in their orientations as Heidemann and Wolff have noticed that Kant has an extremely difficult time distinguishing an empirical concept from its schema. What they fail to discuss, however, is how necessary Kant thinks the distinction is, and what happens if there is no distinction. As Kant himself insists,

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das Schema sinnlicher Begriffe . . . ein Produkt und gleichsam ein Monogram der reinen Einbildungskraft a priori, wodurch und wonach die Bilder altererst moglich werden, die aber mit dem Begriffe nur immer vermittelst des Schema, welches sie bezeichnen, verknupft werden mussen. (A 142/B181; my italics) Images only become possible by means of schemata, and it is only by means of schemata that images, 'individual contents', can be connected with empirical concepts. Further, from what I have said above about the nature of concepts, we can see that collapsing this distinction between rules and the specification of their application leads to either of two unacceptable results. On the one hand, we know that a concept is a rule for synthetic connection. Yet, an individual dog, say, is not an image of a rule, not a representation of a synthesis, but a representation that results from a synthesis, and is thus of a different order with respect to its determinate unity. If the concept is not different from its schema, then it is impossible to explain the relation between a rule, and the conditions under which the rule can be correctly employed. Kant is quite correct in claiming that we cannot explain the relation between a rule and an image, between a concept and its 'application instances', without a schema. Otherwise we would have an unsolvable XWQLO"J-lO<; problem. (If there is just 'image' and 'rule', and if the image is known as such only by applying the rule, then we have lost any standard for deciding whether the rule is applicable. 13) On the other hand, with no schematic application of the concept, the image is collapsed too quickly into the concept, and Bild-unity is interpreted wholly as Begriff-unity. Individual contents are always then seen as concepts. Every instance becomes its own universal, and the question of correct application again vanishes. Above, we saw that if there was no way of thinking together Begriff and Bild, if there was no mediating representation between them, the universality of a concept's one-overmany quality, how a concept could explain the unity of many images, was threatened. Now, as we might expect, the problem is the reverse and equally true. With no schematic representation between them, Bild and Begriff collapse into one another, so that the diversity of a concept's one-over-many quality, how there can genuinely be 'many' determined by 'one' concept, instead of just a plurality of individual concepts, is threatened. It is no idle technical difficulty for Kant to distinguish concept and schema on the level of empirical concepts. No image is ever adequate to its concept, and yet there must be some way of explaining the relation between image and concept that is 'somehow' roughly adequate (in order to explain application). Without such a way of mediating the functional

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rules of 'spontaneity', with unities informed 'receptively' by sensibility, Kant's whole case for a Mittelweg between dogmatic rationalism and empirical scepticism is threatened. Now, we have argued that, initial appearances to the contrary, Kant must be able to distinguish empirical concepts from their schemata, as he himself insists in detail later in the chapter. And, we have argued that, given the possibility of determinate images for empirical concepts, and the impossibility for pure concepts, the task of a schematism must be understood differently in each case. This difference now allows us to explain those initial appearances where Kant seemed to claim that no schematism question is appropriate to empirical concepts. That is, he meant that the schematism question is not appropriate to empirical concepts in the way in which it is for pure concepts. The transcendental schemata extend the results of the Deduction and demonstrate the terms in which an a priori determination of a manifold could occur. An empirical concept does not apply to a manifold in general, but applies to this or that manifold, and thus its schematism must not demonstrate the possibility of conceptual application in general, but the method of determinate application in individiual instances. A transcendental schematism must justify the relation between pure determinations and the empirical by means of a third which unites both. Thus, to ask how pure concepts can transcendentally determine a manifold so that empirical concepts can be objectively applied is different from asking 'by virtue of what' that determinate recognition does occur. In sum, the following has been shown thus far: why a Schematism chapter is necessary; in what sense it is possible; how Kant thinks a schema differs from an image; why an empirical concept must be distinguished from its schema; and why and how the question of an empirical schematism must be differentiated from that of a transcendental schematism. But this way of posing the schematism question for empirical concepts has led us to one question, one that can be asked in a variety of ways: namely, how is it that an empirical concept, as a rule for synthesis, can have a non-synthetic 'limit' sufficient to determine some individual whole, or 'image'? What makes it possible for a rule to result in a Vorstellung that is not an image of a rule, but a whole, a kind, a 'this-such'? How is that a 'consciousness of a synthesis' can have an empirically conditioned unity which determines the character or kind of that synthesis, and thus makes possible determinate application? If Chipman is right that Kant's view seems to be that it is possible to apply empirical concepts to their instances because such concepts possess elementary sensory components which correspond to sensible features of the data which fall under the concepts 14

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then what is Kant's explanation of the totality of these 'sensory components', the whole which makes possible this one individual to be judged as this particular kind of thing? There simply can be no application of a concept if both it and the instance are just indefinite, indeterminate collections of such components. In short, how can a whole, as the activity of positing parts (synthesis) be this whole? It seems to me that we are at the closest Kantian answer we shall ever get on this issue in his account of the work of the imagination in providing a Gestalt for a rule, by means of which images can be represented as connected (verknupft) with such a concept. It has been clear throughout that the schematic projection of the conceptual order is the work of the imagination, a faculty Kant seems to like to shroud with mystery. With pure concepts, we found that a priori determinations of Kant's blank Erkenntnismaterie cOli1d occur because of the imagination's determination of the categories as modes of timeconsciousness. The imagination determines the type of unity or connection by means of which the application of categories to the sensible in general is possible, having already given the justification for that application in the Deduction. Transcendental schemata thus need only themselves be rules, a 'limit' placed on a category, since the results of that application are not concrete wholes or images, just an a priori determination of the manifold in general. But, keeping in mind Kant's own warning that 'rules for rules' can never adequately explain determinate 'application', we can argue that imagined schemata for empirical concepts must more closely approximate the original meaning of O'XTlJl.<X. For an 'image' to the thought 'under' a concept, the concept itself must be thought of as a unity, a one, a totality of components, a completed synthesis. That is, an empirical Begriff must be provided with a Gestalt by the imagination. I must be able to imagine 'dog-in-general' for the rule that is the concept 'dog' to determine the range of 'dog-images'. This mediation is now shown to be the work of the imagination's projection of the concept-rule as a Gestalt. We note immediately that this 'figure' is not equivalent to Bennett's 'private mental image'; it is rather the schema, or ground for the production of any image, whether privately conceived or empirically apprehended. IS We cannot use the concept 'rule' (or, as in Bennett, a furthern schemarule) to understand an image of a dog unless the rule itself can be comprehended as a whole; and this whole can be neither a particular dog-image, nor a representation of a rule. It is, then, only as schematized that empirical concepts apply to a manifold, and as thus imagined it is a little clearer how concepts as rules can function in conditioning instances recognized under them. Put simply, the imagination gives the concept a figure, a shape, a O'XllWx, a form, a recognizable character by virtue of which correct or incorrect inclusion can be discussed.

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But there are certainly problems with this account, especially concerning the nature of this Gestalt, and the source or ground for that schema. As for the first problem, we need to review the discussion of schemata for non-categorial concepts. Kant makes three significant remarks about such projections, all in paragraph seven; about 'triangle', 'dog', and schematism in general. First, the triangle example: Das Schema des Triangels kann niemals anderswo als in Gedanken existieren, und bedeutet eine Regel der Synthesis der Einbildungskraft, in Ansehung reiner Gestalten im Raume. (A 1411B 180) Kant is unfortunately unambiguous in this triangle example. The schemata for such 'pure sensible concepts' are obviously themselves rules. But if this is so, then we are left wondering (a) how that rule is different from the concept itself, and thus how it could in any way help to solve the problem of application, and (b) how it can specifically do what I have suggested empirical schemata must do. According to our analysis, what an empirical schema should do is to provide a way of thinking the synthetic unity of a concept 'as a whole' and as thus applicable to instances. But if schemata are only themselves rules, then not only do we have all the problems associated with (a) (see p. 295 above), but now the additional problems associated with (b). In this case, if the schema for triangle is itself a rule, then it becomes for ever impossible to think the 'shape' of a triangle in general as grounding the relation between determinate images and the concept. That is, suppose we have a rule for the construction of a triangle. It is a triangle-rule (and not, say a square-rule) because of 'what a triangle is', let us say its 'form'. Now, that form can be supplied neither by the intuition (which is apperceived as triangular only when the rule is applied), nor by the rule, which depends on that form to be this 'kind' of a rule. There must be some non-synthetic 'measure' which cannot itself be triangular since it is 'by virtue of which' anything is triangular, a Jl.E'l'QOV that is thus in some sense 'transcendentally real'. For a few pages now, we have been flirting with the suggestion that this true mediation between the 'intellectual' and the 'figurative' is the work of the imagination, relying on that Platonic-sounding word Gestalt. In this example, though, Kant claims that even the schema for a concept is simply a rule for the imagination to produce individuals, leaving us in the dark as to how the activity governed by that rule is a 'one'. Either the schema is simply the same as a concept; in which case, the relation between a rule and an image is very opaque; or the schema is different from the concept, but still, as a further rule, only more determinately specifies the activity that is the definition of the concept; in which case, we can again raise all of our demands for

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a 'non-synthetic source'. (Or, in a different way, we ask for what some phenomenologists demand in criticizing Kant: a 'material a priori' .16). Kant's 'dog' example is a bit more broadly ambiguous about the status of the Gestalt which functions as a schema. We are only told that this 'figure' is produced according to that concept as a rule. But what Kant does not say is how a 'Gestalt eines vierftiBigen Tieres' can be produced in accordance with a rule, since the rule itself does not specify a certain Gestalt, only a certain Handlung. (I.e. the question becomes what 'Original' the imagination 'looks to' in making a Gestalt.) But this ambiguity is not meant to be hidden by Kant, a fact which brings us to the third important comment on the activity of 'providing a schema'. Dieser Schematismus unseres Verstandes, in Ansehung der Erscheinungen und ihrer bloBen Form, ist eine verborgene Kunst in den Tiefen der menschlichen Seele, deren wahre Handgriffe wir der Natur schwerlich jemals abraten, und sie unverdeckt vor Augen legen werden. (A 1411B 181) Now, if this activity is truly a 'verborgene Kunst in den Tiefen der menschlichen Seele', we would seem to be allowed a good deal of speculative freedom in trying to come to terms with what it might do. As has been clear throughout here, we have been thinking of Plato's 'eikastic' imagination and of our ability to 'recognize' originals in images, and not of merely determining the given to produce images. And if we emphasize the Gestalt character of these schemata (as well as the other word Kant uses to describe them - Monogram), the deliberate obscurity of Kant's description of the work of this faculty, and perhaps even insist here on the relevance of Kant's account of 'reflective judgement' in the third Critique as a critical account of discovering universality, 17 perhaps we can make some connections with a more reflective, 'eikastic' imagination. But Kant would have none of this. If there is one, unambiguous insistence throughout his characterization of the imagination, it is that, in its transcendental aspect, it is productive; it makes, and especially, it makes schemata, 'guided' not by an 'in-itself', but only by the concept as rule. Kant's final description of empirical schemata is very clear on this point: a schema is always 'ein Produkt ... der reinen Einbildungskraft a priori' (A 142/B 181); indeed, it is only a product. Any suggestion of an 'eikastic' imagination necessarily makes it reproductive for Kant, which makes it empirical, wholly contingent l8 • 'Platonism' is naive and always subject to Hume's critique if it thinks non-synthetic 'originals' can be 'recognized'. The task is rather the opposite: to show how a conceptrule can determine any image, thanks to the imagination's objective use of it. Or, in other words, even given Kant's own insistence on the

Critical Assessments 301 distinction between an empirical concept and a schema, his own transcendentalism prohibits any appeal to a non-synthetic 'whole' which could 'ground' the relation between rule and image. But, if this is true, then Kant's 'idealism' tends to make the 'unity' of experience so totally 'ideal' that it becomes very difficult to say anything about the function of a given at all, and finally, even about the postulation of the Ding an sich. 19 And, of course, if all this is true, then Kant's transcendental mediation of idealism and realism is in for serious trouble. Too quickly cornered by accepting Hume's account of radical contingency in the given, too insistent on the completely functional nature of conceptual unity (and thus on the exclusively determinative, spontaneous nature of the understanding), too radically 'correctly' the 'dogmatic' stability of Platonic and Aristotelian Forms by placing them within the Bewegung of the subject's synthetic activity, Kant has indeed made man, not nature, the supreme legislator, but at a price of such expensive ignorance that even some features of that legislation cannot be consistently asserted. Unless Kantianism can be modified to include a far more involved account of the unity of an empirical concept, of the concept as a 'whole', then, as the above indicates, the coherence of some essential features of his enterprise is threatened. Kant's inability to answer the question, 'How is the empirical concept schematized?', a difficulty so often noticed but so little pursued, especially if traced back to his theory of all unity as primarily 'synthetic', and of all formality as subjective and functional, can prove to be more than a little troublesome for Kant's Copernican Revolution and its spectacularly influential legacy. And, perhaps, such difficulties make somewhat less persuasive Kant's wholesale critical exclusion of what he regarded as dogmatic rationalism and its transcendental realism.

Notes 1. Although there are certainly wide-ranging differences in accounting for these universals. Compare, for example, P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense (London, Methuen & Co., 1968), one of the better-known 'analytic' attempts to interpret the Critique as an essay on the possible significance of universals; and Hans Graubner, Form and Wesen (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1972), a more strictly 'Kantian' interpretation of form and formal universality as 'subjective'. 2. We are thus investigating the success of Kant's unique version of this problem, a version well expressed by Robert Paul Wolff in Kant's Theory of Mental Activity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), p. 123: 'The paradox of a multiplicity which has unity without losing its diversity - the problem which the ancients called the one and the many - is resolved by the notion of rule-directed activity.' I shall argue that that resolution is not without its difficulties.

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3. Cf. Wilfrid Sellars's explanation of this feature of Kant's 'turn' in 'Towards a theory of categories', published in Experience and Theory, ed. Lawrence Foster and J. W. Swanson (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970), pp.55-78. 4. Cf. Jasche's edition of Immanuel Kants Logik: Ein Handbuch zu Vorlesungen: especially, in section VIII of the Einleitung, the explanation of the 'Begriff eines Merkmals Uberhaupt'. 5. Roughly, this same point about the priority of synthetic unity is made in great detail by Sellars in his reduction of 'red' as a universal to . red· (where . - - - - . means the role played (in L) by , - - - - '). Science and Metaphysics (New York: The Humanities Press, 1968), pp. 82, 148-50. I mention Sellars here because his account would face many of the difficulties I raise against Kant, especially with respect to a 'schematism' for his theory of concepts. 6. This unique Kantian theory of 'subsumption' is one of my disagreements with Chipman's explanation of the schematism in 'Kant's categories and their schematism', Kant Studien 63 (1972), 36-50, especially p. 45. I want to investigate, in more detail than Chipman, Kant's 'constructivist' and 'subjective' interpretation of subsumption. 7. Putting it another way, following Heidemann, what must be schematically mediated are the intellectual and figurative syntheses, first explicitly identified in the second edition. Cf. 'Spontaneitat und Zeitlichkeit', in Kantstudien-Ergiinzungshefte (Kaln: Kainer Universitatsverlag, 1958), p. 141. See also W. H. Walsh's helpful arguments for the necessity of a Schematism chapter in his 'Schematism' , Kant-Studien 49 (1957). For Walsh, though, categories are given a 'sensible meaning' by their schemata, whereas in this interpretation, schemata explain how categories can condition the possibility of there being any determinate, empirical meaning of, say, causality. 8. Cf. A 133, and B 134n. 9. This transcendental 'how' question must, though, first be carefully distinguished from what we can call a 'psychological' how question, a question explicitly excluded from the first Critique by Kant himself in his response to Ulrich in the Metaphysische Anfangsgriinde der Naturwissenschaft, A XVI-XX. That question only asks 'what happens' in the mind when application does occur; the transcendental how question explains the conditions for application, or what must be the case for application rules to be meaningful. Further, this how question must be distinguished from what we can call a 'teleological' how question, one which asks 'how' we can assume that appearances, as given, do regularly conform to the a priori restrictions of the knowing subject; that is, how we could assume application in order to explain it. Thus that teleological question does not ask 'by virtue of what homogeneity can a rule be applied?', but 'by virtue of what can we assume there will be a homogeneity?', and such a question is answered in detail only in the Critique of Judgement. 10. We are thus again departing from Chipman's procedure (op. cit., p. 42). He argues that a transcendental schema can be understood derivatively from the doctrine of an empirical schema. I argue instead for a strong differentiation in kind between them. Also, Chipman argues 'what is involved in the application of an empirical concept to its instances is a matter which cannot be gone into here'. That is precisely the issue we want to 'go into'. 11. Speaking very loosely, one can say that, given the work it must do, Kantian Einbildungskraft replaces the Platonic and Aristotelian vou., as the Third between the One and the Many. For a fuller explanation of the place of the imagination

Critical Assessments 303 in the schematism chapter, see Hermann Marchen, Die Einbildungskraft bei Kant (Tilbingen: Max Niemeyer, 1970), pp. 110-22. 12. Kant's use of allgemein here is difficult to translate. Kemp Smith's rendering, 'in a general manner', is confusing, since the concept should already specify the manner of delineation; rather, Kant seems to mean the 'delineation in general' of a four-footed animal, etc. What seems to be 'universally delineated' is the Gestalt. 13. For further suggestions that Kant may have no doctrine of individuality at all, see Manley Thompson, 'Singular terms and intuitions in Kant's epistemology', Review of Metaphysics 26 (December 1972), especially p. 342 . 14. Chipman, op. cit., p. 39. 15. J. Bennett, Kant's Analytic (Cambridge: Cambridge Unviersity Press, 1966), pp. 141-52. That is, our problem does not directly involve the psychological issue of imagining a dog indeterminate enough to range over all breeds of dogs (but yet which would exclude foxes). The problem is rather how the rule, as a rule, is itself determinate enough to apply in 'just these' instances. Thus, the issue is what we must presuppose in order to explain what the rule does, not what we in fact psychologically imagine. Bennett confuses this issue from the start by immediately collapsing concept and schema (p. 141). The difficulty Kant faces is simply the classic difficulty of a 'whole' and its 'parts'. If the whole concept cannot be explained as just a collection of its parts, or markers (but must be an ordered collection of just these markers), then the whole must in some sense be prior to its parts, and thus make possible the determinacy of 'thissuch' a rule. See also the Critique of Judgement, no. 77. 16. That is, such phenomenologist critics of the Kantian a priori as Adolphe Reinach, Emil Lask, Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann are meant here. 17. Cf. Kritik der Urteilskraft, A xxiv, B xxvi. 18. Cf. B 152. 19. This problem with conceptual 'objectification' would thus make very difficult Bernard Roussett's attempt at a critical 'inclusion' of the Ding an sich. Cf. La Doctrine kantienne de l'objectivite (Paris: J. Vrin, 1968), pp. 161 and 619.

Critical Assessments

17 Kant's Schematism Reconsidered* Eva Schaper

In a footnote to the last sentence of the Introduction to his Critique of Judgement Kant says: It has been thought somewhat SUSpICiOUS that my divisions in pure

philosophy should almost always come out threefold. It is indeed suspicious. There are so many 'third things' in Kant's philo-

sophy. There is, first of all, the synthetic a priori, problematically placed between a priori and empirical. There is the 'power of judgement', surprisingly considered by Kant necessary to mediate between understanding and reason. There is the entire third Critique, supervening upon the complete coverage of the territory of philosophical enquiry in the transcendental key, presented with Kant's own assurance of completeness in the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason. There is the elusive but almost omnipresent reference to 'imagination', operating between sense and understanding - not itself a 'faculty', though Kant often gives it that name, illegitimately by his own analysis; it operates somehow as a mode of conjoint working of sense and intellect. And there is, lastly, the most famous - or most notorious - tertium quid, the transcendental schema, which provides the middle term for the application of the pure categories to the 'given', constituting grounds for conclusions about it as belonging to the 'world'. The easiest and most tempting solution of these problems is to dissolve them by pointing out the artificiality of the issues leading to these 'third things'. Though tempted, I am not convinced that Kant's philosophy can be treated thus as an exercise in a complicated solution of pseudoproblems. Also, I would thereby deprive myself of the uncomfortable and nagging sense of obscure importance which assails me - and many Kant students share this feeling - whenever I consider these points. I

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am prepared to admit that the problems may be represented as artificial. But I want to maintain, with special emphasis on the Kantian schema, that a serious reconsideration repays the effort, even if it should force us to reconsider critically also some of Kant's systematic assumptions. Before concentrating on the schema, I shall briefly indicate the ways in which dissolution of the problems raised by the issues I have mentioned is usually attempted. To regard the synthetic a priori simply as an artificial dodge of Kant's (though it has no doubt often been so regarded) seems to me to stop discussion of any Kantian problem at the outset, and I shall therefore not reproduce the arguments. But with regard to the problem of a 'power of judgement', the dissolution approach is on somewhat firmer ground. One can point out that either Kant had succeeded in the first Critique in determining the ground for its possibility, and in the second Critique in demonstrating its operation in reasoning about the moral implications of our actions - in that case a special justification becomes redundant; or, having failed to do either in the first two Critiques, he had to lay a new foundation in the third - which would then to some extent rule out of court the earlier works, including Kant's own assurance that nothing could be added to, or was to be subtracted from, what he had said in them. The third Critique, as a result of such a dissolution, could then still be read on its own, as a contribution to the history of aesthetics, which still goes on, and as a contribution to the history of teleology, which died by being absorbed into biology and some other 'sciences' with questionable claim to that title. As to Kant's own belief that the third Critique 'filled a gap', one can say that the gulf had first been created by Kant himself when he insisted, first, on the total inability of the understanding to be about anything but phenomena, and on the absolute power of practical reason in breaking through the barrier of appearances in action; and second, on the utter distinction between cognition and volition. Only on such grounds, one might say, was there a gap to be bridged between knowledge and will, and the 'feeling of pleasure and displeasure' serves to provide a precarious path across; only then was there a gulf to be negotiated between Pure and Practical Reason, and Judgement steps into the breach. It can also be pointed out that the artificiality of the so-called necessity for a third Critique arises from the alleged fact that in the first two Critiques Kant had succeeded only in showing that the 'theoretically necessary principles, which apply to phenomena, and the practically necessary principles, which refer to noumena, are logically compatible'. 1 Compatibility not being enough to guarantee truth, he then had to show some real connection between freedom and nature. Again, this would only be necessary and desirable if one had first separated them by definition.2 When we come to 'imagination', Kant seems almost to suggest himself

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that it had to be introduced as a result of his own prior distinctions. The artificiality of the problem can then be shown somewhat along the lines on which one usually demonstrates that Hume's account of memory was bringing in through the back door what he had swept out the front with his dictum that all we are immediately aware of are ideas and impressions of sensation. Imagination, it must be admitted, is a real worry to the student of Kant. It does not help that its first elaborate and highly suggestive introduction occurs in the Subjective Deduction in edition A, and is left out in edition B, where it is presented as 'figurative synthesis' (synthesis speciosa) side by side with the synthesis intellectualis (B 151), both being called 'transcendental'. Laconically Kant here defines imagination as 'the faculty of representing in intuition an object that is not itself present'. This does make the view that Kant first distinguished, then postulated, that which unites again what is thus separated rather plausible. 3 Lastly, and coming to the point, the schema. To represent Kant's most oracular pronouncements4 on this topic as nothing more than the embarrassed gestures of someone who has created a problem for himself, which, should he admit it, would put in question everything apparently achieved up to that point, is only too easy. Many respectable philosophers, however, have not found it too easy. The dissolution of this particularly knotty problem usually takes the form of a dilemma with destructive outcome. Either Kant meant what he said in the concluding paragraphs of the Deduction, namely, that he had transcendentally proved the 'objective validity' of the categories, that is to say, their applicability to possible objects via the argument of the Transcendental Unity of Apperception - and then the Schematism chapter is unnecessary; or Schematism makes a real contribution - but then the Transcendental Deduction is not a proper deduction in the Kantian sense of justification. Both alternatives are equally unpalatable to all but the professional debunker of Kant. Yet commentators with as different axes to grind as H. A. Prichard5 and H. W. B Joseph6 have put forward something like this dilemma as inescapable. More recently, and more bluntly, G. J. Warnock has spoken of Kant's repetition of the question 'How can categories be applied to the given?' in Schematism as a 'silly question'. 7 By 'different axes to grind', I mean that Prichard is measuring Kant by the requirements of pure constructionalism, and then finds Kant failing to meet them consistently, while Joseph weighs and criticizes Kant's doctrine against the conclusions of conceptual Platonism. Warnock raises the issue differently again as one of the misuse of language. 8 It is by no means easy to state the nature of Kant's problem in Schematism. Why should schemata by the necessary tertium quid to guarantee the connectibility of intuitions and pure concepts? And tran-

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scendental schemata at that? Schemata in general for Kant, as for many thinkers of his age, were something like plans or diagrams. For example, a blueprint for construction of a bridge stands midway between a general idea and its particular construction in steel, iron or wood. Schemata provide rules for construction, but have no simple image character or necessary pictorial resemblance. 'Transcendental schemata' Kant reserves for the basic formal characteristics which whatever is thinkable must have when we think it in terms of categories (as he believes he has already shown we cannot help doing, if we are to think at all). Transcendental schemata, if we can define them at all at this stage, are therefore not themselves either general or class concepts, nor are they second-order rules; they are exhibitions of the grounds for the application of secondorder rules (i.e. the categories) to the given. 9 It is with transcendental schemata in this rather difficult sense that Kant is mainly concerned in the first chapter of the Analytic of Principles. In addition to schemata Kant also speaks of schematized categories, i.e. categories as restricted by schemata, or as in a schematic application; and of transcendental schematism, i.e. the performance involved in either application of the categories or exhibition of schemata. Schematism in general is the application of general concepts to particulars via schematic representation which specifies the rules for constructive repetition of each particular instance. Surprisingly enough, Kant recognized no special problem or difficulty in the notion of a general schema; it was with the transcendental schema that his problems became acute. This optimism with regard to his problems became acute. This optimism with regard to general schemata was to some extent shared by most philosophers at his time, who would all have been more or less willing to admit that the operation of subsumption involved quasi-images as mediating between what is concretely given and what is merely thought. As in the case of the formulation of general concepts derived from experience, which Kant so blithely regarded as unproblematic (and for which he referred the reader simply to 'the celebrated Locke' for further elucidation), he found no difficulty in speaking of general schemata as operative for all mathematical and empirical concepts in use. 'The schema of the triangle can exist nowhere but in thought. It is a rule of synthesis of the imagination in respect of pure figure in space' (B 180). And 'The concept "dog" signifies a rule according to which my imagination can delineate the figure of a four-footed animal in a general manner, without the limitation to any single determinate figure such as experience, or any possible image that I can represent in concreto, actually presents.' That schemata are available for thought Kant does not doubt. lO However, the act of operating them, the schematism, is not one whose explanation is obvious either in philosophical or in psychological terms. By continuing the above quoted passage on schemata in general with the famous sen-

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tence describing schematism as 'an art concealed in the depths of the human soul', Kant suggests that this holds equally for the application of general and of transcendental schemata. Kant's problem in the Schematism chapter is then something like this: how are categories applicable 'to appearances and their mere form' (B 180)? This constitutes a problem, since categories themselves are formulation of rules in terms of which we think the given. This is, Kant implies, basic to and philosophically more fundamental than the question of how what Kant calls 'sensible concepts' become connected with images through their schemata. It is a problem on a different, though not disconnected, conceptual level. For, as Kant points out, for the schemata of pure concepts, i.e. of the categories, there are no corresponding images, and yet we have applicability of such pure thoughts, which can be formulated as rules, to the formal requirements of the given, if only in regard to its most general constructibility. That Kant, on the basis of what he had said before in the Critique, finds a 'problem' here has often been regarded as rather surprising. Had he not just spent the entire Transcendental Deduction on showing that the categories can function as specifications of the Transcendental Apperception? Why this apparent repetition of the question? The commentators whom I have already mentioned, and a good many others, tend to agree that the repetition is clumsy and confusing, and that it should not have been necessary had Kant himself taken seriously enough what he had already said, in a very systematic way, leading up to and in the Deduction. But - though fully quoting and commenting on the cryptic Kantian text - these commentators tend merely to repeat the two points which are of crucial importance in Kant's argument. These points need not only explicit emphasis, but must be interpreted by drawing on any help which Kant may give us elsewhere. The two issues which I therefore wish to make central are: (1) Kant proposes schemata as exhibited by the productive imagination, not by understanding, sense or even reason (the distinctions in mental activity which had so far found systematic exposition in the Critique); and (2) Kant thinks of schemata as pure time-determinations (though time had so far figured ambiguously, once as a pure form of sensibility, once as an acknowledged integratum in the Deduction). To take the view that all that Kant needs is already given before Schematism would be to place too strong an emphasis altogether on the implications of his admittedly explicit statements that understanding, sensibility and reason, i.e. the human mind in its formal structure alone, is the home of all formality and structure. I tend to think that the dilemma - either Kant had already proved the applicability of the categories in the Deduction, and then Schematism is unnecessary, or Schematism continues the argument, but then the Deduction cannot be regarded as valid - can be avoided, but at the cost

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of yet another charge against Kant: that his system was based on distinctions and assumptions as to the nature of mind, form and knowable reality, which culminated in a point as a fruitful and interesting proposal for a scheme which one might call a 'metaphysics of science and knowledge'. Within these confines, the Deduction and everything leading up to it seem to me perfectly valid. But in Schematism Kant reached a point where he was no longer asking that kind of question but showed himself perturbed by a different concern: how to provide a 'metaphysics of experience'. On that level, Schematism brings in new material and new suggestions. All Kant students will have to decide for themselves whether to read the Critique on the level of providing a metaphysical foundation of science - then Schematism can be skipped or treated as merely elaborating in isolation a point which the Deduction makes in a more complex context; or whether to read the Critique as an admittedly imperfect and often obscure attempt to give a metaphysics of experience. The two readings are by no means incompatible, provided they are undertaken with these different purposes clearly in mind. But in the latter case we cannot accept - as would be in order in the first case - the view that Kant's systematic distinctions are adequate and cogent for the task in hand. They are radically put in question by Kant himself for this new purpose, which emerges first into view in Schematism, and - if I may anticipate here - underlies the whole third Critique, and indeed all Kant's endeavours to show the connected validity of the entire critical enterprise. The two crucial issues - schemata as belonging to productive imagination, and schemata as pure time-determinations - can thus not be discussed without throwing doubt on some of Kant's own systematic tenets, and on the interpretation which is based exclusively on taking these tenets too seriously. This interpretation can, for convenience' sake, be labelled 'constructionalism'. It is one which commands a good deal of respect, and is widely adhered to still in present-day approaches to Kant. Its history goes back to the time of the first reception of the Critique; it flourished in nineteenth-century Kant scholarship, was stressed by H. A Prichard, and was at least tacitly held by Joseph, and by Warnock in his attack on Kant's Schematism. From James Ward, A Study of Kant, I take a quotation which neatly summarizes what I call the constructionalist approach: 'Objective experience, structurally regarded, is ... from end to end a synthesis of what he [Kant] termed "a manifold".'l1 Here we have the usual, and for many readers inescapable, interpretation of Kant as holding a synthesizing or integrating process to be at work in thoroughgoing imposition of structure, starting with the unifying grasp of perceptual consciousness, and continuing into the range of purely intellectual demands made upon the 'given', if it is to be 'given' at all; that is to say, if it is to be 'my'

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experience, it must be moulded to my demands of intelligibility. On this interpretation structure in every sense is contributed by and derivable from the interest and activity and make-up of the experiencing subject. This view results in putting the burden of logical priority squarely on the unity of self-consciousness (and I cannot see how in that case ontological priority can be avoided either). Whether one calls it a mere 'functional unity', or unity logically conditioning the unity of experience, or whether one uses any other carefully phrased formula to disavow, with Kant, the postulation of a substantial self, the fact remains that form in the given structure of any description is then the outcome of forming or structuring something by human agency into the shapes which make recognition possible. The transcendental subject, however much one insists that it has the transcendental object as its correlate, is then logically prior. To insist on the entailment of 'unity of subject' and 'unity of object' can then only mean that the former constitutes the latter and makes it possible; the reverse, that the unity of object constitutes transcendental unity of subject, would only be acceptable by courtesy to the meaning of entailment. It would seem a suspicious argument even for a constructionalist both to maintain that constructing is prior and basic, and to use the term 'mutual entailment' in its strict logical sense. Whatever grounds there may be for a different approach to Kant, avoiding the constructionalist interpretation, they seem to me to lie hidden in the obscurities of the chapter on Schematism, in the emphasis on time, in the doctrine of transcendental imagination, as well as in the rather blurred focus on the 'power of judgement' which Kant did not, in my opinion, fundamentally sharpen by devoting a special Critique to it - though, blurred or not, we shall have to make use of it. The constructionalist approach to what Kant calls the synthesis of imagination would maintain that transcendental imagination actually moulds the sense-manifold in such a manner that its submission to the categorial apprehension of the understanding is thereby ensured. I would point out that there is nothing in Kant which requires this interpretation, though there is a lot which seems compatible with it. But then, explicitly to have adopted this view would not have helped Kant with his particular problem. He would have needed another transcendental act to ensure that the sense-manifold is amenable to being so moulded by imagination - and so on ad infinitum. This is, of course, what the acutest constructionalist critics of Kant have found to object to in the Kantian schematism. How, in rejecting the constructionalist viewpoint, do we get a different picture of what Kant is saying? The key phrase obviously must be B 181, the description of schematism as 'an art concealed in the depths of the human soul, whose real modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover, and to have open to our gaze'.

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One may protest that such an art, if 'concealed in the depths of the human soul', and for ever beyond our ken, simply has no place in a Critique of Pure Reason. If Kant had really wanted to retreat here from the implications of the Copernican Revolution for theoretical philosophy (i.e. from the thesis that the mind can only know a world under its own formal perspective), he should in all fairness have retreated from the whole undertaking and left it as a mystery how we ever come to know anything. Trying to 'justify' the possibility of knowing by anchoring the proof of connectibility to the simple assertion that we just do connect and never learn how does not seem a very impressive way out. And yet Kant kept dwelling on this point: how do we connect, namely, pure thought with what is not thought; how can that which is sensed also be thought? He offers 'schemata' as the necessary and sufficient grounds to link pure concepts with that which is to be thought as ordered in terms of them. Yet he repeats: how is this possible? I fail to understand this insistent question in any sense other than 'What must the given be, so that it is orderable?' Kant calls it the problem of application, for the justification of which the schemata have to be exhibited. It is at this point that Kant does not, as the constructionalist approach would have him do, simply affirm that the given stands under the synthetic unity of apperception, all structural features being contributed by the synthesizing activity. Instead, he enters the tortuous argument about what the given must be, so that synthesis can pronounce the categorial conditions as fulfilled: it must be schematic, and the categories apply when suitably schematized. Neither the synthesis of sense (the having of sense-experience by one sentient) nor the synthesis of understanding (the thinking of experience by one mind) as such secure or impose schemata, according to what Kant says in this chapter. The synthesis of sense, in the Transcendental Aesthetic, was certainly made responsible for the 'forms' of the sensible, i.e. space and time. Yet this impositional character of space and time does not seem to be as consistently maintained throughout the Critique as it is confidently announced in the Aesthetic. For one thing, in the Aesthetic it is really space which receives the full treatment along the constructionalist lines, presumably because it could lead so conveniently to the exhibition of mathematics (with geometry as the paradigm) as a body of synthetic a priori propositions. Time in the Aesthetic gets away with a far scantier treatment, on supposedly parallel lines, for which the fully developed body of a priori synthetic propositions corresponding to a science of space is unfortunately missing. It is only in the Deduction that time makes another, rather spectacular appearance. And although there Kant says that he is speaking equally about space in a parallel fashion to time, it is obviously time which steals the show now. For the Deduction is not merely a deduction of the time categories; of at least

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equal importance is Kant's elaboration of the Transcendental Unity of Apperception, in which time is an essential factor, not fully accounted for by calling it a pure form of sensibility (whilst space in the Deduction might just pass under such a description). In fact, the disproportionate treatment of space and time respectively, which was disquietingly present in the Aesthetic, despite Kant's own assurance to the contrary, is repeated, with reverse emphasis, in the Deduction, where the act of experience in time is the analysandum, the only permissible starting point for the unfolding of Kant's major 'justification' of his procedure in Critical philosophy. And not enough at that. In Schematism, Kant implicitly sets out to do the work of the Aesthetic all over again, by showing, if not explicitly saying so, that we think in categories what is given in sense, not because the synthesis of the understanding superimposes its forms upon that which is given under the synthesis of sense, but because the 'synthesis of imagination' 'produces' schemata in the given which make application of one to the other possible. A strange conclusion indeed, considering that imagination here seems to mean 'thought as if sensed', and that products of the imagination are determinations of time - which would be an unnecessary duplication if the Aesthetic had been Kant's last word on time as a pure form of sensibility. Obviously it was not. And it is thus easier for some purposes (e.g. for an understanding of the regressive analysis of the structure of experience) to read the Critique backwards from Schematism than forwards from the Aesthetic. Kant's own words leave the vital connection of schemata and time only barely stated on a very formalized level. In B 184 he summarizes: 'The schemata are thus nothing but a priori determinations of time in accordance with rules. These rules relate in the order of the categories to the time-series, the time-content, the time-order, and lastly to the scope of time in respect of all possible objects.' Now, of course, if rules are the characteristics of the understanding (which Kant even calls the 'faculty of rules' (A 126)), and time is, according to the Aesthetic, one of the a priori forms of sensibility, then we have again, against the background of the systematic faculty doctrine, the problem of a mysterious connection via imagination. Graham Bird, in a recent book on Kant,12 uses in passing a nice metaphor for imagination as working, according to Kant, like a clutch mechanism between sense and understanding, putting the machinery of experience transcendentally into gear. A suggestive metaphor, suggestive in its mechanistic formulation of the very problem any interpretation faces which starts and remains with the separate faculties of human cognition according to the Kantian system. Kant's own metaphor, 'an art concealed in the depths of the human soul', is significantly nearer the point; it invites us, however, to jettison the systematic distinction, so far proposed in the Critique, between sense, understanding and reason. This distinction emerges now as insufficient for the purpose of

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accounting for the connection of thought and sense in a given act of experience. The 'determinations of time according to rules,' i.e. intellectual determination of the pure form of sensibility, are not the work of either understanding or sense in their a priori aspects - though we can describe the connection when achieved as 'understanding made applicable to sense'. The agency responsible for the achievement, however, is pure imagination which has so far not figured importantly in the Critique at all. In the Subjective Deduction Kant states clearly, for the first time, that pure imagination conditions all a priori knowledge. In the same paragraph (A 124) he therefore draws the unjustifiable inference that imagination is 'one of the fundamental faculties of the human soul'. This will do only if we understand 'faculty' here in the untechnical sense of 'capacity' or 'power', not in the technical sense in which understanding and sensibility are termed 'faculties' by Kant. In this passage Kant simply reasserts that what is seen as connected must be found as connected, and he then makes 'pure imagination' responsible for it. 'By its means we bring the manifold of intuition on the one side into connection with the condition of the necessary unity of pure apperception on the other. The two extremes, namely, sensibility and understanding, must stand in necessary connection with each other through the mediation of this transcendental function of imagination, because otherwise the former, though indeed yielding appearances, would supply no objects of empirical knowledge, and consequently no experience' (my italics). It is noteworthy that the formulation, 'must stand in necessary connection' is coupled by Kant with 'pure imagination' as responsible for it. Kant's most outspoken assertion of 'real connection' here stands side by side with such a connection being attributed to a faculty not of realizing, but of imagining. Is he after all saying no more than that we do the connecting and imagine it really to be there? In one sense, yes, this is what Kant must be saying. The 'as-if' element which comes to the fore in Kant's regulative principles can be detected even in that which underlies his constitutive principles, namely, the synthesis of imagination which alone gives constitutive powers to those principles. But this is not the whole story. If taken on its own, this point would result in something even worse than the naive constructionalist approach to Kant, which I have already criticized as unwarranted in its claim to be the Kant interpretation. The basic Kantian insight which lurks in Schematism seems to me this: though it is true that we construct, we construct not as minds, or intellects, not by being mind, but by being in time. I am not saying by 'thinking in time', or even 'experiencing under the form of time', which would be closer to the Kantian text, but 'being in time'. Kant never put it quite like this. But it seems to me that this is what was hidden as the

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'real modes of activity' to which Kant referred, and with which he grappled in this chapter. Otherwise imagination would be a deus ex machina if ever there was one. It still is, of course, only a formula for the assertion that man does not confront the given manifold, then proceed to mould it, but rather that he is in it, in thoroughgoing relation already, which on analysis then yields the time-factor as bearing an unduly heavy burden. This point - that human nature includes temporality - is, of course, made in many other philosophical proposals. It is not unique to Kant, let alone adequately stated by him. The force it has in his philosophy (a somewhat obscure force, to be sure) depends on the typically Kantian perspective which I wish to retain despite my divergence from what I have suggested are redundant systematic distinctions in his philosophy. Kant's basic assertion that the human equipment makes our experience amenable to us as ours is unaffected by my criticism of his family doctrine. With this perspective, the rather commonplace insistence that human nature is temporal nature gains in complexity. For not only is time a human form of experience, but it is that in which man finds himself as human, and the world as 'world'. I stress 'finds himself', for that seems to me the message of Schematism: not that man imposes what he is himself (to a certain extent he obviously does), but that he discovers, via the schemata as underlying the possibility of things for him, his own nature and the nature of that in which he is, his being-inthe-world. The phrase is deliberately Heidegger's. Heidegger provides the best example (thought not one I wish to discuss in detail) of a philosopher who has taken his clue in so far as his own assimilation of Kant is concerned almost exclusively from the 'hidden meaning' of Kant's remarks on Schematism. His Kant book, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, is an ingenious, if not always faithful elaboration of Kant's teaching on transcendental imagination. Heidegger's own philosophy, Being and Time, is in one of its most important aspects a continuation of what Heidegger found indicated in Kant, brought to fruition in a somewhat un-Kantian key. Risking a summarized formulation, one might say that Heidegger's radical criticism of the Western philosophical tradition is based on his recognition that temporality is not something which can be added on to an otherwise completed philosophical account of existence. This, I believe, was exactly what Kant was groping for when he first made time (and space) part of the human framework for experience, then, later in the first Critique, hinted at the more than methodological importance of building the time-factor into the experiential equipment: we are in time, as Heidegger would put it, and to ask what time as such is, is just as futile as to describe what there is and then to consider it under the aspect of time. Neither a theory of time nor an untemporal account of the real will do: the only answer lies

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in an analysis of human experience - as Kant would say; Heidegger would see it as the fundamental analysis of man's being-in-the-world, his Geworfensein into existence. Heidegger's is not the only notable attempt that has been made to work out some of the suggestions barely indicated by Kant himself in Schematism. Ernst Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms presents another example of a view in which the schema is vital, as the basic formal unit, both constructed and found - in Goethe's terms: meaning and being at the same time.13 With this stress on 'being-in-time' we can take a fresh look at Kant's productive imagination a priori, which is so far little more than an embarrassing cover for the admission that sense, understanding and reason are after all insufficient to account transcendentally for the outcome of mental activity. Imagination, as introduced in the Subjective Deduction, is made responsible for the connection which we have in the phenomena of our experience. I am now stressing 'phenomena', not 'the given', for it is the given appearances as categorized in which the connection is available. Seen thus, the schemata are limiting factors for the categories, restricting their objectively valid application to phenomena only (leaving indeterminate thinking theoretically capable, but in an epistemologically useless fashion, of employing unschematized categories). The given as thought constitutes 'phenomena', and 'appearances for sense' are left in the somewhat ambiguous position of theoretical limits, not actual constituent parts of experience. When it comes to the analysis of constituent parts, we are already concerned with schematized content, and the schemata are attributable to what there is in our experience and can be handled by both sense and thought in conjunction. Productive imagination does not impose its own forms - there are no formal a priori features belonging to it, since, strictly speaking, it is not a 'faculty'; but productive imagination exhibits, by holding the different formal requirements together, the amenability of the given to the joint operation of sense and understanding. In a way it is therefore legitimate to say that the 'third thing', that which mediates between sense and understanding, is not a third faculty, imagination, or a third formal component, not even a 'something' at all, but the 'given' in its fittedness for sense and understanding taken jointly. When Kant calls the schemata pure time-determinations, and schematized categories 'temporalized' categories, he points to imagination not as a third level of mind, but as the joint function of mental activity in coping with experience. That it is a coping concerned with and leading to knowledge, knowledge which is by definition of phenomena only, gives to imagination in its productive capacity the aspect of subjectivity. It is the perspective of the subject which constitutes a content of awareness

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a datum for knowledge. But this perspective or productive capacity does not constitute the content of awareness. Now, the same productive imagination which in the first Critique is said by Kant to underlie the a priori synthesis of apperception reappears in the third Critique as the ground for reflective judgement. And reflective judgement, in its aesthetic and teleological form, is not about the knowable, the 'merely' phenomenal, but about the world in its one aspect in which human subjectivity can discover that it is in harmony and conformity with something other than itself: the aspect of beauty and purpose, which the subject does not impose, but to which it assents. And this is not a world outside time; it may not be 'knowable', but it is given. Kant certainly insists that purposive thinking and recognition of 'purposiveness without purpose' in aesthetic awareness do not constitute 'knowledge'. But if we are to take seriously that 'pure imagination' in the first Critique itself conditions the entire a priori synthesis of apperception, then, surely, the insistence on the merely regulative and heuristic value of teleological and aesthetic thinking must be taken with a grain of salt. Kant cannot have it both ways, though he tries hard enough. He cannot, in the end, say both that all form and structure is mind-dependent, and that beauty and harmony and purpose are found, not imposed. The latter are assented to by the subject which finds its own functioning confirmed by the recognition of congruence. It cannot, it is true, take such congruence for an 'objective fact'. But surely not because it is 'merely subjective' or merely imagined; rather - and nothing Kant says is incompatible with this - because congruence underlies the eliciting and shaping of 'objective fact'. One can still say, then, with Kant, that all principles of judgement have 'as-if' character, but not because they are inventions of human fantasy, but because we cannot assert them as knowable fact, since we have already assumed them in the synthesis of apperception which provides the rules for the recognition of 'objective fact'. For this synthesis is conditioned by the same productive imagination which allows us to formulate specific principles of judgement in their regulative and 'as-if' capacity. Oddly enough, time plays no explicit or important part in the third Critique. Yet if there is this link between productive imagination and the power of judgement, the former conditioning the pure synthesis of apperception, the latter being the former's principle-forming capacity, then we have got the time-factor of equal and fundamental importance to both. It can only be attributed to Kant's preoccupation with time as sufficiently accounted for in the Transcendental Aesthetic of the first Critique that he gives such insufficient attention to it in the third Critique. The sense of 'aesthetic' as used in the third Critique lays a continued etymological stress on the derivation of the term from aisthesis, i.e. sensed or immediate awareness. And it is impossible, on the Kantian

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basis, to have any sensed awareness outside time. Temporality cannot be left out and added afterwards for anything Kant says in the Critique of Judgement. It is not only that which constitutes the form of empirical givenness, so that we can come to know it - the proper sphere of the first Critique. It is also taken for granted as the unifying perspective for judgement upon beauty and telos. For, according to Kant, we reflect not only on our powers as working in purposive harmony, but we do this through fully perceiving and distancing a felt situation, i.e. a situation given in time. Within the Kantian compass the recognition that human temporality is incapable of being added to an analysis after accounting for all the rest opens the way for a Kantian foundation of modern thought - modern thought which is, I believe, both essentially constructive and essentially historical. Kant's philosophy affords a suitable framework for a breaking away in just that direction from the outmoded conception of man as a mental-material compound confronting the world of nature, a conception which has proved so singularly unacceptable to recent thinking. I am aware that the na'ive confrontation view is superseded in other, nonKantian, orientations as well. Yet I would consider the Kantian suggestions more positively helpful than a merely negative attitude which tries to avoid metaphysical commitments of its own. Kant's insistence that the nature of consciousness is responsible for the structure with which the world in which we live appears to us seems to me sound, as long as we do not mean by this simply that mind imposes its structure. As long as we only mean that structure by necessity is structure of experiential encounter, that is to say, structure of what is encountered in a context of that which limits and thus, in away, constitutes the encounterable, this can be defended. The two extremes of accepting mind and reason as formally creative without qualification, and of postulating an unknowable reality nevertheless 'as it really is', should be avoided. And they can be avoided, if one makes Kant's Schematism central, in a reading somewhat along the lines I have attempted so far: holding that the schematic grounds for the applicability of all minddependent forms are found in temporal encounter as structural features of experience.!4 This needs supplementation by Kant's third Critique, which must be taken, despite its profession of containing regulative principles only, as the involuntary showing of hands on Kant's part. If we take it that the third Critique is linked with Schematism more intimately than with the hypothetical gap between freedom and nature, and productive imagination produces in time both the schemata by recognition of experiential structure, and judgement by assent to harmonization of all the subjective powers which are object-centred in aesthetic experience, we can overcome some of the difficulties which result from Kant's own limitation of the considerations in Schematism to the context

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of epistemology alone. In fact, for a purely epistemological context, the considerations of Schematism are only an elaboration of the Deduction, and unnecessarily obscure at that. They are novel and important, however, when we understand Kant to be concerned here with metaphysical questions in his own sense of 'critical' metaphysics: to show that experience as we have it does not make sense without certain presuppositions. The presuppositions he seems to be offering are not only the modal account of how we come to terms with whatever is there, but also the suggestion that the modal analysis is possible only because the different modalities of experience are different articulations of human temporality. Kant may have insisted that the third Critique was important as bridging the gap between freedom and nature. We are surely free to insist that the importance of this work lies at least as much in providing support for the view that all human experience is temporal experience, and that it will therefore not do to make time merely a form of sensibility imposed on non-temporal material. Rather, as Kant himself seems to have seen already in Schematism - hence his struggle with some of the implications of his own doctrine - objects, ourselves included, are temporally determined and structured, and the schematized categories are the intellectual formulations of their recognition. Some of the formulations, for there is, even on Kant's own grounds, no good reason for their limitation, either in number or in direction of reference to possibly new forms of human action and experience. Taking the third Critique as dealing with the same imagination which is 'productive' of schemata in Kant's sense, we must surely reject also Kant's own claim that he is dealing here with possible access to the world of the mysterious things-in-themselves. He makes almost too good a case in this Critique for the 'subjective necessity' of aesthetic judgements to be formulations of recognized conformity and congruence, wholly within the temporality of our lives. The encounter with beauty and telos is as 'phenomenal' as we care to take this term - entirely a question of the involvement in, then distancing from, the here and now of the perceptually, socially, culturally 'given'. This means that we have to widen the Kantian perspective beyond the scope of his epistemological restrictions, but the perspective remains recognizably Kantian nevertheless. Regarding the schemata as timedeterminations in the sense which has so far been indicated allows us even obliges us - to admit the entire range of human temporal encounter to the context in which structure, whilst not purely mind-imposed, is structure of constructions in time. There are all kinds of frameworks for orientation in which human endeavour comes to terms with worlds partly of its own making (but therefore none the less inescapable in their 'empirical reality'), partly of its own finding in the implications of temporal existence. All cultural pursuits which contribute to the fabric of

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individual and social understanding, self-realization and creative advance could gain in manageability for philosophical purposes if the possibility of seeing them in this way were admitted. The sphere of applicability of such a view could range from language, religion and art to scientific and philosophical understanding, covering expressive, cognitive and volitional functions of man and their manifestations in action and intellectual achievement. 15 Far from having, in his doctrine of phenomena and noumena, erected a barrier between appearance and reality, Kant seems to me to have shown the way to combat both the rationalists' and the empiricists' endeavours to penetrate through the veil of conceptual or sensory clues to a reality behind them. For traditional rationalism and traditional empiricism are curiously at one in this respect, despite fundamental opposition as to what constitutes either reliable clues or the nature of that to which they are said to give access. They believe in disclosure via conception or perception respectively. Kant's was historically the first major attempt to do away with the underlying image of confrontation, and I think this is still relevant today. Understanding him from the third Critique means rejecting any view according to which the modes in which we think, speak or experience are just so many ways of attempted access to the real, to the world, to something which is in itself, and according to which cultural forms such as philosophies, arts, sciences, religions represent in various coded forms something 'about' the real which, ideally speaking, exists independently of such formulations. Rather, on the Kantian approach here outlined, these modes of thinking and experiencing are part of the real, the only reality we have got, and all formulation is articulation in various moves, with trial and error, in many directions of relating the particular item meaningfully to general structures. Such structures are not models of something else. They are related to theories as a non-Euclidean 'model' of spatial properties is related to a particular non-Euclidean geometry, not as a representative picture is related to what it represents. Reference cannot be wholly outside the particular structure which is disclosed in understanding, cognition - or in language generally and in art. Rather, in the various attempts to articulate, the 'real' (if one must have that term) is constantly 'under construction'. This is taking one suggestion of Kant's Transcendental Deduction quite seriously, more so perhaps than Kant himself would have allowed. This is that whatever we may mean by 'mind' or 'human mentality', it constitutes itself into what it is only in encounter. I say 'more so perhaps than Kant himself would have allowed', because he took the mental makeup, the human equipment, to be unchanging and stable. This is another of the fundamental points where a Kantian systematic presupposition is unnecessarily stultifying. To think of the human forms of experience as immutable, as being the same for all men and at all times, simply will

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not do. Kant's own completely unhistorical bias may be understandable from the standpoint of the age in which he lived. But it is made questionable by the very implications of his thought on time in Schematism, on imagination, and on judgement. One of these implications is that the forms of knowledge need not be the only formal characteristics Kant's own philosophy will allow. The human perspective, on a Kantian basis, can surely be understood as in various subtle modifications recognizing and eliciting other formal patterns, which organize the entire range of human interests. There are linguistic, mythical, scientific, artistic and political ways of coming to terms with being in a complex world. But cultural forms may change and develop and evolve, being partly based on earlier achievement, earlier error, earlier loss and frustration, and on earlier vision. Such forms may themselves be the raw material for new and derivative formal patterns. More often, they are just modified in the handling of either more complex or more isolated problems. But the 'immutable constitution' theory goes overboard with the widening of the Kantian perspective to include all formal possibilities within the range of schematism. All this stresses what is there in Kant in his insistence on form as being 'function' - function of temporality, I now wish to say. In Schematism, the realization of the purely formal in temporal demonstration guarantees for Kant the solidarity of mind and that towards which mind is active in experience. His schemata are exhibitions. We could say that the schemata do not only guarantee the application of the categories to the given; they underlie the fact of temporal moves by which we guarantee the connection of meanings. Kant himself speaks of schemata as 'monograms of the pure imagination a priori' (B 181). My view, when fully worked out, would have to maintain that such schematic monograms have Gestalt character, and are therefore as such not restricted to cognitive and even linguistic expressions. Although Kant formulated his schemata as basic only to intellectual understanding which operates discursively, this does not make the schemata themselves discursive. They remain that in terms of which, and under the conditions of which, the listing of marks, the recognition of special relations and similarities, etc., i.e. all discursive understanding, is possible. With the adaptation of Kant's doctrine of schemata which is here proposed (and which I believe to be compatible with Kant's own narrower formulation in all essentials), schemata can be seen as the conditions under which men are active and formative in many different ways. The schematic suggestions, so tentatively raised by Kant, provide directions and frames also for non-discursive modes of insight, of social and creative coming to terms with the life we are living and making. It may by now be clearer why I suggested earlier that the thought and imagination of so many subsequent philosophers was captured by Kant

Critical Assessments 321 - not by Kant the rigid systematizer, but more often by Kant despite himself. The schema has been the focal point for many developments, though often only seen 'through a glass, darkly'. We have only to think of the wide range of phenomenological techniques in the field of psychology, anthropology and sociology to realize the extent to which the conception of a dualistic confrontation of man and nature has broken down. It has, at least in those spheres, but also in contemporary philosophy, been entirely superseded. In phenomenology, nature is not a purely physical structure, but it emerges with a meaningful structure from man's endeavour to understand his environment. And man is not a mental-corporeal entity, but is equally emergent from the cultural, historical, scientific and artistic activities in which he constitutes himself as an individual or as a member of various groups. There are, for instance, the structural patterns as Jean Piaget conceives them of the complex human functions in terms of behaviour, or as Claude LeviStrauss discovers them in the transition in anthropology from natural to cultural phenomena. They form the basis for analysis from which to arrive at an adequate description of human happenings in a dynamically social context. Not only the psychology of 'understanding', stemming from Dilthey, but also Sartre's existential psychoanalysis point in the same direction. In these examples, chosen at random from the phenomenological rag-bag, which is, after all, a Kantian container, the complex cultural fact is assumed as a datum. The task is not to break it down into its elements, but to focus on functions and patterned directions of human temporal mentality coping with its experience while building it up. Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenologie de la perception tries to do for epistemology what Husserl and his pupils attempted for the foundations of science. Roman Ingarden, Nicolai Hartmann and Martin Heidegger have stressed in their work the structural analysis of man's artistic creations which express with such richness and modulated subtlety man's being-in-the-world, his being in time. Philosophers of quite a different conviction surely play the same game when they assume the complex fact of language as their datum. I shall end with a few lines from Wittgenstein. First, a couple of brief passages stressing the unthinkability of objects outside space and time, or apart from their possible connection; this is Kant's case for the necessity of schemata, for 'determinations according to roles'. 'Just as we cannot think of spatial objects at all apart from space, and temporal objects apart from time, so we cannot think of any object apart from the possibility of its connexion with other things' (2.0121). And: 'In the terminology of Hertz we might say: only connections according to rules are thinkable' (6.361). Second, a passage which reads like a comment on what Kant had to say on the first schema of relation: 'We cannot compare any process with "the passage of time" - there is no such thing - but only with another process' (6.311). These

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lines comes from the Tractatus, but I do not think that what they assert, or their peculiar flavour, is negated by the tenor of the later Investigations. I do, of course, consider Wittgenstein a Kantian with a vengeance.

Notes

* A revised version of a paper read at meetings of the Scots Philosophical Club on 14 December 1963, and of the Yale Graduate Philosophy Club on 17 March 1964. 1. Th!s is. main~ained by S. Korner, Kant (Penguin Books, 1955), p. 177. 2. ThiS dissolutIOn does not work as neatly as the others. The thesis that the first two Critiques establish only logical compatibility of nature and freedom is d!f~cult to maintain. A:nd t~at the th,ird Crit!que then argues from logical compatibility to real connectIOn IS made Implausible by Kant's assertion that all the princi~les of aesthetic and teleological judgement are heuristic or of subjective necessity only, and thus on the simple 'gap' theory unable to provide any de facto guarantee for the connection said to be left over from the other two Critiques. 3 ..It ~s, howev~r, not. the only ~iew one could take. Kant's own words may well. Illd~~ate th~ Illsufficlenc1 o~ hiS system and yet testify to the importance of the IlltUitlOn which forced him III all honesty to say some rather odd things. As Hu~e li~e.s n?~ by his :impressions' and 'ideas', but by his painful wrestling with the empmcal III expenence, so Kant, I venture to say, lives not by having neatly separated sense from understanding, but by admitting defeat in the systematically unmotivated conjuring up of 'imagination' to undo the damage. ~. The opa9.ueness an? obscurity of the Schematism chapter - the chapter wh~~h Kant himself conSidered to be one of the most important pieces of the Cn~lque, an? to which Hegel paid tribute as being among the finest pages in the entlre Kan~ta.n a;uvre - has often been stressed, with undertones ranging from wonder to IrntatlOn. From among the earliest statements we recall F. H. Jacobi's assessment of schematism as 'the most wonderful and most mysterious of all unfathomable mysteries and wonders' (Werke, ed. G. Fleischer (Leipzig, 1812-25), vol. III, p. 96), and Schopenhauer's characterization of schematism as a curiosity 'which is famous for its profound darkness, because nobody has yet been able t~. make sense of it' ('Kritik der Kantischen Philosophie', in Werke, ed. W. v. Lohneysen (Stuttgart; Frankfurt am Main, 1960--63), vol. I, p. 606). 5. H. A. Pric~ard, Kant's Theory of Knowledge (Oxford, 1909), p. 246: 'It seems clear that If the first part [the Deduction] is successful, the second [Schematism] must be unnecessary.' 6. H. W. ~. !oseph, 'T~e Sche.matism of the categories in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, III Essays In AnCIent and Modern Philosophy (Oxford, 1935), pp. 266-~02. Joseph accu~es Kan.t of not having distinguished two problems in Scher;natlsm: how the ulliversal IS related to the particular (which would still remalll a conceptual problem, wholly within the confines of intellectual unders~and~ng, and thus not needing anything like Schematism), and how the intelli~Ible. IS related to the sensible (which does indeed raise the question of a connectmg link, but Kant's answer then seems to imply an infinite regress of mediators the Third Man all over again). 7. G. J. Warnock, 'Concepts and schematism', in Analysis, 9 (1948-9), 77-82.

Critical Assessments 323 8. Continental Kant scholarship has, on the whole, tended towards a more conciliatory view of the problem of schematism. A dilemma in as extreme a form as that favoured by Anglo-Saxon commentators cannot be found. The most prominent ways of by-passing the apparent paradox have been to consider the Schematism chapter as completion or as elaboration of the Deduction, avoiding a direct statement as to whether the Deduction is valid without it. Hermann Cohen and August Stadler tended in this direction. Fritz Heinemann, in Der Aufbau von Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft und das Problem der Zeit (Giessen, 1913), p. 132, maintains that 'the real deduction does not happen in the Transcendental Deduction, but in Schematism', thus also denying a dilemma in favour of complete coherence and development from the Deduction to its climax in Schematism. This view is as frequent in Continental commentaries as that which regards Schematism as the application of the general results of the Deduction and as in no way misplaced at the head of the detailed discussion of the Principles. But the two possibilities of interpreting the contribution of Schematism either continuation or replacement of Deduction - have, as far as I know, not been formulated as a dilemma outside the Anglo-Saxon context. 9. This is sometimes represented as if the schemata were necessary in order to connect the pure concepts with what is to be subsumed under them in intuition. But this is surely misreading Kant. Whatever the categories are, they are not class concepts under which particulars either should be or can be subsumed. 10. T. D. Weldon, in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (Oxford, 1945), pp. 164-7, mentioned Newton's and Locke's similar views and usages of the notion of a schema in general. 11. (Cambridge, 1922) p. 80. 12. Kant's Theory of Knowledge (New York, 1962), p. 52. 13. I do not think one would go too far if one were to point to Kant's Schematism and the doctrine of Imagination as at least a contributory inspiration for post-Kantian philosophies of process, not so much of the Whiteheadian, but of the Bergsonian variety. An interesting postscript to the many developments from this part of Kant's thinking can be found at present, in a very original form, in E. H. Gombrich's Art and Illusion (New York, 1960). It is too specialized an application of a modified Kantianism to be of immediate interest here. Yet I could not deny myself this reference to it in a footnote. 14. H. J. de Vleeschauwer's position in La Deduction transcendantale dans l'O!uvre de Kant (Paris, 1937) comes closest to the view I am here trying to maintain. He states explicitly (vol. 3, p. 441): 'Le schematisme constitute Ie fondement de l'harmonie de ces facultes de connaitre en vue de la constitution formelle de l'experience.' The emphasis of his entire interpretation of schematism is on the 'constitution formelle de l'experience', and from the above quotation he continues, as in other similar contexts, to a consideration of the third Critique and a discussion of the influence of Leibniz's pre-established harmony on Kant. 15. This is, of course, what Ernst Cassirer attempts in his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. He explicitly maintains that he wishes to expand Kant's 'Critique of Knowledge' into a 'Critique of Culture'.

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18 The Originality of Kant's Distinction between Analytic and Synthetic Judgements Henry E. Allison

In most discussions of the topic, Kant's distinction between analytic and synthetic judgements is assumed to be fundamentally akin to distinctions drawn by some of his predecessors. Leibniz's distinction between truths of reason and truths of fact and Hume's between relations of ideas and matters of fact are the two most commonly cited. If it is acknowledged at all, Kant's originality is seen to lie in his extremely controversial contention that a subset of synthetic judgements can be known to be true a priori. It must be noted, however, that this textbook conception of the Kantian distinction ignores the fact that, in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant claims that not only the problem of the synthetic a priori, 'but perhaps even the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgements, has never previously been considered' (B 19). Moreover, some three years later, in his response to Eberhard, who denied that Kant's thought is original in any significant respect, he again insists that prior to the Critique 'this manner of considering judgment has never been properly conceived.'1 To be sure, Kant also expresses himself more cautiously, acknowledging that some of his predecessors, most notably Locke, Leibniz and Crusius, came close to discovering the distinction. 2 Nevertheless, he consistently maintained the originality of the distinction as he articulated it. Not surprisingly, this claim has been challenged, first by Eberhard and then, in the twentieth century, by Arthur Lovejoy. Both insist, the latter with considerable erudition, that Kant's celebrated distinction is nothing more than a warmed-over restatement of a distinction that was already commonplace in the logical writings of the Leibniz-Wolff school. 3 The Eberhard-Lovejoy critique has, in turn, been dealt with in definitive fashion by Lewis White Beck, who champions Crusius as a genuine forerunner of Kant. 4 I believe that Beck is correct to the extent that Crusius exerted a significant (perhaps even decisive) influence on Kant,

and that he probably came closer to anticipating the distinction than any of Kant's better-known predecessors; but I do not think that one can claim much more than that. 5 My concern, however, is not with historical questions regarding relative degrees of influence or approximation; it is rather with the philosophical reasons underlying Kant's insistence on the discontinuity of his analytic-synthetic distinction with the superficially similar distinctions of his predecessors. In brief, my thesis is that Kant's claim: of originality reflects his understanding of the connection between the analytic-synthetic distinction and his conception of judgement or, more generally, his account of discursive thought. The essential point is that in order to recognize the possibility of judgements that are synthetic in Kant's sense, it is first necessary to recognize the complementary roles of concepts and sensible intuitions in human knowledge. In other words, it is necessary to recognize that human thought is discursive in the sense indicated by Kant in the Transcendental Analytic. Since, as I shall try to show, Kant's predecessors did not regard human thought as discursive in this sense (as requiring a synthesis of concept and intuition), they were not able to arrive at the Kantian conception of a synthetic judgement (whether a priori or a posteriori).6 Consequently, they can hardly be said to have arrived at Kant's analytic-synthetic distinction.

I

Discursive knowledge, which Kant sometimes characterizes simply as 'thought' (das Denken), is knowledge by means of concepts. 7 In his Lectures on Logic Kant defines a concept, in contrast to an intuition, as 'a general representation or a representation of what is common to several objects. 8 In the light of this definition, he further points out that it is a mere tautology to speak of general or common concepts, as if concepts could be divided into general, particular and singular. 'Not the concepts themselves, but merely their use can be so divided. '9 In the parallel definition in the Critique, Kant remarks that a concept, again in contrast to an intuition, refers to its object 'mediately by means of a feature (eines Merkmals) which several things may have in common' (A 320/B 377). In other words, because of its generality, a concept can only refer to an object by means of features which are also predicable of other objects falling under the same concept. In the Critique Kant remarks that a concept 'is always, as regards its form, something universal which serves as a rule' (A 106). As such, a concept functions as an organizing principle for consciousness, a means for holding a series of representations (themselves concepts) together in an 'analytic unity'. For example, to form the concept of body is to think together the features of extension, impenetrability, figure, etc. (the

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components of the concept). To apply this concept is to conceive of some actual or possible object(s) under the general description provided by these features. This is equivalent to forming a judgement with respect to the object(s). Thus Kant claims that 'the only use which the understanding can make of these concepts is to judge by means of them' (A 68/B 93), and he characterizes concepts as 'predicates of possible judgements' (A 69/B 94). Kant also distinguishes between pure (a priori) and empirical concepts and between the matter and the form of a concept; but only the latter distinction is directly relevant to our present concerns. By the content of an empirical concept, Kant means the sensible features that are thought in it as marks. These are derived from experience and correspond to the sensible properties of things. By the form of a concept, Kant means its universality or generality, which is the same for all concepts. The main point is that simply having a set of sensible impressions that are associated with one another is not the same as having a concept. The latter requires the thought of the applicability of this set of sensible impressions to a plurality of possible objects. With this thought these impressions become transformed into 'marks', i.e. partial conceptions. This thought, however, is not itself derived from experience; rather, it is produced by a series of 'logical acts' of the understanding that Kant terms 'comparison', 'reflection' and 'abstraction'.10 These involve the combining together of the common sensible features shared by diverse particulars into the above-mentioned 'analytic unity', while disregarding or abstracting from the differencesY Kant sometimes characterizes this whole process as 'reflection' (Reflexion, Uberlegung);12 consequently, the concepts produced thereby are also called 'reflected (reflectirte) representations. '13 Although discursive knowledge is defined as knowledge by means of concepts, concepts alone are not sufficient to produce knowledge. Thought must have some content to conceptualize, and since it is essentially an organizing or unifying activity, it cannot produce this content from its own resources. The content must, therefore, in some way be given to the mind. Kant's generic term for the kind of representation that performs this essential epistemic task is 'intuition' (Anschauung). In the Lectures on Logic Kant defines an intuition, in contrast to a concept, as a 'singular representation (repraesentatio singularis), ,l4 He repeats this characterization in the parallel definition in the Critique, and, as befitting its presentational function, adds that an intuition 'refers immediately to the object' (bezieht sich unmittelbar auf den Gegenstand) (A 320/B 377). An intuition can thus be characterized as a representation of an individual object, by means of which that object is present to the mind. Both the singularity and the presentational function of an intuition can be understood in terms of its immediacyY

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The above characterization is meant to apply to all kinds of intuition. Kant also insists, however, that all our, i.e. human, intuition, but not every conceivable kind, is sensible. Now 'sensibility' is the name Kant assigns to the receptive side of the mind, that is, its capacity to receive date (impressions) in so far as it is somehow 'affected by objects'. The linkage of intuition with sensibility thus means that all our intuition and, therefore, all our knowledge, depends upon the mind's capacity to receive data (impressions). By the same token, sensible intuition only provides the mind with the raw data for conceptualization, not with determinate knowledge of objects. 16 Actual knowledge requires not only that the data be given in intuition, but also that they be taken under some general description or 'recognized in a concept'. Kant expresses this clearly in the famous formula: Intuitions and concepts constitute, therefore, the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuitions without concepts, can yield knowledge. (A 501B 74) It has been frequently noted, however, that there is a tension, if not a contradiction, between Kant's claim that sensible intuition requires thought in order to yield the representation of an object and the generic definition of 'intuition' as repraesentatio singularisY The latter certainly suggests that an intuition is itself a representation of an individual object, quite apart from any conceptual determination. Perhaps the sharpest statement of the problem is by J. S. Beck, who comments in a letter to Kant: The Critique calls 'intuition' a representation that relates immediately to an object. But in fact, a representation does not become objective until it is subsumed under the categories. Since intuition similarly acquires its objective character only by means of the application of categories to it, I am in favour of leaving out that definition of 'intuition' that refers to it as a representation relating to objects. I find in intuition nothing more than a manifold accompanied by consciousness (or by the unique 'I think'), a manifold determined by the latter, in which there is as such no relation to an object. I would also like to reject the definition of 'concept' as a representation mediately related to an object. Rather, I distinguish concepts from intuitions by the fact that they are thoroughly determinate whereas intuitions are not thoroughly determinate. For both intuitions and concepts acquire objectivity only after the activity of judgment subsumes them under the pure concepts of the understanding. IS

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Kant's only extant response to this query is contained in a marginal note attached to Beck's letter: In it he remarks: To make [Bestimmung] a concept, by means of intuition, into a cognition of an object, is indeed the work of judgment; but the reference of intuition to an object in general is not. For the latter is merely the logical use of representation insofar as a representation is thought as being a cognition. When, on the other hand, a single representation is referred only to the subject, the use is aesthetic (feeling), in which case the representation cannot become a piece of knowledge. 19 Although Kant does attempt to defend his definition of 'intuition', he really seems to concede Beck's main point; for he acknowledges that, apart from being conceptualized in an act of judgement, intuitions do not really refer to or 'represent' objects at all. To be sure, Kant does suggest that, independently of judgement, an intuition refers to an 'object in general', and this calls to mind the definition of 'appearance' in the Critique as the 'undetermined object of an empirical intuition' (A 20/B 34). Nevertheless, it is clear in the present case that the assertion of a connection between intuition and an 'object in general' is merely for the purpose of logical 'classification'. In other words, it is Kant's way of distinguishing between intuitions, which become objective, i.e. represent objects, by being brought under concepts in judgements, and purely subjective or aesthetic representations (feelings), which have no cognitive function. 20 It must not be forgotten, however, that Kantian intuitions can be brought under concepts, and that when they are, they do represent particular objects. Thus, as I have argued elsewhere, it is necessary to distinguish between determinate or conceptualized and indeterminate or unconceptualized intuitions. 21 Only the former is in the full sense a repraesentatio singularis. Unfortunately, this does not exhaust the complexity or, perhaps better, the ambiguity inherent in the Kantian conception of intuition. In fact, it only applies to one of three senses in which Kant uses the term: the sense in which it refers to a particular kind of representation or mental content. In addition to this more or less official sense of 'intuition', Kant also uses the term to refer both to the object represented, the intuited, and to the act of directly representing an individual, the intuiting. In short, it is necessary to distinguish a mental content, an object, and an act sense of 'intuition' .22 Now, while it is generally clear from the context when the term is being used in the third sense, it is frequently difficult to determine whether it is being used in the first or second sense or, indeed, whether or nor Kant himself conflates the two senses. Moreover, we shall see that a resolution of this question is crucial for the proper

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understanding of the Kantian conception of a synthetic judgement. First, however, we must consider Kant's general theory of judgement.

II

As already indicated, discursive knowledge is judgemental. It is in and through judgements that we apply concepts to given data, while concepts themselves are characterized as 'predicates of possible judgements'. Kant makes all of this quite explicit when he states that 'we can reduce all acts of the understanding to judgements, and the understanding may therefore be represented as a faculty of judgement (ein Vermogen zu urtheilen) , (A 69/B 94). Accordingly, in order to understand more fully the significance of Kant's claim about the discursive nature of human cognition, it is imperative to consider his account of the nature of judgement. Kant's general account of judgement in the Critique is contained in the section entitled 'The Logical Employment of the Understanding', which serves as an introduction to the Metaphysical Deduction. His major concern here is to make explicit the connection between discursive or conceptual knowledge and judgement. This enables him to connect the pure concepts of the understanding with the forms or functions of unity in judgement. The initial claim is simply that every judgement involves an act of conceptualization and every such act involves a judgement. 23 Since this is the case, and since Kant's conception of concepts commits him to the doctrine that 'no concept is ever related to an object immediately, but to some other representation of it, be that other representation an intuition or a concept', he proceeds to define judgement as 'the mediate knowledge of an object, that is, the representation of a representation of it' (A 68/B 93). Apart from the mediated or indirect nature of the relation between concepts and objects in judgements, which is a consequence of the abstract, general nature of the concept, two points are to be noted about this definition. The first is that it implies that every judgement involves the cognition of an object, or at least the claim of such cognition. This, in turn, means that every judgement, simply qua judgement, is 'objectively valid'. Although Kant does not develop that point here, he does do so in the second edition Transcendental Deduction, where he distinguishes a judgement from a mere association of ideas, which only possesses 'subjective validity'. 24 The second is that it is perfectly general, and thus presumably applicable to analytic and synthetic judgements alike. It is followed immediately in the text by an explanation which contains a capsule account of this theory of judgement. Because of its brevity and importance, I shall quote it in full.

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In every judgment there is a concept which holds of many representations, and among them of a given representation that is immediately related to an object. Thus in the judgment, 'all bodies are divisible', the concept of the divisible applies to various other concepts, but is here applied in particular to the concept of body, and this concept again to certain intuitions [or appearances)25 that present themselves to us. These objects, therefore, are mediately represented through the concept of divisibility. Accordingly, all judgments are functions of unity among our representations; instead of an immediate representation, a higher representation, which comprises the immediate representation and various others, is used in knowing the object, and thereby much possible knowledge is collected into one. We see from Kant's example that the judgement involves two concepts, 'body' and 'divisibility', which are related both to each other and to the object judged about, that is, to the complete set of xs thought under the general description contained in the concept 'body'. Of these, the subject concept, 'body', stands in the more direct, though still not immediate, relation to the object. It does not relate to the object simpliciter (no concept can do that), but rather to an immediate representation of it. Such an immediate representation is, by definition, an intuition; so the subject concept in Kant's illustration refers directly to the }ntuition, and only mediately to the object. Roughly put, the intuition provides the sensible content for the judgement, while the concept provides the rule in accordance with which the content is determined. It is precisely by determining this content that the concept is brought into relation with the object. That is why Kant characterizes the relation between concept and object as mediate. 26 The judgement then asserts that the object so determined (the subject of the judgement) is also thought through the predicate 'divisibility'. This constitutes a second determination or conceptualization of the object, one that is mediated by the first. In other words, that which was first thought through and specified by the concept 'body' is now also thought through the 'higher' or more general representation 'divisibility'. It is this second determination to which Kant refers when he claims that in a judgement 'much knowledge is collected into one'. Presumably, the collection or unification effected by this particular judgement is of the xs thought through the concept 'body' with the other xs that may be thought through the concept 'divisibility', e.g. lines and planes. The judgement affirms that every x thought under the former concept is also thought under the latter. Kant's claim that 'all judgements are functions of unity among our representations' is intended to underscore the point that every judgement involves a unification or 'collection' of representations under a concept, that is, an act of conceptualizationY

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More detailed accounts of this same conception of judgement are to be found in many of Kant's Reflexionen. These accounts are generally intended as introductions to the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgements, but the treatment of the generic features of judgement can be considered independently of that issue. The following is the relevant portion of one of the most important of these Reflexionen: Every object is known only through predicates which we think or assert of it. Before this, any representations that may be found in us are to be regarded only as material for cognition, not as themselves cognitions. An object therefore is only a something in general which we think to ourselves through certain predicates which constitute its concept. Every judgment therefore contains two predicates which we compare with one another. 0lle of these, which constitutes the given knowledge of the object, is called the logical subject; the other, which is compared with it, is called the predicate. When I say 'a body is divisible' this means that something x, which I know through the predicates that together constitute a concept of body, I also think through the predicate of divisibility. 28 The first two sentences of this passage reiterate the previously made point about unconceptualized representations or, more generally, about all representations apart from their funtion in judgement. Such representations, Kant here suggests, are merely materials for knowledge. This account also helps to explain why Kant characteristically refers to an object, considered apart from any conceptualization of it, as a mere 'something in general' or its equivalent. Of more immediate significance, however, is the fact that Kant infers from this that every judgement must have two predicates. Certainly, this claim cannot simply be accepted as it stands. The obvious difficulty is that it applies only to categorical judgements; hypothetical and disjunctive judgements can have many more than two predicates. Nevertheless, since Kant regards these latter forms of judgement as logical compounds of categorical judgements, this is a mere detail that can be safely ignored. The crucial point is that when Kant characterizes concepts as 'predicates of possible judgements' he is not limiting their function to that of logical or grammatical predicates. If he were, he could not claim that judgements have more than one predicate. His major contention is that predicates function to determine the very content that is to be judged about. They do this by providing a general description under which this content can be thought. In so far as a concept fulfils this function, it is regarded as a 'real' rather than merely as a 'logical' predicate. Such a predicate is also called a 'determination' (Bestimmung). Thus, in his well-known critique of the ontological argument, Kant denies that existence is a real predicate or determi-

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nation. 29 He does so for the perfectly good reason that it does not add any content to the description of a thing to say that it exists. He does not, however, deny that it is a logical predicate; consequently, even existential judgements can be said to have two predicates. In the1judgement under consideration, the logical subject, 'body', functions as a real predicate. In Kant's own terms, it 'constitutes the given knowledge of the object'. In other words, it provides the initial description under which the subject = x is to be taken in the judgement. Correlatively, since the judgement is analytic, the predicate 'divisibility' is only a logical predicate; consequently it does not add any further determinations to the subject beyond those already established by the characterization of it as a body. Leaving aside for the moment the whole question of analyticity, we see that the judgement 'compares' these predicates with one another and asserts that they pertain to an identical x. It thus asserts that the same (or some, or every) x that is thought through the predicate 'body' is also thought through the predicate 'divisibility'. This is the basic Kantian schema for judgements of the categorical form, whether analytic or synthetic. Since, as previously noted, the other relational forms are logical compounds of categorical judgements, it can be taken as the Kantian schema for judgement in general. From it we can see how deeply Kant's analysis of judgement is rooted in his conception of the discursive nature of human thought.

HI We have seen that discursive knowledge is judgemental and that judgement requires both concepts and sensible intuitions. Only in so far as these two 'modes of knowledge' are related to one another in judgement do they in fact function as representations in the full sense. We have also noted, without dwelling on the point, that sensible intuition is not the only (logically) possible kind of intuition. It follows from this that discursive knowing is not the only (logically) possible kind of knowing. In other words, a non-discursive intellect, which cognizes its 'objects' by means of a non-sensible, i.e. intellectual, intuition is at least logically possible. Kant terms such a mind 'intuitive'. Consequently, his claim that human knowing is discursive is equivalent to the denial that it is intuitive. This rescues the discursivity thesis from the charge of triviality to which it has seemed to many to be condemned. Kant's fullest and most suggestive account of the difference between the manner of cognition of an intuitive intellect and that of our own discursive intellect, with its reliance upon sensible intuition for data, is contained in the Critique of Judgement. 3D A discursive understanding is there said to operate by means of an 'analytic universal'. This is the

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familiar general concept or abstract universal. Such a concept is distinct from the particulars falling under it, and can determine nothing with respect to the way in which these particulars differ from one another. In fact, it is formed precisely by abstracting from these differences. As a result of its mode of origination, an analytic universal can determine particulars only as instances of a kind, and not as unique individuals. Moreover, it can only do even this in so far as the sensible intuition of the particular is subsumed under it. This, of course, occurs through an act of judgement; so analytic universals function as 'predicates of possible judgements'. Finally, since it requires sensible intuition, an analytic universal can only serve as a vehicle for the cognition of things as they appear. By contrast, an intuitive intellect represents its object by means of a 'synthetic universal', which is another name for an intellectual intuition. Unlike its discursive counterpart, a synthetic universal provides a representation of a whole as a whole: it cognizes its object as a fully determinate, unique individual, rather than merely as an instance of a kind. Thus, to know an object intuitively is to know it directly or through itself, not as thought under some general description. It is also to know it as it is in itself. Although the latter is crucial for the understanding of Kant's overall position, particularly for his conception of a noumenon as the object of an intuitive intellect, for our present purposes the main point is simply that such an intellect has no need to conceptualize the content given to it. In fact, nothing is 'given' to it. Its act of intuition is at the same time the creation of the object intuited. It is, therefore, to be described as 'archetypal' in contrast to our 'ectypal', discursive intellect. It should be clear from this that the concept of an intuitive intellect is only applicable to God. The contrast between discursive and intuitive knowledge is thus, at bottom, a contrast between the human and the divine or infinite intellect. Kant thought it possible to draw this contrast because we can form a problematic idea of an infinite intellect. The ensuing idea may be empty, but it is at least coherent, and this is enough to establish the logical (although not the real) possibility of such an intellect. The main function of this conception in the Critique is to undermine the assumption that our 'way of knowing' is the only possible way, and in so doing to drive a 'critical' wedge between the designated subjective conditions of human knowledge and conditions of things as they are in themselves, independently of these subjective conditions. In a word, it serves as a heuristic device in support of Kant's idealistic stance. I would also like to suggest, however, that it serves another purpose, albeit one that Kant never makes explicit. This is to provide a model for the conception of knowledge that is shared by all non-critical, i.e. transcendentally realistic, philosophical positions. I have argued else-

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where that the label 'transcendental realism' is applicable to all noncritical positions, and that transcendental realism, in all its forms, is committed to what can be called a 'theocentric model of knowledge'. 31 This does not mean that the transcendental realist is committed to the absurd view that the human mind is actually an intuitive intellect in the sense here designated. The point is rather that the theocentric conception functions as a normative model to which transcendental realists appeal, either implicitly or explicitly, in their accounts of human knowledge. That is why Kant's main predecessors were not able to provide an adequate analysis of the discursive nature of human thought, which, in turn, made it impossible for them to draw a clear distinction between analytic and synthetic judgements. In what follows, I shall try to illustrate this with respect to both the empiricists and the rationalists. (A) The empiricists

Of the thinkers usually grouped under this heading, Locke is clearly the one who comes closest to anticipating Kant's claim regarding the discursivity of human knowledge. Unlike Berkeley and Hume, he at least allows that there are general ideas, although he does frequently conflate these ideas with images. 32 Indeed, at first glance, the use to which the mind on Locke's account puts its general ideas seems to be akin to the use to which Kant claims the understanding puts its concepts. Certainly, a Lockian general idea, which is essentially the idea of a sort, can be described as a vehicle whereby 'much possible knowledge is collected into one' (A 69/B 93). Nevertheless, a closer look reveals that Lockian general ideas differ significantly in both nature and function from Kantian concepts. Kant himself points to these differences in the well-known passage where he remarks that, whereas Leibniz 'intellectualized appearances', Locke, 'according to his system of noogony [Noogonie] ... sensualized all concepts of the understanding, i.e. interpreted them as nothing more than empirical or abstracted concepts of reflection' (A 271/ B 327). The specific target of Kant's attack here is not so much Locke's tendency to conflate ideas and images as his failure to recognize a set of a priori concepts derived from the very nature of the understanding. Implicit in all of this, however, and certainly suggested by Kant's selfconscious use of the neologism 'noogony', is the claim that Locke failed to recognize the true role of conceptualization in knowledge. The point is that Lockian general ideas are not required for the representation of objects in the way in which concepts, both pure and empirical, are for Kant. In Kantian terms, a Lockian general idea does not function as an Erkenntnisgrund, that is, it does not serve as a rule through which an 'analytic unity' is produced and the mind is for the first time provided with a determinate representation of an object. On the contrary, since

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ex hypothesi all Lockian general ideas are derived by abstraction from experience, it follows that both their formation and their subsequent use presuppose a fund of pre- or non-conceptual knowledge, which is then further articulated by means of sortal concepts. This primary knowledge is provided by the so-called simple ideas of sensation and reflection, all of which are held to be 'adequate', that is, to 'perfectly represent those archetypes which the mind supposes them to be taken from'. 33 By contrast, our sortal ideas ('complex ideas of substances') are held to be ineluctably partial and one-sided because they are all based upon a limited experience, and are designed to meet our classificatory needs rather than to reflect the real nature of things. 34 For all of these reasons, but particularly because Lockian simple ideas are deemed to be given independently of any conceptualization on the part of the understanding, Locke's conception of knowledge must be said to be intuitive in the Kantian sense rather than discursive. Given this account of Locke, as seen through Kantian spectacles, it should not be necessary to deal at any length with the other empiricists. Clearly, the paradigm of knowledge for both Berkeley and Hume is the immediate apprehension of given mental contents (impressions or ideas). Consequently, their conceptions of knowledge must be regarded as intuitive in the same sense and for the same reasons as Locke's. In fact, as already noted, these thinkers go beyond Locke in the direction of intuitivity by rejecting abstract general ideas altogether. The closest that they come to the Kantian notion of applying concepts to given data is their crude accounts of fitting ideas to impressions or sensible particulars. Hume even insists that every 'idea' is nothing more than a 'copy' of a corresponding impression. As such, it is itself something that one can immediately inspect or intuit and, therefore, not at all a concept in the Kantian sense. (B) The rationalists

The situation with regard to the rationalists is both more complex and more interesting. Although Descartes is notorious for his doctrine of the divine creation of eternal truths, and one can find a perfectly explicit, self-conscious appeal to an intuitive, theocentric model of knowledge in Spinoza and Malebranche,35 the most relevant representative of this tradition for our purposes is Leibniz. The fundamental difference between the Leibnizian and the Kantian conceptions of knowledge is already evident from the fact that for the former the predicate of every true proposition is contained in the concept of the subject (the famous 'predicate in notion principle'). As is frequently noted, this makes all propositions, even those expressing contingent truths, analytic in the Kantian sense. Of itself, this precludes the possibility of claiming that Leibniz anticipated the analytic-synthetic distinction. 36

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It is not so obvious, however, that Leibniz denies the discursive nature of human thought, as seems to be suggested by Kant's charge that he 'intellectualized appearances' (A 2711B 327). In fact, it has been argued that in spite of certain inconsistencies in his own approach, Leibniz actually anticipated Kant's distinction between concepts and intuition. In support of this claim, it is noted that Leibniz has different criteria for the clarity and distinctness of concepts and perceptions. 37 Moreover, as Margaret Wilson points out, Leibniz, unlike Descartes, was concerned with 'the problem of recognizing represented particulars - with concept "application" or the use of "kind terms" in the usual sense'. 38 Although this is all quite correct, the fact remains that, when viewed from Kant's perspective, Leibniz can still be said to operate with an intuitive rather than a discursive model of knowledge. This becomes clear if one notes the close connection between Kant's characterization of a synthetic universal and Leibniz's conception of a complete concept of an individual substance, which is the true starting point of his account of knowledge. By definition, a Leibnizian complete concept completely determines an individual, which is just what Kant claims for the problematic synthetic universal. Admittedly, Leibniz, like Kant, insists that only the divine mind is capable of such a 'concept'; but whereas Kant uses the notion of a synthetic universal as a point of contrast to the human (discursive) way of knowing, Leibniz uses it as a norm or model in terms of which human knowledge is analysed. Moreover, such a use of this conception underlies his whole account of concept application and the recognition of particulars. This is reflected in the fact that Leibniz regards all general (kind) and relational concepts not only as abstract, but as incomplete. 39 General concepts, for Leibniz as for Kant, are purported to encompass what is common to a number of particulars. The problem is that, in the Leibnizian universe, where, in virtue of its complete concept, every substance is qualitatively as well as numerically distinct from every other, thcre are no properties that, strictly speaking, are common to two or more substances. There are merely similarities, which are reified into identities by the imagination because of the incapacity of the senses to perceive minute differences. Similarly, Leibniz also maintains that relations such as place, space and time have no reality apart from the individual relata. In contemplating them in abstraction from their relata, the mind is dealing merely with entia rationis. 40 This does not make such concepts into fictions; for these products of the understanding, like general concepts, have some basis in the nature of things. It does, however, entail that they are incapable of serving as vehicles for adequate knowledge, and that they are in principle eliminable from an account of the universe. The Monado!ogy, of course, is just such an account. The same model underlies Leibniz's account of the empirical knowl-

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edge of individuals. In opposition to Locke, who held that general ideas are formed by abstraction from the primary sensible knowledge of individuals, Leibniz denies that we have any such sensory knowledge of individuals from which to abstract. Abstraction, for Leibniz, proceeds from species to genus, not from individual to species. What is taken as the sensory awareness of an individual (a determinate empirical intuition for Kant) is really the confused thought of a kind. This is because for Leibniz 'individuality includes infinity, and only he who is capable of comprehending it can have the knowledge of the principle of individuation of this or that thing'. 41 Correlatively, since Leibniz views space and time as entia rationis rather than as conditions of human sensibility, he denies that they are capable of individuating objects. By contrast, for Kant such as 'intellectualist' position entails the denial of the possibility of the empirical knowledge of individuals and thus of the possibility of synthetic a posteriori judgements. Recall that for Kant particular objects are given in sensible intuition and recognized or thought through concepts. But with his analysis of sensory awareness, which is itself inseparable from his conception of a complete concept (as alone capable of individuating), Leibniz effectively denies both of these points. This, I take it, is the real force of Kant's contention that Leibniz failed to distinguish between sensibility and understanding, and that he regarded sensory awareness as confused thought. 42 It also explains why Leibniz, like Locke (not to mention Berkeley and Hume), was unable to provide an adequate account of the discursive nature of human thought.

IV We are now in a position to examine Kant's distinction between analytic and synthetic judgements as well as his claim of originality for this distinction. Unfortunately, neither its connection with his theory of judgement nor its originality is readily apparent from the well-known formulations in the Introduction to the Critique. Kant there provides two different, but purportedly equivalent, versions of the distinction. According to the first version, analytic judgements are those in which 'the predicate B belongs to the subject A, as something which is (covertly) contained in this concept A'. Equivalently, they are described as those in which the connection of the predicate with the subject is 'thought through identity'. Synthetic judgements, by contrast, are those in which 'B lies outside the concept A, although it does stand in connection with it.' The connection between subject and predicate in such judgements is thus said to be 'thought without identity' (A 6-7/B 10-11). According to the second version, which follows immediately in the text, the distinction is between merely explicative (analytic) and ampliative (synthetic) judge-

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ments. The former, Kant maintains, add 'nothing through the predicate to the concept of the subject, merely breaking it up into those constituent concepts that have all along been thought in it, although confusedly'. The latter, on the other hand, 'add to the concept of the subject a predicate which has not been in any wise thought in it, and which no analysis could possibly extract from it' (A 7/B 11). Only much later in the Critique does Kant make explicit what is implicit in his entire discussion, viz. that the law of contradiction is the principle of all analytic judgements. 43 Far from indicating any great originality, the first version seems to support Eberhard's contention, summarily dismissed by Kant, that the distinction is equivalent to the traditional contrast between identical and non-identical judgements. 44 In addition, it provides no hint as to how syntheticity is to be understood, except as the negation of analyticity. To some extent this latter difficulty is remedied in the second version, where syntheticity, the real locus of Kant's concern, 'wears the trousers'. Even here, however, Kant does not indicate in what sense and by what means we 'extend' our knowledge in synthetic judgements; as a result, the actual basis of the distinction is not made apparent. Moreover, the same can be said about the formulations in the Prolegomena and On a Discovery, both of which closely parallel the second version in the Critique. 45 A much more helpful account is contained in a generally neglected note in the Lectures on Logic, where Kant introduces the contrast between a formal and a material extension of knowledge. 46 The basic idea is that analytic judgements extend knowledge in the former and synthetic judgements in the latter sense. The characterization of analytic judgements as involving a formal extension of knowledge requires a distinction between such judgements and tautologies, which, unfortunately, Kant does not consistently maintain. 47 For our present purposes, however, the most important aspect of this formulation is that it helps to clarify the connection between the analytic-synthetic distinction and Kant's theory of judgement. As we shall see, this is ultimately because the notion of a material extension of knowledge must be understood in terms of the previously discussed relationship of concept and intuition in a judgement. Let us first consider how analytic judgements provide a formal extension of knowledge. Such an extension occurs through the clarification or explication of what is merely implicit in a concept. This involves the uncovering of implications of which one may not have been previously aware, but which are derivable by strictly logical means from a given concept. Once again, Kant takes 'All bodies are extended' as his example of an analytic judgement. Moroever, as he does in many of the Refiexionen dealing with the topic, but not in the Critique itself, he provides a schematic rendering of the judgement which makes his pos-

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ition quite clear. As he succinctly puts it: 'To every x to which appertains the concept of body (a + b) appertains also extension (b).'4s. This is the basic formula for an analytic judgement; it shows that in such judgements the predicate (b) is related to the object = x (the subject of the judgement) simply in virtue of the fact that it is already contained (as a mark) in the concept of the subject. Analytic judgements, therefore, have a logical subject, and, as Kant's example indicates, they can also have a real subject; but since the truth or falsity of the judgement can be determined merely by analysing the concept of the subject, the reference to the object = x is otiose. 49 That is why it is perfectly possible to form analytic judgements about non-existent, even impossible, objects, and why all analytic judgements are known a priori. In his response to Eberhard, Kant supplements this by introducing what amounts to a distinction between immediately and mediately analytic judgements. 50 'All bodies are extended' is an instance of the former. It is immediately analytic because 'extension', together with 'figure', 'impenetrability', etc., is a mark of the concept of body or, in the scholastic terminology interjected into the debate by Eberhard, part of the 'logical essence' of the concept. By contrast, 'All bodies are divisible' is a mediately analytic judgement. The difference stems from the fact that the predicate ('divisibility') is not part of the concept (logical essence) of body, but, instead, of one of its constituent concepts. In other words, it is a mark of a mark. As such, the judgement rests on an inference, and in that respect can be said to extend our knowledge. Kant's main point, however, is that this does not constitute an essential difference. In each case the predicate is derived from the concept of the subject by a process of analysis, and thus on the basis of the principle of contradiction. In each case, then, the extension of our knowledge is merely formal. It should be clear, even from this cursory account, that Kant's conception of analyticity is of a piece with his basic thesis regarding the discursive nature of human thought. In particular, it rests upon his notion of a concept (analytic universal) as a set of marks (themselves concepts), which are thought together in an 'analytic unity', and which can serve as a ground for the recognition of objects. These marks collectively constitute the intension of a concept. One concept is 'contained in' another if and only if it is itself either a mark of the concept or a mark of one of its marks. Unlike most contemporary conceptions of analyticity, Kant's is thus thoroughly intensional. As Beck quite correctly points out, it rests upon the doctrine of the fixity of a concept, that is, on the thesis that the marks of a concept can be sufficiently determined (even without an explicit definition) for the purpose of analysis,51 The notorious difficulties that arise concerning analytic judgements involving empirical concepts such as 'water', which we need not consider here, all stem from the difficulty of sufficiently determining such concepts. 52

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As already noted, a synthetic judgement involves what Kant terms a 'material extension' of knowledge. The example of such a judgement given in the Lectures on Logic is 'All bodies have attraction'. This is rendered schematically as 'For every x to which appertains the concept of body (a + b) appertains also attraction (C).'53 Like its analytic counterpart, this judgement asserts a connection between the predicate (c) and the subject (x), which is thought through the concept (a + b). Specifically, it asserts that every (x), known under the general description contained in the concept (a + b), also possesses the additional property (c). Unlike its analytic counterpart, however, it asserts this independently of any direct connection between the predicate and the concept of the subject. To be sure, in the judgement the predicate (c) is connected with the subject concept (a + b); but the connection is grounded in, and mediated by, the reference of both to the identical object (x), which serves as the subject of the judgement. It therefore extends our knowledge of x (in this case all x s) in the sense that it provides a determination or property of x that is not already contained in the concept (a + b). This is what is meant by a 'material extension'. Kant attempts to explicate this further by suggesting that the synthetic judgement contains a 'determination' and the analytic judgement only a 'logical predicate'.54 It will be recalled that by the former is meant a real predicate, that is, a property that really pertains to the subject of the judgement, while by the latter is meant a concept that is predicated of the concept of the subject in the judgement. Since Kant maintains both that existential judgements are synthetic and that 'existence' is not a real predicate, this account obviously cannot be accepted as it stands. An existential judgement is synthetic, not because its logical predicate, 'existence', is a real predicate or determination, but rather because its logical subject is one, and the judgement simply asserts the existence of an object corresponding to this subject. Now, it might also seem that in analytic judgements, such as 'All bodies are divisible', the logical predicate, 'divisibility', is likewise a real predicate. After all, it is a property of every x that answers to the general description thought in the concept of body; indeed, this is just what the judgement asserts. Nevertheless, the point is that in the analytic judgement the predicate is related to the subject (x) simply in virtue of the fact that it is already contained (either immediately or mediately) in the concept of the subject. Thus the 'reality' of the predicate does not come into consideration in the judgement. In synthetic judgements, however, the reference to the object (x) and, therefore, the reality of the predicate is just the point at issue. Consequently, such judgements make an extra-conceptual claim. That is why the question of how such judgements can be known a priori is so perplexing. Finally, since it makes an extra-conceptual claim, every synthetic judge-

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ment (of theoretical reason) contains a relation of its constituent concepts to intuition. Perhaps the central claim of Kant's theory of knowledge is that this relation is necessary in order to 'ground', i.e. make possible, a material extension of knowledge. The reason for this is to be found in the very nature of discursive thought. We have seen that concepts, as general representations, cannot relate directly to objects. The relation must always be mediated by the relation of the concept to another representation, and ultimately to one that is in a mediate relation to the object. Such a representation is an intuition, and its epistemic function is to present the 'object', or, better, the material for thinking the object, to the mind. This requirement entails that we can never determine simply by means of an inspection of the constituent marks of a concept (analysis) whether or not the concept is empty, that is, whether or not there are any objects falling under the general description contained in the concept. In the terms of the present discussion, which are those of the dispute with Eberhard rather than of the Critique, we cannot determine whether the concept, which always functions as a predicate in a judgement, serves as a real or merely as a logical predicate. This can only be determined by an appeal to intuition; and this is because a judgement which connects a real predicate with an object (a synthetic jUdgement) does so by relating the predicate to the intuition of the object. Only by this means is a material extension of knowledge possible for a discursive intelligence. 55 It follows from the above analysis that in order to distinguish between analytic and synthetic judgements one must recognize a class of judgements that involve a material extension of knowledge. This, of itself, precludes both Leibniz and Hume: the former because his 'predicate in notion' principle undercuts the contrast between a formal and a material extension of knowledge (it renders all synthetic judgements 'mediately analytic'); the latter because he explicitly denies the possibility of a material extension (a posteriori as well as a priori). 56 It also follows that in order to account for the possibility of material extension, one must first recognize the role of sensible intuition within judgement. Since Kant's predecessors, both empiricist and rationalist, did not recognize this role, they were not able to account for this possibility. Thus, in spite of the fact that some of them, most notably Crusius, saw that many judgements require an extra-logical grounding or principle, they did not have a clear conception of a synthetic judgement in the Kantian sense. At most, they realized that not all judgements fit the model of analyticity subscribed to by Leibniz. But it is one thing to realize that not all judgements are analytic and quite another to offer an adequate account of those that are not. This, I take it, is why Kant could justifiably claim to have been the first to draw the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgements, while at the same time acknowledging that others came close to arriving at it.

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Notes 1. On a Discovery, Kants gesammelte Schriften, vol. VIII, p. 244. The KantEberhard Controversy, ed. and trans. Henry E. Allison (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), p. 154. 2. Cf. Prolegomena, §3, Kants gesammelte Schriften, vol. IV, p. 270, where Kant acknowledges finding 'einen Wink zu dieser Eintheilung in Locke'; On a Discovery, vol. VIII, pp. 245-6; The Kant-Eberhard Controversy, pp. 155-6, where he again mentions Locke as well as Crusius and the Wolffian logician Johann Peter Reusch; and the Vorarbeiten zur Schrift gegen Eberhard, vol. XX, p. 376, where he suggest that perhaps Leibniz understood nothing more with his distinction between the principles of contradiction and sufficient reason than his own analytic-synthetic distinction. 3. Arthur O. Lovejoy, 'Kant's antithesis of dogmatism and criticism', in Kant: Disputed Questions, ed. Moltke S. Gram (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967), pp. 105-30. I discuss Eberhard's views in The Kant-Eberhard Controversy, pp.36-42. 4. Lewis White Beck, 'Lovejoy as a critic of Kant' and 'Analytic and synthetic judgments before Kant', in Essays on Kant and Hume (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 61-100; esp. 92-4 for the discussion of Crusius. 5. As Lewis White Beck points out, J. S. Beck wrote to Kant in 1793 that Crusius's Weg zur Gewissheit, §260, provides a better indication of the analyticsynthetic distinction than the passages Kant had cited from Locke (Kants gesammelte Schriften, vol. XI, pp. 444-5). Crusius there argues against Wolffian dogmatism that the principle of contradiction is not the single principle of human cognition; in particular, he maintains that it is not sufficient to account for 'the constitution [Einrichtung] of the concepts themselves'. Here, as elsewhere, his main example is the causal principle. He contends that the proposition that something came into existence without a cause is absurd but not self-contradictory. As many scholars, including Beck, have noted, Crusius is thus a source of the essential lesson which Kant claimed to have learned from Hume and which supposedly awakened him from his 'dogmatic slumber'. At the very least, Crusius must be credited with a clear recognition of the need to provide an extra-logical principle for the explanation of some a priori truths. Presumably, this is what Kant himself had in mind when he remarked that Crusius 'only refers to metaphysical propositions which cannot be demonstrated through the principle of contradiction' (On a Discovery, vol. VIII, p. 246; The Kant-Eberhard Controversy, p. 156). Kant's complaint is that Crus ius did not proceed from this insight to the formulation of a universal distinction between kinds of judgements. His point could also be put by stating that Crusius hit upon the problem of the synthetic a priori without first having a clear conception of the nature of synthetic judgements in general. This is consistent with the fact that Kant's criticism of Crusius is essentially the same as his criticism of Hume, viz. he conflates subjective with objective necessity. For a comprehensive treatment of Kant's relationship to Crusius see Heinz Heimsoeth, Metaphysik und Kritik bei Chr. A. Crusius, Schriften der Konigsberger Gelehrten Gesellschaft, Heft 3 (Berlin, 1926). 6. The general point that Kant's predecessors did not regard knowledge as discursive in Kant's sense is argued by M. Glouberman, 'Conceptuality: an essay in retrieval', Kant-Studien 4 (1979), 383-408. He does not, however, relate the issue to the analytic-synthetic distinction or to the question of Kant's originality. 7. Lectures on Logic, §1, Kants gesammelte Schriften, vol. IX, p. 91. 8. ibid.

Critical Assessments 343 9. ibid. 10. ibid., §6, pp. 94-5. 11. ibid., p. 95. 12. ibid., §5, p. 94. Cf. Reflexionen 2876 and 2878, Kants gesammelte Schriften, vol. XVI, pp. 555 and 557. 13. Lectures on Logic, §1, p. 91. 14. ibid. 15. This is diametrically opposed to the interpretation advanced by Jaakko Hintikka, 'On Kant's notion of intuition (Anschauung)" in The First Critique, Reflections on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, ed. Terence Penelhum and J. J. MacIntosh (Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1969), pp. 38-53, and related papers. Following Frege, Hintikka calls attention to the fact that in the Lectures on Logic Kant defines 'intuition' simply as a singular representation, and that he nowhere affirms a necessary connection between intuition and sensibility. An intuition is thus understood essentially as a singular representation corresponding to a singular term; immediacy is treated as a mere corollary of singularity. Now Hintikka is quite correct with regard to the question of the connection between intuition and sensibility, but it does not follow from this (as he seems to assume) that immediacy is not a defining characteristic of a Kantian intuition. The key point is that even non-sensible, i.e. intellectual, intuitions must be conceived of as presenting their object immediately to the mind. Thus, despite Kant's definition in the Lectures on Logic, singularity is not really a sufficient criterion for an intuition in the Kantian sense, even when the notion is divorced from any connection with sensibility. Hintikka's denigration of the immediacy criterion has also been criticized from a quite different perspective, and with no reference to the notion of an intellectual intuition, by Charles Parsons, 'Kant's philosophy of arithmetic', in Philosophy, Science and Method, ed. Sidney Morgenbesser, Patrick Suppes and Morton White (New York: St Martin's Press, 1969), esp. pp. 570-1, and Kirk Dalles Wilson, 'Kant on intuition', Philosophical Quarterly 25 (1975), 247-65. 16. Interestingly enough, this whole issue is glossed over by Hintikka. He argues (op. cit., pp. 46ff.) that since the connection between intuition and sensibility is only established in the Transcendental Aesthetic, any reference to intuition in portions of the Critique that precede the Aesthetic either textually (the Introduction) or chronologically (the Transcendental Doctrine of Method) can be interpreted without any reference to sensibility. The motivation for such a reading is to find in the Critique a conception of syntheticity, and, more particularly, an account of the role of intution in mathematics, which is devoid of all of the 'psychological' implications which, Hintikka assumes, arise as soon as intuition is understood in connection with sensibility. The point which Hintikka ignores, however, in this effort to modernize, i.e. de-psychologize, Kant, is the connection between sensibility and discursive knowledge. 17. Most recently by Manley Thompson, 'Singular terms and intuitions in Kant's epistemology', Review of Metaphysics 26/2 (December 1972), 314-43. 18. Beck's letter to Kant, 11 November 1791, Kants gesammelte Schriften, vol. XI, p. 310. English translation in Arnulf Zweig, Kant, Philosophical Correspondence, 1759-99 (Chicago University Press, 1967), pp. 180-1. Beck repeats essentially the same point in his letter to Kant of 31 May 1792. 19. Zweig, Correspondence, p. 181. 20. Cf. Critique of Pure Reason, B 66, Critique of Judgement, Introduction, VII, Kants gesammelte Schriften, vol. VI, p. 189. 21. The Kant-Eberhard Controversy, pp. 80-2, and 'Transcendental schema-

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tism and the problem of the synthetic a priori', Dialectica 35, no. 12 (1981), 68-73. In these places, however, I have argued for the necessity of making the distinction in the case of pure intuition (the central text being B 160 note, where Kant distinguishes between a 'form of intuition' and a 'formal intuition'). The present claim is that a parallel distinction is required for empirical intuition as well. 22. This threefold distinction was suggested to me by Lewis White Beck in his comments on an earlier version of this essay. 23. Cf. H. 1. Paton, Kant's Metaphysic of Experience (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1936), vol. I, p. 251. 24. Critique of Pure Reason B 142. If one is to make any sense of the claim that every judgement is objectively valid, it is obviously necessary to distinguish between objective validity and truth, as Kant himself does at A 760/B 788. For a discussion of this issue see Gerold Prauss, Erscheinung bei Kant (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1971), pp. 86-87, and Rainer Stuhlmann-Laeisz, Kants Logik (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1976), pp. 28-53. 25. Following Paton, op. cit., p.253 no. 3, Kant's own Handexemplar and Raymond Schmidt, I am assuming that the text here should read Anschauungen, not Erscheinungen. 26. It should be noted that this interpretation is independent of the resolution of the textual question referred to in the preceding note. This is because 'intuition' in the passage under discussion must be taken to mean 'the intuited', which for Kant is always an appearance. They key point is rather the claim that within the judgement the concept is related to a 'given representation' that is itself immediately related to the object. This makes intuition, qua representation, part of the content of the judgement. 27. Cf. Paton, op. cit., pp. 245-8. 28. Refiexion 4634, Kants gesammelte Schriften, vol. XVII, pp. 616--17. Similar accounts are contained in numerous other Refiexionen, especially those in the 'Lose Blatter aus dem Duisburgischen Nachlass', vol. XVII, pp. 643-73. This particular Refiexion is cited by Paton, op. cit., p. 251 n. 3. 29. Critique of Pure Reason, A 598/B 626ff. 30. Critique of Judgement, §77, Kants gesammelte Schriften, vol. VI, pp.407-1O. 31. 'Kant's refutation of realism', Dialectica 30, no. 2/3 (1976), 224-53. 32. This point has been noted frequently by critics going back at least as far as Leibniz. For a contemporary and balanced discussion of the issue, in which Locke is compared to Berkeley, see 1. L. Mackie, Problems from Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 115ff. 33. Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Bk II, chap. XXXI, sec. 1. 34. This theme runs throughout the Essay. It is discussed at all those places where Locke contrasts real and nominal essence. See especially Bk II, chap. XXXI, and Bk III, chaps. III and VI. 35. For a discussion of Kant's critique of Spinoza (and Malebranche) on this point see my 'Kant's critique of Spinoza', in The Philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, ed. Richard Kennington, Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy 7 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1980), pp. 199-228. 36. In the New Essays on Human Understanding, Leibniz does seem to recognize a class of judgements called 'disparates' which are exceptions to this principle. These are defined (Bk IV, chap. II, 1) as 'propositions which say that the object of one idea is not the object of another idea; for instance Warmth is not

Critical Assessments 345 the same thing as colour.' Leibniz remarks that such propositions can be established with certainty without proof, ie. reduction to identity. It is not clear, however, whether he regarded them as reducible to identity. The issue is discussed by Margaret Wilson, 'On Leibniz's explication of "necessary truth" " Studia Leibnitiana Supplementa 3 (1969), 50-63, and by Beck, 'Analytic and synthetic judgments before Kant', op. cit., pp. 87-8. My own view is that such judgements (propositions) constitute an anomaly for Leibniz, not that they suggest that he recognized judgements that are synthetic in Kant's sense. 37. Cf. Robert McRae, Leibniz: Perception, Apperception, and Thought (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1976), pp. 126-9; Margaret Wilson, 'Confused ideas', in Essays on the Philosophy of Leibniz, Rice University Studies in Philosophy (1978), pp. 123-5. 38. Wilson, op. cit., p. 126. 39. Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, Bk III, chap. VI, §19, and chap. VII, §1. The point is discussed by McRae, op. cit., pp. 83-9. 40. Leibniz's main account of this topic is in the Fifth Letter to Clarke, §47. The interpretation adopted here is suggested by Hide Ishiguro's account of what she terms Leibniz's 'nominalist thesis', 'Leibniz's theory of the ideality of relations', in Leibniz: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Harry G. Frankfurt (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1972), esp. pp. 200-3. 41. Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, Bk III, chap. III, §6. The point is discussed by McRae, op. cit., p. 75. 42. Cf. Critique of Pure Reason, A 43-4/B 60-1, A 270-21B 326--8; On a Discovery, Kants gesaammelte Schriften, vol. VIII, p. 220; The Kant-Eberhard Controversy, pp. 78 and 134. 43. Critique of Pure Reason, A 150-2/B 189-91. 44. Cf. The Kant-Eberhard Controversy, pp. 37-8. 45. Prolegomena, §2, Kants gesammelte Schriften, vol. IV, pp.266--7; On a Discovery, vol. VIII, p. 228; The Kant-Eberhard Controversy, p. 141. 46. Lectures on Logic, §36, Kants gesammelte Schriften, vol. IX, p. 111. 47. For example, in The Progress of Metaphysics, Kants gesammelte Schriften, vol. XX, p. 322, he explicitly distinguishes between analytic judgements, which are grounded in identity, and identical judgements. However, in Lectures on Logic, §37, he treats tautologies as a subset of analytic judgements. For a discussion of this issue see H. 1. de Vleeschauwer, La Deduction transcendantale dans l'ceuvre de Kant (Paris and the Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1934-7), vol. III, p.406. 48. Lectures on Logic, §36, Kants gesammelte Schriften, vol. IX, p. 111. 49. As noted by Beck, 'Can Kant's synthetic judgements be made analytic?', in Kant: Disputed Questions, p. 230. Kant himself makes the point in Refiexion 4674, Kants gesammelte Schriften, vol. XVII, p. 645, where he remarks that in analytic judgements 'Das x Wit weg.' 50. On a Discovery, Kants gesammelte Schriften, vol. VIII, pp. 239ff.; The Kant-Eberhard Controversy, pp. 49-50, 141ff. 51. Beck, 'Can Kant's synthetic judgements be made analytic?', op. cit., p. 231, and 'Kant's theory of definition', op. cit., p. 225. 52. Cf. Critique of Pure Reason A 728/B 756, where Kant asks: 'What useful purpose could be served by defining an empirical concept, such, for instance, as that of water? When we speak of water and its properties, we do not stop short at what is thought in the word "water" but proceed to experiments.' As Beck notes in his comments upon the passage: 'Description suffices; definition which aims at being more than nominal is a useless presumption' ('Kant's theory of

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definition', op. cit., p. 223). Kant's point seems to be that judgements involving such empirical concepts are normally not analytic; but if one does explicitly endeavour to make an analytic judgement, i.e. appeal to meanings, one can only appeal to a purely nominal definition: 'what is thought in the word'. This makes the judgement arbitrary. One is perhaps tempted to say that judgements about words in contrast to the intension of concepts are empirical claims about linguistic usage. Kant, however, does not seem to have addressed that possibility. 53. Lectures on Logic, §36, Kants gesammelte Schriften, vol. IX, p. 111. 54. ibid. / 55. Cf. Kant's letter to Reinhold, 12 March 1789, Kants gesammelte Schriften, vol. XI, p. 38; The Kant-Eberhard Controversy, p. 164. The claim that synthetic judgements for Kant involve the predication of concepts of intuitions was first made by Moltke S. Gram, Kant, Ontology and the A Priori (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968), pp. 65-92, and again in 'The crisis of syntheticity: the Kant-Eberhard controversy', Kant-Studien 2 (1980), 155-80.

19 Can Kant's Synthetic Judgements be made Analytic? Lewis White Beck

In the sixties, when Kant had first drawn his distinction between analytic and synthetic judgements, he made the following note: 'If one had the entire concept of which the notions of the subject and predicate are compartes, synthetic judgements would change into analytic. It is a question of how much arbitrariness there is. '1 This question has been asked repeatedly since that time, and the clear and unmistakable trend of the answers has been that the decision whether a specific judgement is analytic or synthetic is arbitrary or at least is dependent upon variable conditions of how much the judger knows about the subject of the judgement and on their arbitrary decision of the choice and formula of their definitions. In recent discussions of the distinction, analytic judgements are those that follow from explicit definitions by the rules of logic; and, definitions are nominal or stipulative, to some degree arbitrary. If it is further argued, as is often done, that all a priori judgements are analytic, it follows that the distinction between a priori and a posteriori is likewise a shifting, arbitrary distinction. Kant, who first asked the question, seems to have decided very early that the line of demarcation between these two types of judgement was not variable or arbitrary. The purpose of this essay is to enquire into the reasons for his decision and to indicate some of its implications for his philosophy as a whole.

I Analytic and synthetic judgements Judgement, for Kant, is a synthesis of representations, having objective validity. The synthesis must be in accord with some objective, normative rule, and not merely illustrate some contingent law of association. A

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representation, functioning in the synthesis of judgement, is not just a brute given mental content, but is a mark of an object, its meaning fixed by a rule. Abstraction from the given complexity of representations in consciousness, and the generalization that a particular kind of representation is the mark of a particular kind of object, are necessary in converting raw representations into marks which can be manipulated in knowing. 2 Concepts are such marks functioning in knowledge; they are representations under an analytical (abstractive) unity through which they are discursive and not merely given sense contents. As concepts, they are not given; they are made concepts by being involved in a special attitude of intention and interpretation of data. All that we directly have of an object is such marks. Our original consciousness is a congeries of raw materials for concepts, and the business of consciousness is to refine and organize these representations, assigning to some of them the role of subjects and to others that of predicates in judgements which are their objectively valid syntheses;3 only as predicates of possible judgements do Vorstellungen serve as concepts, and only as containing representations under themselves do concepts refer to objects.4 Besides the analytical unity by which hic et nunc representations are made to serve as marks under a discursive concept (e.g. this quale at this time is seen as an example of a specific quality also instanced in another quale at another time), in order that there be judgement there must also be a synthetical unity through which the concepts (and their corresponding representations) are referred to the same object. This object may not be given at all, or if given it is given as only a still further complex of representations which refer to 'the same object' only by virtue of some precedent synthetical unity. The synthetical unity, which is a form and not a content of experience, is not given, but is prescribed to experience by a rule that requires a common focus of meaning of the several concepts that appear in a judgement; if one such object is not meant by the various concepts, the synthesis of the concepts is a comparison, a setting of them side by side, and not a judgement. This common object is called by Kant X, and the rule of synthetical unity means that the terms in a judgement (concepts derived through the analytical unity of representations), such as A and B, must be regarded as marks of X. Then through A and B we know X, and the cognition of X through A or B is a concept of X. 5 A and B are, epistemologically, predicates of X, but one of them is made to serve as the logical subject and the other as the logical predicate. The one called subject is directly related to X, and the one called predicate is indirectly related to X in the judgement, though its occurrence in experience may be direct evidence of the existence of X (usually it is the wider concept, and is applied to a specific X only through the mediation of the subject concept).6 Thus, to summarize and make specific: when X is known through two concepts

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related to each other in a synthetical unity, then a judgement whose form is given by a category or rule of this synthetical unity is established. If the rule is, for instance, the category of inherence and subsistence, the judgement reads, 'There is an X such that X is A and X is B.' If B is related to A directly by being included as a part of its connotation, so that 'X is A' implies logically 'X is B,' the judgement is analytic. In an analytic judgement, reference to X is otiose, and we say simply, 'All A is B', where A and B are 'partial concepts' of X, and B is a constitutive part of A. But 'All A is B' is an elliptical expression, since A is a complex concept containing B. Fully expanded, therefore, the analytic judgement is the tautology, 'All A. B is B.' When B is a concept of X because it is a nota notae of X, i.e. a mark or constituent of A, we can speak of the judgement as one in which the certainty of the connection of subject and predicate is 'through identity'. 7 If the identity is explicit, the judgement is inconsequential. The important case is the one in which the identity is implicit, so that its explication 'widens our knowledge formaliter' though not materialiter. B may be 'covertly contained in the concept'8 and not thought 'so distinctly and with the same (full) consciousness' as A. 9 It is an 'analytic attribute' of A contained in it and elicited from it by logical analysis. lo But it is essential that it be 'contained in' A, so that the judgement is explicative, not ampliative, and independent of further experience of the X of which both A and B are concepts. Now if the decision on analyticity of a specific judgement could be based on a definition of the subject, it would be easy enough to determine whether the judgement is analytic. But Kant rejects this procedure, because he holds that 'definability' is a stricter condition than 'analyzability', and that we can therefore make analytical judgements with concepts we cannot define. It is, in fact, through organizing analytic judgements that we gradually approach to definition,!! which is the end, not the beginning, of knowledge. Since Kant has so restricted the scope and value of definition, these statements about the inclusion of one concept in another are exceedingly obscure. It seems that, without a stated definition, they can be understood in part only psychologically or phenomenologically. Speaking for the phenomenological interpretation is the emphasis upon what is 'actually thought' in the subject; speaking for a logical interpretation is the fact that analytic attributes may be uncovered and brought to light only by sustained enquiry, and are not present, in any phenomenological sense, in the thought of the concept of the subject. If we investigate each phrase in these passages, the possible confusion of the two meanings is not removed. For instance, 'contained in' (enthalten in) was a logical term used by Kant's contemporaries to describe predicates belonging to all individuals denoted by a conceptY But Kant

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obviously does not mean it only in a logical sense, for then synthetic attributes would be contained in the subject concept, which he denies; 'contained in' seems to have reference to the subjective intension, and thus to have at least psychological overtones. But the words 'actually thought in the concept of the subject' are elsewhere given a strictly logical meaning, since Kant says that what is really thought in a concept is 'nothing other than its definition'.13 I think we have to suspect here a fundamental failure on Kant's part to distinguish the logical from the phenomenological aspects of thought. Where definitions or fairly complete analyses are available, he thinks of the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgement as logical; where they are not, but are rather the objects of search, he has recourse to a phenomenological criterion, by virtue of which he seeks definitions through analysis of what, in the plainest sense, is 'actually thought' in a concept or even 'contained in' a complex experience subject to subsequent analysis. 14 While we cannot speak of two definitions of the analytic, and can at most say that the analytic has both a logical and a phenomenological dimension, we can discern two criteria for analytic judgement. Kant, in apparent disregard of their differences, uses first one and then the other as it suits his purposes, perhaps in the conviction that their answers will in any specific case be the same. (1) The logical criterion of analytic judgement is its conformity to the law of contradiction, a necessary condition of any judgement and a necessary and sufficient condition for an analytic judgement. The test is applied as follows: substitute in a judgement synonyms for synonyms, or an analysis or definition of the subject concept for the subject itself. Then the contradictory of this judgement will infringe the law of contradiction if the original judgement is analytic. And as the contradictory of a self-contradictory proposition is necessary, the original judgement is necessary. In applying the logical criterion, a definition in the strict sense is not required, for it is from the analytic judgements in informal exposition that we first gain the definition. All that is needed is a partial analysis of the subject concept. The absence of definition may at most prevent only the decision that some specific judgement is not analytic,15 for what is mentioned as the predicate may be an unnoticed analytic attribute that we would have noticed had we possessed a full definition. But no criterion is infallible; even given a strict definition, the pertinency of a specific attribute as analytical may be a discovery of the most difficult and surprising kind. It is in such cases that there will be the greatest divergence between decisions made on this and those made on the phenomenological criterion. (2) The phenomenological criterion is the issue of an inspection of

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what is found introspectively to be really thought in the concept of the subject. Though we have seen that what is 'really thought' is said to be a definition, and that the mention of predicates not thought 'with the same (full) consciousness' suggests a very wide range of predicates that might pass the logical but fail the phenomenological test, still it is clear that Kant was not free from psychologizing, introspective tendency in his decisions on what is analytic and what is synthetic. The Port Royal Logic l6 demanded 'moderate attention' to see whether the predicate is 'truly contained in the idea of the subject', and not a completely articulated logical system as a criterion for this decision; the same kind of 'moderate attention' seems to provide a criterion for Kant. He repeatedly asks himself and the reader what he thinks when he thinks a particular concept, and though undoubtedly one may think much, by casual association, which is not 'contained in the concept', what he does not think is not included in the content of the concept. Just as he has previously distinguished between what is contained in and what is contained under a concept, so also he distinguishes between what 'lies in' a concept and what 'belongs to' iL I7 There seems to be here a tacit distinction between two kinds of concepts, one being a concept of a highly refined analytical or abstractive unity, subject to strict definition, and the other being a looser complex of representations, more or less loosely held together and expandable through the accretion of new experience or subject to restriction in content through the supervention of a definition. 18 I now turn, for the space of one paragraph, to Kant's description of synthetic judgements, after which I shall come back to these two criteria of analytic judgement. The following material is essential for evaluating the issues raised by the two criteria. B may be related to A indirectly by virtue of the fact that both are predicates of the same X. Then the concept A does not include the concept of B as a part of its logical essence, and to relate them to each other in judgement requires reference to the X of which each is a partial concept. There are three kinds of X which serve to mediate between A and B. (i) X may be a schema of an object in general (of a thing, cause, etc.). (ii) X may be a determinable intuition of space or time or both, which A or B both refer to and make determinate. (iii) X may be a datum or concretum of experience, 'the complete experience of the object which I think through the concept A'.19 In the former two cases, the judgement will be valid regardless of the empirical content of the concepts, and in the first case there is established the kind of judgement which appears in 'metaphysics as science'. Failure to provide a schema without the conditions of space and time and to put the thing in itself in the role of the X makes synthetic judgements impossible except of objects of possible experience. The second is the situation with respect

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to mathematical judgements, where X is a construction. In the third alternative, the judgement is a posteriori. But in each case it is a synthetic judgement, since the predicate is not found by analysis of the logical subject. If X is (as is actually the case) a subjective condition for the synthesis of A and B, the resulting synthetic judgement is, in the transcendental sense, only subjectively valid; though we can say still that the predicate is a part of the real and not of the nominal essence. In the same sense, an analytic judgement is objectively and even transcendently valid, not being restricted to the conditions of synthesis placed upon the X.20 From this account of the origin of synthetic judgement, and from the two criteria mentioned above, it is clear that the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgement is not one of formal logic, for formal logic abstracts from the meaning of all terms.

II Variability of the distinction Eberhard interpreted an analytic judgement as one the predicate of which is an essentia of the subject, and a synthetic judgement as one the predicate of which is an attribute derived from an essentia. But Kant denies that this is his meaning, for he holds that 'derived from' is equivocal. If the attribute is derived by logical analysis, the judgement is indeed analytic whether we knew that the attribute was 'contained in' the subject concept or not; but there are other attributes, synthetic attributes (Bestimmungen) , that are not contained in the logical essence, even though they might be associated with it in our minds, e.g. as weight with body. They are derived not by logical analysis but by construction or exhibition of a corresponding intuitive object. From such an experience the attribute can as it were be read off, though it is not a nota notae of the subject concept but a nota of the real object. It is this kind of synthetic predicate which is a part of the ratio essendi of the object, and it gives the concept of the subject and all its judgements whatever objective validity they have. Though Eberhard was a mediocre thinker much of whose argument is vitiated by being based upon patent misunderstandings of Kant, he did nevertheless ask a difficult and important question: 'How do we decide what is "actually thought" in a concept?' Unless a definite and plausible criterion can be given that is exempt from the vagaries of the phenomenological criterion and of the logical criterion when Kant attempts to employ it unarmed with definitions, then an important member of the structure of his philosophy must be given up. Modern writers, reacting against both psychologism and phenomenology, wanting a behavioural rather than an introspectional criterion if a significant logical criterion

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cannot be given, have directed their main attack on the possibility of maintaining the distinction, in any particular instance, without a complement of definitions. Rather than considering the views of those who give up or relativize the distinction for the reasons just mentioned, however, it will be more profitable to consider the views of a critic who admits a sharp distinction between analytic and synthetic, yet who does not base it on the test of nominal or stipulative definition. A critic this close to Kant is likely to be more instructive, at this juncture, than one more radically opposed to Kant. The criticism I shall consider is that by C. I. Lewis, which is in part an infinitely improved version of some debating points raised by Eberhard. Kant's cognizance of these arguments, admittedly in a more primitive form, makes a study of them especially worth while for an understanding of Kant himself. Lewis argues as follows. The notion of a necessary but non-analytic proposition such as 'Every event has a cause' is based on an equivocation. For 'event', as a concept which does not contain 'having a cause' as a part of its meaning, is not the same as the concept of 'event' which does contain the concept 'having a cause'. Part of Kant's argument is based on the former and simpler concept, and here Kant rightly infers that the proposition is synthetic. But the argument that the proposition is a priori is based on the second, richer, concept. We can, according to Kant, think without contradiction an uncaused event; hence the relation expressed in the judgement is synthetic; but we cannot imagine, represent or know an event as objective without relating it to another event by a rule of causation; hence the judgement is known a priori. The equivocation is that 'event' in the second case means 'phenomenal event in objective space and time', while in the first case it is not so restricted. If this restriction is made explicit, however, the relation between the restricted concepts is seen to be analytic. The Second Analogy of Experience seems to be synthetic only because the word 'event' is not usually given the restricted meaning. The term needs to be fixed by definition before one can pronounce the judgement to be analytic or synthetic; and in defining it, we must be sure to include in its meaning everything needed to determine the objective applicability of the term in question: 'Anything which is essential to the temporal character of an event must be included in the adequate concept of it as a temporal event . . . . A definition which does not logically entail all characters essential to what is defined, is faulty' .21 Kant's reply to this kind of criticism, as it appeared in its first crude form, or rather Schultz's reply written under Kant's supervision, makes two responses. (1) Two different propositions, one of which is analytic and one synthetic, may be expressed by the same sentence, for the same word in

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the sentences may refer to two different concepts, one narrower and one broader. (2) Closely related to this is the assertion of the 'fixity' of a concept. A concept cannot be arbitrarily widened through the accumulation of information. It can be replaced by another called by the same name; but of any given concept it can be decided what is implicit in it to be explicated in analytical judgement and what does not lie in it at all. When one changes a definition, which may change the status of many judgements, the judgements are changed not merely in status but in meaning and validity. Definitions should not, therefore, be arbitrarily changed; a new one must pass the same kind of test of 'realness' that the old one originally passed and later failed, if it is not to be merely stipulation without objective reference. We cannot convert empirical knowledge into a priori knowledge simply by refining our language: Let one put into the concept of the subject just so many attributes that the predicate which one wishes to prove of the subject can be derived from its concept merely by the law of contradiction. The critical philosophy permits him to make this kind of analytic judgement, but raises a question about the concept of the subject itself. It asks: how did you come to include in this concept the different attributes so that it [now analytically] entails synthetic propositions? first prove the objective reality of your concept, i.e. first prove that any one of its attributes really belongs to a possible object, and when you have done that, then prove that the other attributes belong to the same thing that the first one belongs to, without themselves belonging to the first attribute. The whole question of how much or how little the concept of the subject is to contain has not the least bearing on the metaphysical question: how are synthetic a priori judgements possible? It belongs merely in the logical theory of definition. And the theory of definition without doubt requires that one not introduce more attributes into a definition than are necessary to distinguish the defined thing from all others. Hence [in a good definition] one excludes those attributes of which one can demand a proof whether and on what grounds they belong to the former attributes [that are included]. 22 In other words, Kant is saying that a definition which will change a synthetic into an analytic judgement must be either nominal or real. If nominal, it does not in the least affect the cognitive status of the original judgement; while it may make the original sentence formally analytic, it does not give to the knowledge it expresses any logical or epistemic necessity it previously lacked. 23 And if the definition is a real one, we must know the necessary conjunction of independent, co-ordinate attributes in order to make it; and this conjunction is precisely what was

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stated in the synthetic judgement whose status is now being disputed. All that is effected by such a procedure, we might say, is that the locus of a priori synthesis is shifted.

HI Indefinability of the categories

Thus far I have considered only Kant's explicit answers to the criticism that the analytic-synthetic distinction is variable. I now examine Kant's reply in its general philosophical bearings. I have already mentioned that there are in Kant's writings two quite different species of concept. In one case, like that of 'water', the word is 'more properly to be regarded as merely a designation than as a concept of the thing',24 and its meaning does vary with experience. In the other, the concept is fixed either by definition, or fixed because it is a pure concept which, while not subject to definition, is not subject to revision by the accumulation of experience. In the latter case, Kant believed that a fixed decision could be made concerning what was and what was not included in it, even at a time before a stated definition had been reached. The rationalistic tradition in which Kant wrote fixed many of the most important concepts by 'implicit' definition and common use or by nominal definitions that had become well established. 25 Thus Kant could confidently decide that a given proposition is analytic without the necessity of referring to a 'rule book' of stipulative definitions. We, in a more conventionalistic period, are usually puzzled by some of his decisions, and can only feel that Kant and his contemporaries were committing what Whitehead called the 'fallacy of the perfect dictionary' - when the dictionary could not, in principle, exist for Kant at all. But the more important point is that the concepts with which Kant is most concerned, viz. the categories, are not fixed by definition and need not be fixed in this way. They are fixed because, as pure, they are not susceptible to experiential modification. Let us consider what Kant was attempting to do with these concepts. It had been shown by Hume that they could not be given objective validity by definition, and though Kant might have given a richer, more determinate definition to such a concept as cause, a still more extended Humean argument would have been fatal again to its claims to objective validity. Definition and proof of objective validity are not the same except in mathematics, which, for quite peculiar reasons, does not have to meet the Humean type of criticism. Assuming a broader definition, a proof of the objective validity of its analytic consequences is still called for if Hume's criticisms of the rational structure of empirical knowledge are to be met. Given the broader definition, of course, antecedently synthetic judgements become analytic. So long as the definitional compo-

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nent is expanded ad lib, any a priori judgement can be shown to be analytic. But apriority is not dependent upon this kind of analyticity; the analyticity of such a judgement is not a condition of its apriority but a subsequent, factitious addendum to it. That is, there must be recognition of some special dignity of function of a specific proposition that makes it worth while to devise a language in which it will be necessary; but the linguistic necessity is established subsequent to this recognition. Kant did not simply suppose that causality had objective meaning; he tried to show that it did, and in doing so he found that he had to add to the concept of sufficient reason determinations which neither Hume nor the rationalists had suspected; he had to give a new interpretation to 'possible experience' as the mediator between the terms of such a judgement. To have suppressed this interpretation for the sake of a formal definition of cause which would render the Second Analogy of Experience analytical would have distorted the whole procedure of the critical philosophy, and would have left unanswered the reiterated question, how can this judgement, based on definition, be valid objectively? Kant thought that real definitions should come at the end of enquiry, not at the beginning. One might expect, therefore, that the contribution of the Critique of Pure Reason might have been seen as a new set of definitions subsequent to which a priori judgements previously called synthetic would now be called analytic. Why did Kant not see his work in this way, but obstinately regard the Analogies as synthetic judgements - in spite of the fact that he might have seen the logical classification as tentative, dependent upon the richness of the concepts? There were several reasons why Kant did not do this. Among them was his respect for tradition; more important was his recognition that Hume's objections to the rational foundations of empirical knowledge could not be met by new definitions. And a still more fundamental reason is to be found in his repeated denials of the definability of the categories: the definitions which some might think would serve for this reduction of all a priori knowledge to analytic knowledge cannot be given. Definitions, however elaborated, are still conceptual relations; but what is needed is some way to get a concept into relation with an object, and to do it in a priori fashion. Concepts alone, however richly furnished with predicates, do not establish contact with things; only intuition can provide this contact. We can indeed conceptualize and name the requisite intuition; but in doing this, we treat it like a universal concept, and as such it fails to establish the objective reference. It always leaves open the question: does this complex universal apply? The category, whether it can be defined or not, must be schematized - must be provided, in Lewis's terminology, with a sense meaning as well as a linguistic meaning. Kant is profuse in his definitions of pure categories, but these definitions are nomina1. 26 Schematizing a category is very different from defining it:

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There is something strange and even nonsensical in the notion that there should be a concept which must have a meaning but which cannot be defined. But the categories are in a unique position, for only by virtue of the general condition of sensibility can they have a definite meaning and relation to an object. This condition, however, is omitted in the pure category, for this can contain only the logical function of bringing the manifold under a concept,27 without specifying the concept or the condition of its application to a specific manifold. No philosopher has emphasized more than Kant the fundamental difference between sense and understanding while at the same time asserting their complementary function. This fundamental difference is essential here. It is not the concept of an intuitive condition, which might be added to a concept or included in its definition, that gives full meaning to the category; it is the condition of sensibility itself,28 the condition of its actual use in specific circumstances according to rule. This is a transcendental addendum, a real predicate, a synthetic predicate, a Bestimmung, an element in the ration essendi as well as the ratio cognoscendi. It is not just another attribute without which the definition is 'inadequate'. Make the added condition a conceptual amendment to the definition, and the entire question is postponed: we would still have to ask, 'How does this concept have a priori objective application?'29

IV The status of mathematical judgements

Because Kant does admit definitions, in the strictest sense, only in the field of mathematics,30 it is easy to admit a sharp distinction between analytic and synthetic judgements here; in fact, mathematical definition has been taken as establishing the paradigm of the analytic-synthetic distinctionY Granting the sharpness of the distinction between analytic and synthetic here, most competent critics of Kant are in agreement that he was in error in saying that mathematical judgements are synthetic. It is said that what kept him from seeing that they are analytic was the lack of adequate mathematical definitions, definitions not available until much later. Professor Lewis characteristically writes: 'It would be ungrateful and unjust to blame Kant for not foreseeing that, from genuinely adequate mathematical definitions, the theorems of mathematics might be deducible.'32 Obviously, deducible from definition and analytic are here regarded as equivalent notions. This however, as we have amply seen, is not what Kant meant by 'analytic'. In the Prolegomena he wrote:

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As it was found that the conclusions of mathematics all proceed according to the law of contradiction ... men persuaded themselves that the fundamental principles were known by the same law. This was a great mistake, for a synthetical proposition can indeed be understood [eingesehen] by the law of contradiction, but only by presupposing another synthetical proposition from which it follows, never by that law alone. 33 From this we see the following: (i) Mathematical theorems may be synthetic even if proved by the law of contradiction, i.e. by strictly logical procedure. Deducibility is not a sufficient condition for analyticity. To be analytic, in Kant's meaning, a proposition would have to be proven by the law of contradiction alone, i.e. its contradictory would have to be self-contradictory; but in mathematical proof by strict logic, the contradictory of the proposition contradicts some other assumed propositions. (ii) A proposition will be called synthetic if among its premisses is a synthetic proposition, such as an axiom, or a mathematical definition, i.e. a synthetical definition which can be exhibited in a construction. (iii) Mathematical axioms (fundamental principles) are synthetic since they are not established by the analysis of a given concept, but only by the intuitive construction of the concept, which will show the necessary presence of attributes not included in a logical definition of the subject. 34 The theorems, therefore, can be called synthetic even though they are strictly (analytically, in modern usage) demonstrable. The famous discussion of the example '7 + 5 = 12', two paragraphs later, is quite independent of the grounds given in the quotation for calling the theorems synthetic. It is, in fact, inconsistent with it. In the quotation, Kant is conceding that a theorem does follow from premisses by strict logic; whatever may be the nature of the premisses, the internal structure of the proof is logical. But in the discussion of '7 + 5' Kant is arguing that a theorem does not follow logically even from synthetic axioms, but that intuitive construction enters into the theorem itself and its proof. These two theses - that an intuitive synthetic element is present in the primitive propositions, and that an intuitive synthetic process is present in demonstration - are independent of each other. Because a mathematical judgement is often synthetical by the phenomenological criterion, Kant seems to have supposed that there were good logical reasons for calling it synthetic. Of these two theses, only the first is of any moment in the epistemology (not the methodology) of mathematical knowledge, but it is only the second of the theses that could be corrected by the use of what Lewis calls 'genuinely adequate mathematical definitions'. The real dispute between Kant and his critics is not whether the theorems are analytic in the sense of being strictly deducible, and not whether they should be called analytic now when it is admitted that

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they are deducible from definitions, but whether there are any primitive propositions which are synthetic and intuitive. Kant is arguing that the axioms cannot be analytic, both because they must establish a connection between concepts, just as definitions do, and because they must establish a connection that can be exhibited in intuition. And this is what is denied by the modern critic of Kant. I think Kant is obviously right in saying that there cannot be a system of nothing but analytic propositions; there must be some complexes to analyse, and these must be stated synthetically. But if the postulates are not analytic, this does not mean that they are synthetic propositions, i.e. synthetic statements expressing truths. A stipulation can 'establish' synthetic relations, but it does not thereby qualify as a proposition. If it be assumed that mathematics is a game, then the analytic-synthetic distinction is of no importance in discussing the postulates, because the premisses are not propositions at all but are only stipulations or propositional functions. 35 Kant did not espouse the game theory. Mathematics was for him objective knowledge. That is why he regarded the axioms as propositions, not proposals. Were they mere relations of ideas, in Hume's sense, they could be made as 'adequate' as one wished, yet the question of how they could be objectively valid would remain untouched. But for Kant, real mathematical definitions are possible, because the definition creates the object. This sounds like stipulation again; but the object is not an arbitrary logical product of subjectively chosen independent properties. To define a mathematical concept is to prescribe rules for its construction in space and time. Such a definition is a synthetical proposition, because the spatial determination of the figure is not a logical consequence of the concept but is a real condition of its application. The real property is joined to the logical properties synthetically, not analytically. Objections to Kant's views of mathematics, therefore, cannot be removed merely by the substitution of more adequate sets of definitions and postulates, as if being a better mathematician would have corrected Kant's philosophy of mathematics. The syntheticity of mathematical knowledge in Kant is not a consequence of the inadequacy of his definitions. It is an essential feature of his entire theory of mathematical knowledge, by which the identity of mathematics and logic was denied. Mathematical knowledge in his view of the world has objective reference, and this is obtained not through definition but through intuition and construction. His mathematical definitions are real; what is deduced from them may be, in modern but not Kantian terminology, analytic propositions. But the propositions admitted as theorems by Kant are not like the analytic propositions of modern mathematics or the relations of ideas of Hume, for they have a necessary relation to experience through the synthetic, intuitive character of the definitions and axioms. Even propo-

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sitions which Kant admits are analytic belong to mathematics only if they can be exhibited in intuition. 36 Whatever improvements in Kant's definitions might have been introduced for the sake of making the theorems analytic in his sense would have cost a high price in setting mathematics apart from the discussion of the conditions of possible experience. And had they been seen as analytic, Kant's long and deep concern with mathematics would not have positively contributed to his interpretation of the problems of empirical knowledge. For Kant saw in mathematics a clue to the objectivity of all a priori knowledge, both analytic and what he considered to be synthetic. This is indeed the sense of the Copernican Revolution: even empirical objects are constructions; and their necessary conditions are geometrical. Had Kant radically sundered mathematical knowledge from the intuitive a priori structures of empirical knowledge, as he criticizes Hume for doing,3? both would have been rendered unintelligible to him. The question is thereby raised whether, in introducing modern amendments into Kant's theory of mathematics (perhaps for the purpose of 'saving what is essential in the Critical philosophy'), we do not at the same time overlook or destroy everything distinctive in his theory of empirical knowledge.

Notes 1. Refiexion 3928. The numbering of the Refiexionen and all page references to the works of Kant are, unless otherwise noted, those of the edition of the Prussian Academy. 2. Refiexion 2881. 3. Refiexionen 3920, 4634. 4. Critique of Pure Reason, A 69/B 94. 5. Refiexion 3920. 6. Fortschritte der Metaphysik, Immanuel Kants Werke, ed. Ernst Cassirer, 11 vols. (Berlin, 1912-22), vol. VIII, p. 245. 7. Vorlesungen aber Logik, §36. Kant objects to calling them identical judgements, however; cf. Ober eine Entdeckung, p. 244. 8. Critique of Pure Reason A 71B 10. 9. Prolegomena, §2a. 10. Ober eine Entdeckung, pp. 228 f. 11. Prolegomena, §2c3; cf. Vorlesungen aber Logik, §109 Anmerkung; Ober die Deutlichkeit der Grundsiitze, p. 282 (trans. Beck, p. 262); Falsche SpitzJindigkeit, p. 61. I have studied the relation between Kant's theory of definition and the distinction between the analytic and synthetic in some detail in 'Kant's theory of definition', Philosophical Review 65 (1956). 12. Vaihinger, Commentar zu Kants Kritik der rein en Vernunft, vol. I, p. 258. 'Contained in' is contrasted with 'contained under' - Refiexion 3043. The latter, used in describing synthetic judgements, seems to mean for Kant what Vaihinger says was commonly meant by 'contained in'. See also Refiexionen 2896, 2902. 13. Critique of Pure Reason, A 718/B 746. 14. A recent paper, by Robert S. Hartman, 'Analytic and synthetic as categor-

Critical Assessments 361 ies of inquiry' (Perspectives in Philosophy (Ohio State University Press, 1953), pp. 55-78), has the special merit of singling out the two kinds of analyticity, one of which it calls definitional and the other expositional, and distinguishing both from 'analytic' in the sense of descriptive of what is 'contained in' an experience of an empirical object. Hartman's paper presents very clearly the processes by which analytic judgements lead to definitions, and definitions then establish a new and stricter criterion of analyticity. Another study of the process by which an analytic judgement may become synthetic is K. Sternberg, 'Uber die Unterscheidung von analytischen und synthetischen Urteilen', Kant-Studien 31 (1926), 171-201. 15. Cf. Vorlesungen aber Logik, §109 Anm. 16. Part IV, ch. vi. 17. Critique of Pure Reason, A 7181b 746; but cf. Vorlesungen aber Logik, Einleitung viii, (IKW, VII 373) where attributes belong to the essence, so far as they are derived from it. 18. The confusion between these two meanings of 'concept' has been discussed by Koppelmann, 'Kants Lehre vom analytischen Urteil', Philosophische Monatshefte 21 (1885), 65-101; and by H. Ritzel, 'Uber analytische Urteile', lahrbuch f. Philosophie u. phiinomenologische Forschung 3 (1916), 253-344, at 261-76, 324. The full significance of it, as representing the interpenetration of two stages of enquiry dominated respectively by the analytic and the synthetic method, is ably worked out by Hartman, op. cit. 19. Critique of Pure Reason, A 8; omitted in B. 20. Refiexion 3960. 21. C. 1. Lewis, An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, pp. 161-2. I have given a fuller exposition of Lewis's views (without discussion of the point raised here) in 'Die Kantkritik von C. 1. Lewis und der analytischen Schule', KantStudien 45 (1954), 3-20. 22. Rezension von Eberhard's Magazin, pp. 408-9. 23. In this, Lewis is in agreement with Kant. In criticizing these who identify the a priori and the analytic, and then define the analytic in terms of linguistic rules or procedures, Lewis writes: 'If implications of conceptions of this sort should be well worked out, it must appear that they are fatal to the thesis that what is a priori coincides with what is analytic; since the notion that what may be known true without recourse to sense experience, is relative to vocabulary or dependent on conventions of procedure, is not credible' (op. cit., p. 36). 24. Critique of Pure Reason, A 728/B 756. 25. Cf. J. H. Hyslop, 'Kant's treatment of analytic and synthetic judgment', Monist 13 (1903), 331-51, which emphasizes Cartesian and Newtonian conclusions as they 'infected' the concepts Kant used. 26. Critique of Pure Reason, A 244/B 302. 27. ibid., A 244-5; omitted from B. My italics. 28. The difference between a concept of an intuitive condition and the intuitive condition itself is formally like that between the concept of existence and existence itself. Kant's criticism of the ontological argument, mutatis mutandis, could be used here against the view (expressed by Lewis, op. cit., p. 162, middle paragraph) that the concept of space suffices, if we assume, with Kant, that mathematics is knowledge of something real. 29. There is still another argument in the Critique (A 245, absent from B) against the definability of categories, to wit, that such definitions are circular. I do not think the argument is valid; but inasmuch as it applies, if at aU, to the

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pure as well as to the schematized categories, it is not relevant to our purposes here. 30. Critique of Pure Reason, A 729/B 758. 31. 'Ka?-t .scheint bei der Einteilung der Urteile in analytisch und synthetisch von der FlktIOn auszugehen, dass such die nichtmathematischen Begriffe definiert werden konnen.' K. Marc-Wogau, 'Kants Lehre vom analytischen Urteil' Theoria 17 (1951), 140-54, at 150. ' 32. Op. cit., p. 162. 33. ~rolegomena, §2C1 = Critique of Pure Reason, B 14. 34. Ober die Deutlichkeit, p. 277 (trans. Beck, p. 263); Ober eine Entdeckung pp. 229ff.; Critique of Pure Reason, A 7301B758. ' 35. Kant says ~hat mathematical definitions are willkiirlich, which is usually ~ranslated as 'arbItrary'. But the connotation of 'random' present in 'arbitrary' IS not present in Kant's word 'arbitrary', for Kant makes the antonym of 'arbitrary' not 'necessary' but 'empirical'. Vorlesungen iiber Logik, §103 Anm. Willkiirlich has reference to the volitional character of a synthetic definition a rule for the .synthesis .o.f a con.cep~;. but a m~thematical concept is synthesiz~d only under gIven conditIons of IntUItIOn, and IS therefore not arbitrary in the modern sense of this word. 36. Critique of Pure Reason, B 17 = Prolegomena §2c2. 37. Prolegomena §2c2; Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, p. 51 (trans. Beck, pp. 161-2).

20 Transcendental Arguments Revisited Jay F. Rosenberg

Since the topic of transcendental arguments has been given rather widespread attention in recent years, it may fairly be asked why a revisiting is called for. The short answer is that, although much has been made of what purport to be Wittgenstein's or Strawson's or Shoemaker's transcendental arguments, comparatively little attention has been paid to Kant's transcendental arguments. Since he invented the notion, that alone would justify another look. But there is another, longer, answer. If you look at what's been said about the various transcendental arguments imputed to Wittgenstein or Strawson or Shoemaker, what strikes you is that the goal of contemporary considerations is either to limit the scope of applicability of transcendental arguments or to deny their possibility altogether. Consideration of transcendental arguments nowadays, in fact, is most commonly a critical prelude to some neo-Hegelian chicanery. Once again, I think, the most significant positive Kantian insights are in danger of being lost in the rush of dialectic. So I want to take another look at transcendental arguments - specifically at Kant's notion of a transcendental deduction - with the aim of seeing whether there isn't after all something more in the notion than the covert appeals to verificationism which it has lately been fashionable to find there. If we ask to what species of argument a Kantian transcendental deduction belongs, the temptation must surely be to answer that it is a deduction. The argument, after all, isn't an induction. What else is there for it to be? But let's not be misdirected this early on by mere terminology. Kant's use of the term 'deduction' is not quite ours. His is derived from Rechtsphilosophie and alludes to juridical defences of claims of right or of legal entitlement. What Kant explicitly intends (A 84/B 16ff.) is that the conclusion of a transcendental deduction should state, not a matter of fact, but a matter of right. It is, in other words, to say that something may be done. It articulates a principle of permission. The conclusion of

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a transcendental deduction is thus to be a normative conclusion. And this, in turn, suggests that the argument supporting it will belong to that species of argument, whatever it is, which is tailored to the establishing of normative conclusions. It suggests, in fact, that a transcendental deduction must be a piece of practical reasoning. If it is a deduction in our sense of 'deduction', then, it should be a practical deduction - a bit of means-ends reasoning, or perhaps what is sometimes called a 'practical syllogism' . Rights or permissions are always rights or permissions to do something. What is the doing, the piece of conduct, to which a successful transcendental deduction entitles us? Kant's answer is that a transcendental deduction, if successful, establishes or secures or legitimizes our right to employ certain concepts. Here our path forks. There are two questions we might ask. We can ask: the right to employ what concepts? And here the suggestion is that there's something special about the concepts which raises the question of our right to employ them. Or we can ask: to employ concepts in what way? And the suggestion now is that there's something special about the manner or mode of employment to raise the question of our right so to employ concepts. Kant proposes to find the answer along the first path. Let's tag along with him for a while. The concepts Kant regards as standing in need of a transcendental deduction are what he calls 'a priori' concepts. Now 'a priori' is a term of art, awarded to knowledge 'independent of experience' and to concepts 'not derivable from experience'. To see what these terms mean to Kant, we need to look at his project in its historical setting. A useful point of departure is the contrast between the transcendental deduction that Kant envisages and what he calls an 'empirical' deduction 'which shows the manner in which a concept is acquired through experience and through reflection upon experience, and which therefore concerns, not its legitimacy, but only its de facto mode of origination' (A 85/B 117). What this should remind us of is Hume's project of showing from what impressions an idea is derived. On Hume's account, such an exhibition is the sole means of legitimizing our possession of and employment of an idea. What awoke Kant from his dogmatic slumber was the prod of Hume's clear recognition that most or all of the key concepts of classical metaphysics - self, substance, causation, space and time - could not be thus legitimized. Hume pictures us as finding in complex impressions the originals of certain simple ideas and abstracting them to obtain the raw materials from which new complex ideas could then be synthesized. Conversely, every legitimate complex idea can be broken down into ingredient simple ideas, each of which could then be traced to an original appearance in an impression. It is this last task which Kant speaks of as an empirical deduction.

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What Hume discovered, however, was that there are certain notions in use which cannot thus be given an empirical deduction. Of these, the most notorious is causation. Hume asks us to Suppose two objects to be presented to us, of which the one is the cause and the other the effect; it is plain that, from the simple consideration of one or both these objects, we never shall perceive the tie by which they are united, or be able certainly to pronounce, that there is a connection betwixt them. It is not, therefore, from anyone instance, that we arrive at the idea of cause and effect, of a necessary connection of power, of force, of energy, and of efficacy. (Treatise, I.iii.14) Thus there is no single impression of necessary connection, and the mere repetition of similar impressions adds nothing new in the way of experiential content. Hume's conclusion is that the representation of a causal connection, as something more than a mere constant conjunction and temporal succession, cannot be grounded in experience (that is, derived from impressions) at all. Similarly, Hume argues that the notion of a self or person is not derivable from original impressions: If any impression gives rise to the idea of self, that impression must

continue invariably the same, through the whole course of our lives; since self is supposed to exist after that manner. But there is no impression constant and invariable. (Treatise, 1. iv. 6) Faced with these considerations, Hume himself is pulled in two directions. Recognizing that the concepts of causation and of self are, by his criteria, illegitimate, he often speaks of us as 'mistaking' something else for these ideas. But recognizing (less explicitly) that simple dismissal of the notions radically impoverishes our conceptual resources - that they are more than mere metaphysical conceits - he gives us, too, the rudiments of a theory of habit, or custom, which does yeoman, if somewhat ad hoc, service in providing surrogate notions to carry us across the emergent conceptual gulfs. It is concepts that fail of Humean legitimacy in this way which Kant calls a priori concepts. The aim of a transcendental deduction, then, is genuinely to legitimize these concepts - the concepts of causation, of self, and other, similar, concepts. But what is the principle of classification here? How are we to sort out the a priori concepts from among indefinitely many others? Kant finds two marks: unrestricted universality and unqualified necessity. 'Necessity and strict universality are ... sure criteria of a priori knowledge, and are inseparable from one another' (B

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4). Here, too, Kant is simply following out the lines sketched by Hume. Necessity and strict universality are clearest in the notion of a self that must accompany every representing that is mine. Similarly, Hume takes the causal concept that stands in need of legitimization to be the concept operative in what he calls 'a general maxim of philosophy' that 'whatever begins to exist must have a cause of its existence'. And here again we find paired the ideas of strict universality and necessity. An a priori concept, then, is a concept that must apply to all possible objects or experiences. In so characterizing a priori concepts, and in concluding that they are incapable of grounding in or derivation from experience, Hume and Kant make contact with a fundamental stratum of classical epistemology, running back at least to Plato - the thesis that experience can yield knowledge of what is, but not of what must be. (Nor, for that matter, of what ought to be - an observation which is the entry point to quite another cluster of problems.) Call a 'conceptual core' whatever set of concepts must apply to all possible objects. A conceptual core thus pivots on the concept of an object. It is constituted by the concept of an object and whatever other concepts are analytically consequent upon it. Is there only one conceptual core, or can there be many? Kant's answer is: only one. Call this the Principle of Core Invariance. Should we accept it? Well, that will depend on what demands we place upon the concept of an object, for the question of core invariance is the same question as that of the univocality of the concept of an object. Kant reserves the term 'object' for something intersubjective, external, and independent of particular representings. Accepting these constraints, he is unable to distinguish categorial species of objects. But I think that this is largely a historical accident. From Kant's historical perspective, all public objects are physical objects, where the only theory of physical objects available is Newton's. What happens, in consequence, is that the theoretical necessities of Newtonian physics come to be seen as categorial constraints on any object concept. Again, the space of public objects in Newtonian theory is Euclidean three-space. Thus, analogously, embedding in a three-dimensional space of zero curvature comes to be regarded as the form of all representings that purport to be representings of objects external to us. Now our historical setting is different. Having a grasp of theory succession in natural science, we are in the position to generalize Kant's marks of strict universality and categorical necessity in terms of the universality of lawfulness and the necessity of natural law. If we do so, what we find is a recognizable plurality of object concepts in temporal succession, moving from that of a Newtonian object to at least two successors: that of a molecule, or submicroscopic object, and that of an elementary particle, or quantum object. On this construction, what a

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conceptual core will be is a generic theoretical centre upon which particular empirical descriptive systems are erected - the introduction of a generic notion of an object, which, in turn, is specified by contentive theories down to the stratum of natural kinds, of chemical elements, or of elementary particles. We may think of such a nuclear theory as taking the form of a set of fundamental laws governing the counting of those objects the concept of which it introduces. Looked at another way, then, the concept of an object will be pinned to a set of principles for counting. And this allows us a certain catholicity about the notion. The minimum object concept will be the mere distinction of a thing in contrast to its environment. The principles for counting objects of this categorial species will be synchronic only. They will provide grounds for a determinate count of objects in an environment at a time, but not for the perduring of objects across time. Diachronic principles of counting, tracking objects across time, require the ability to distinguish real from apparent changes, and within the minimal core the resources for that distinction cannot be provided. This minimal core is just what Kant gives us in the Axioms of Intuition and the Anticipations of Perception. It is precisely synchronicity which demarcates these principles from the Analogies, for it is in the Analogies that we first find perduring objects that can be the same again, although different in appearance. (See B 218-9.) In 'The" given" and how to take it'l I have explored this minimal core in some detail. There I speak of its objects as 'phenomenal', but that term requires a bit if investigation. The root notion of phenomenality is that of a phenomenal regularity or mode of presentation - an appearance or regularity of appearance drawn within a core rich enough to contain the resources for the distinction. Objects of a core, then, can be deemed phenomenal only from the standpoint of a successor - one that will specify those real objects of which the putative predecessor objects are actually mere modes of appearing. Now it is a constraint upon Kant's (univocal) object concept that a core constituting it should contain the resources for internal judgements of phenomenality. Consequently, what are, in my sense, phenomenal objects will not be objects for Kant at all. But I think there is a point to extending the object concept downwards into this minimal core as well as upwards into historical successor concepts. The point is this: when we view the minimal core as a predecessor, and that which introduces perduring physical substances as its successor, the argument that we can exhibit as legitimizing the replacement of the one by the other will serve as a paradigm and archetype of all transcendental deductions. What is this argument? Well, I have displayed the major structure of it in 'The "given" and how to take it', so I shall not do so again. For here

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I am operating at a higher level of generality. I want to say what that argument and any like it must be like. The conceptual core of the Analogies, pivoting on the concept of an external object (an object of experience, in a precise technical Kantian sense of that term), is the least-evolved core from which phenomenal objects are phenomenal. More importantly, it is the 'smallest' core that can ground intersubjectivity, externality, independence of representings, and perduration across time through apparent change, and it is the smallest that can structure a world of objects that I not only encounter but inhabit. It was Kant's special genius to discern just this, and to discover that these categorial features are a conceptual 'package deal'. The minimal core cannot be added to piecemeal and remain a core - that is, retain determinate principles of counting for its objects. A conceptual quantum jump is required, and the next stable orbit is the full core of natured perduring substances in space, constituting a world in which I, too, move. The principles of counting for external objects are diachronic as well as synchronic. Correctly understood, they are no less determinate than the synchronic principles of the minimal core. The notions upon which they turn are those of part and whole. If, to many philosophers, these notions have not appeared able to yield a determinate count of physical objects in a specific environment across time, this is largely because the concepts have been treated mereologically, rather than as the internal correlatives which they properly are. A part is always a part of a whole; a whole always a whole of parts. The case for working out the notions - and for unravelling the confusions among the concepts of part, piece and portion upon which the illicit mereological assimilation rests - has been enshrined in our literature as the Ship of Theseus problem, but a full consideration of these issues would take us too far afield from the main lines of this enquiry. Let us return to the larger story. Kant is a methodological solipsist. He finds himself in possession of a conceptual core, a set of categorial concepts, which appears to him in his historical setting to be unique and invariant. He would like, of course, to say that his objects are only phenomena too, but the only standpoint within his architectonic from which that judgement could be made is the framework of things-in-themselves, and, since things-in-themselves are incognizable and ineffable, that - as Hegel recognized - is not a standpoint that is available to him. The categorial object concepts with which Kant finds himself cannot be derived from experience; that is, they cannot be provided with an empirical deduction. Kant is therefore limited to asking how he can justify his employment of them from within. And this, in turn, constrains his understanding of the character of a transcendental deduction. We, in contrast, are epistemological naturalists, and we stand in a

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historical setting from which we have observed theory succession in the natural sciences and come to some understanding of it. Our notion of a conceptual core is continuous with that of a physical theory, and we can thus see Kant's categorial necessity as a species of natural necessity writ large. We can, in other words, apply the evolutionary viewpoint to epistemology - to conceptual systems - as it has been applied to biological, societal and economic systems. Such a diachronic epistemology introduces the impossibility of core pluralism. In contrast to Kant's view of necessity and the categories as having in their scope all possible experience, we can think of them as time-bound. If we do so regard them, then, a transcendental deduction will be what is exhibited in the shift from one conceptual core to another, in the large - and in contentive theory succession in the small, as well. So I propose to relativize the notion of a priori concepts to a particular conceptual core or theory system. The notion of a synthetic a priori thus drops out into the notion of a physical theory, where universality is lawfulness and necessity is natural necessity. Now, however, there will be nothing special - that is, metaphysical - about those concepts the application of which a transcendental deduction is supposed to legitimize. The difference is of degree of generality, not of epistemic kind. And so we have come to the end of our first path. Let us double back, then, and return to the second of the two questions that were generated by our original look at the Kantian text. That is, let us ask how it is that these concepts - in particular, the concept of an object - are to be employed. Kant's answer here is: 'in application to possible experience'. But what does this mean? It will again be helpful to look first at Hume. Hume's notion of an impression plays, from time to time, two quite different roles in his thought. An impression of a III K - for example of a red rectangle - is sometimes thought of as a \21 and K particular - for example something red and rectangular - on the model of a patch of mental pigment in an iconic mental picture. On other occasions, though, it behaves as if it were a basic knowing episode - the conviction that something is III and K (is red and rectangular) - serving as a premiss from which inferences may be drawn and entering into logical relationships with other impressions. The model here is judgemental; it is the mental sentence (inner speech). This, of course, is a conflation which Hume inherits from Locke's and Berkeley's uses of 'idea'. One of Kant's leading notions - and one of his greatest strengths - is that he rigorously and from the outset separates what Hume here conflates, assigning one role to the sensibility - providing the matter or content of experience - and one to the understanding - providing the (categorial) form. But further, Kant insists that experience - that is, a perceptual taking as opposed to the mere having of sensations - is

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necessarily something to which both of these moments contribute. It is a kind of resultant vector sum of these two components; one of the things Kant speaks of as a 'synthesis' (A 92/B 125ff.). On the Kantian view, all awareness is experience, and all experience is under concepts. The world is not given to us structured. It acts on us, and we structure it. For the concepts through which we experience the world are our concepts, and are brought to sensations, not extracted from them. In any experience, then, we are to distinguish these two aspects: one of sensation, pure receptivity or affectedness (in which humans are continuous with other animal species); and one judgemental, the bringing under concepts that we ourselves supply. These observations help make intelligible passages like A 737/B 765. There, discussing the outcome of a transcendental deduction, Kant remarks that, although it needs proof, 'it should be entitled a principle, not a theorem, because it has the peculiar character that it makes possible the very experience which is its own ground of proof, and that in this experience it must always itself be presupposed'. Kant's view is, clearly, that there are experiences one can't have unless one has certain concepts. A transcendental deduction is a justificatory argument legitimizing the employment of a particular conceptual core in the having of certain experiences - and these are to be experiences which themselves could not be had were we not in possession of and deploying just that conceptual core. It is in this way that the conclusion of a transcendental deduction makes possible the very experience which is its own ground of proof. And this explains, too, why Kant argues that transcendental proofs can never be indirect, by reductio ad absurdum, but are always 'ostensive' (A 789/B 817). Does all this transpose into our evolutionary and naturalistic key? Well, we shall need at least this much modification: a transcendental deduction will legitimize the application in experience of a certain conceptual core as a replacement for and instead of some possible other, predecessor, core. In any experience, we conceive the world we experience through the medium of a particular conceptual core. What Kant taught us to do is to be aware of this as a conceptual practice, a piece of cognitive conduct, which stands in need of legitimization. A transcendental deduction is to be an argument that legitimizes such a practice, that gives us licence and title to engage in it. What the standpoint of evolutionary naturalism implies, however, is that the argument will support this conceptual practice only when it is regarded as a reconceptualization of the experienced world under a second, successor, set of concepts, a world also conceivable (and, typically, previously conceived) under a different set of concepts constitutive of a predecessor core. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, we preserve here the crucial Kantian notion of an 'ostensive' appeal to the actual employment, in application to had experiences, of

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the very concepts to be legitimized. For it emerges as the observation that the question of justification or legitimacy can only be asked from within the standpoint of the successor core. Only then do we have the system of concepts into whose legitimacy we wish to enquire. But these had experiences are supposed, on Kant's account of transcendental deductions, to form their own ground of proof. What this implies is that what is supposed to legitimize the employment of the successor concepts is the fact that their employment makes possible the very experiences in which they are employed. In other words, where our adoption of a certain, successor conceptual core makes possible the reconceptualization of the experienced world under a new categorial characterization, that it makes this possible is supposed to be what gives us the right actually to reconceptualize the world thus. That something with this structure could be a justificatory argument, however, makes sense only if there is some overriding epistemic end in view - call it 'E' - better served by thus reconceptualizing the world. That the possession of this core makes possible this conception of the world we are experiencing can legitimize our employment of the core only if the having of experiences thus conceptually structured is itself epistemically desirable under some description. We have now made contact with the theme of practical reasoning which I introduced at the beginning of this essay. Practical reasoning moves through analysis of means and ends. The practical argument that is a transcendental deduction, then, will need to have a major premiss articulating our overriding epistemic end, that is, a premiss expressing our intention to achieve this end, E. The conclusion of a transcendental deduction will be that some particular conceptual core, say Cg , ought to be espoused, adopted or employed - or, at any rate, may justifiably be so adopted. What is needed to mediate between major premiss and conclusion here are subsidiary premisses bringing the adoption of C8 under the appropriate desirability characterization vis-a.-vis E - as a good, or the best, or the only means of achieving the end E. And, what our evolutionary naturalism implies is that they must do this by adverting to the status of C8 as a successor core, that is, to the relations in which it stands to its predecessor, Cpo What emerges as the logical skeleton of a transcendental deduction, then, is something like this: We shall achieve the epistemic end E. The best or the only way to achieve E is to adopt or espouse or employ conceptual cores having certain relevant features, F. The successor core C8 stands to its predecessor Cp in those relations in virtue of which Cs has the features F.

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It is integrative success, then, which justifies our conceptual practices.

Hence, we may - indeed, we ought to - adopt or espouse or employ the conceptual core C8 • The major missing piece of our puzzle now becomes the end E. What is this overriding epistemic end-in-view which powers the mechanism of core succession? The response of an innocent realism is that it is the attaining of a better fit between our system of representations and how things-in-themselves stand. But this, of course, will not do - and it is another measure of Kant's brilliance that he clearly recognizes this. On Kant's view - and on ours - there is no access to things-in-themselves not mediated by one or another conceptual core, which themselves all equally stand in need of legitimization through transcendental deduction. and if we can, where Kant cannot, speak of temporally later conceptual schemes as increasingly adequate representations of things-in-themselves, it is not because we do, where Kant did not, know what things-inthemselves really are. Rather it is because, finding a process where Kant saw invariance, whereas he could only say that things-in-themselves are whatever ineffably lies beyond and outside of all possible representings, we can characterize them precisely as that towards representation of which this process inexorably tends. When Kant could only speak, we can both speak and gesture. 2 So innocent realism is not the answer. The epistemic end E must be something that can be known to be better realized from a standpoint within a determinate conceptual core. Kant's answer is that it is a unity of synthesis - a 'universal and necessary unity of consciousness' in the manifold of perception, without which 'these perceptions would not then belong to any experience, consequently would be without an object, merely a blind play of representations, less even than a dream' (A 112; cf. B 136-7, B 143, A 156/B 195). What the end-in-view E is, then, is that what we experience be experienced as something that hangs together - not just a set, but a structure. It is, in other words, that our experience be of a unified world: Thus the order and regularity in the appearances, which we entitle nature, we ourselves introduce. We could never find them in appearance, had not we ourselves ... originally set them there. (A 125)

The understanding is ... itself the lawgiver of nature. Save through it, nature, that is, synthetic unity of the manifold of appearance according to rules, would not exist at all. (A 126-7)

More precisely, what legitimizes our adoption and employment of a successor core is that the reconceptualization of our world permits its reunification as an orderly single world in which the disconnected regularities experienced as in the world though the medium of the predecessor core re-emerge as regularities of appearance in the successor, and can be so experienced as thus not in the world but in us. (This is the process I have exhibited concretely at the end of 'The "given" and how to take it'.) Epistemic evolution thus mirrors biological. Process in each is measured by the successive emergence of more and more thoroughly unified, structured and integrated systems. The unity of which Kant most often speaks, of course, is not this external unity of nature but the internal synthesis of experience in a single consciousness, the transcendental unity of apperception. It is both a mark of his genius and an expression of his historicity that he sees these as necessarily the same issue. It is a mark of his genius in that he correctly and brilliantly discerns that my coming to see all of my experiences as mine - as the experiences of a unitary consciousness, each accompaniable by an '1 think' - is possible only if I conceive of these experiences as representings of a world external to me; a world the existence of which is independent of my representing it, and in which I, too, have a place. But it is an expression of his historicity as well, for, having found a place for me in that world which, in consequence, 1 am able to represent - a world of perduring, causally interacting natured substances in space - Kant fails to discern any means of moving beyond this core to a standpoint from which both the empirical self and the world as thus conceived could themselves genuinely be regarded as merely phenomenal. He fails, in other words, to discern that this total conception of self-in-world, once achieved, is capable of further categorial evolution, the radical reconceptualization of what both I and the world that I inhabit categorially are and, in consequence, of what my inhabitation of that world and my being affected by it consist in. And now we arrive at the end of our second path, which, like all philosophical paths, ends only in further forks and branchings. But we have planted a few signposts. A Kantian transcendental deduction is a piece of practical reasoning, a justificatory argument legitimizing a conceptual practice. That practice is our conceptualization and reconceptualization of the world we experience and of our experiencing it through the medium of conceptual cores; generic theories which populate the experienced world with objects among which, amazingly, we are able to place ourselves. And what legitimizes this practice is its own synthetic and integrative success. Only thus can our world cohere as known, and only thus can we cohere as the knowers of it.

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If all this seems somehow terribly familiar, well of course it is. For a giant has walked this path before me, and giants leave deep footprints. In the setting of evolutionary naturalism, a transcendental deduction is no different from a Peirce an abduction, nor is the integrative synthesis of our experience as of a unified world anything other than what Peirce called 'the fixation of belief'. But this should not surprise us. For Peirce was - in the deepest, purest, and most insightful sense - a Kantian. And, as I remarked at the outset of this essay, what are nowadays in fresh danger of being lost are precisely the deepest and purest of Kant's insights.

Notes 1. Metaphilosophy VI (1975). 2. For details, see my Linguistic Representation (Boston: Reidel, 1975).