Reading Kant: New Perspectives on Transcendental Arguments and Critical Philosophy

Copyright

© Basil

Blackwell Ltd 1989

First published 1989

. I I t<~

Basil Blackwell Ltd 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK

I

I

I

Basil Blackwell Inc. 432 Park Avenue South, Suite 1503 New York, NY 10016, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of shorr passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no parr of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired oue, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the su bsequent purchaser. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Reading Kant: new perspectives on transcendental arguments and critical philosophy. 1. Germany philosophy, Kant, Immanuel, 1724-1804 I. Schaper, Eva II. Vossenkuhl, Wilhelm 193 ISBN 0-631-16029-9 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Reading Kant: new perspectives on transcendental arguments and critical philosophy I edited by Eva Schaper and Wilhelm Vossenkuhl. p. cm. Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 0-631-16029-9 1. Kant, Immanuel, 1724-1804. 2. Transcendental logic. 3. Transcendentalism. I. Schaper, Eva. II. Vossenkuhl, Wilhelm, 1945B2799.T7R43 1989 193-dc19

Preface

All papers in this collection owe their inspiration to Kant. For many of the contributors this means that a large and important part of their working lives has been spent in the company of Kant's texts, wrestling with their difficulties and patiently trying to make sense of obscurities in then1. As in the case of every great philosopher, understanding Kant is a task that is never completed, however much every generation of scholars feeds on the achievements of earlier generations or is provoked by what n1ay now appear to be earlier misunderstandings. Disagreements on how to read Kant are likely to be with us as long as reading him remains philosophically rewarding. A number of contributions to this volume have been occasioned by lively controversies over the detail of particular assessments that Kant's doctrines have already received. Others advance afresh and offer novel insights, ranging from interpretation to critical revisions and reconstructions of Kantian arguments. It is no exaggeration to say that we have collected in one volume as many 'readings' of Kant as there are contributors. We trust, however, that it will be clear that they have all been reading the same Kant. The perspectives differ as much as the particular areas of Kant's philosophy explored. There are convergences of interest and divergences of approach. We have grouped the papers then1atically, and our part headings try to give son1e indications of the problems addressed. Not everyone will approve of our mode of arranging them, the responsibility for grouping them, rather than offering the volume without any guide for the selective reader, belongs to the editors. We have had too much respect for the authors to ask them to conform to guidelines and to tailor their contributions accordingly. In any case, such a request would have been unreasonable and could hardly have been heeded without loss. We have felt confirmed in our allegiance to the spirit of Kant by the way the collection has found its shape.

Vll1

Preface

The partitions In this volun1e are not meant as demarcation lines. Part I, 'Transcendental Arguments', for example, might well have included several of the papers appearing in part II, 'The Refutation of Scepticism'. The authors work with readings or modifications of a particular form of argumentation which we owe to Kant and which has recently been much debated, attacked, defended or even actually used. Both contributors to part I focus explicitly on the controversial nature of such arguments. Eckart Forster returns first to Kant's own understanding of transcendental arguments in order to show that they establish non-analytical and non-empirical conclusions; the transcendental mode of argumentation is defended against its most prominent recent critics. Graham Bird also reflects on the difference between Kant's and modern transcendental arguments, before concentrating in detail on Kant's procedure in the two standard-setting arguments, the Refutation of Idealism and the Second Analogy. This paper already deals with some of the issues that are central to part II. Here the question is not so much whether Kant's intentions were explicitly directed to such a refutation as whether his approach yields, or could yield, models which may be so used. Ross Harrison rejects contemporary historicizing interpretations of Kant's transcendental arguments as mistaken and develops an austere general version of his own that, he holds, can successfully refute scepticism. Ralph Walker maintains that the individual sceptic who is prepared to argue at all will have to accept that the conclusions of transcendental arguments leave him deprived of the sceptical starting point: but such arguments cannot, in his view, serve to defuse scepticism in general. He leaves it open how far transcendental arguments can really take us. Peter Bieri argues, with Kant unmistakably in the background, that scepticisn1 cannot coherently establish its own claims. He scrutinizes the main formulations of anti-sceptical positions, not without admitting specific weaknesses in them. He then develops a line based on results from contemporary cognitive science, which seeks to establish the controversial point that understanding the mind as an intentional structure guarantees coherence with the causal structure of the world. Part III, 'Geometry and Idealism', focuses on Kant's understanding of geometry and on the vexed question of how far his position provides support for the transcendental idealism Kant apparently derives from it, and how far one can go in endorsing it. Terry Greenwood gives a modal analysis of Kant's spatiality condition which demands that if something is represented as an object it must necessarily be represented as being in space. He finds that even if the Kantian condition holds, the wider claims of transcendental idealism are not thereby substantiated. Indeed, any plausibility transcendental arguments possess would be lost if they had transcendental idealist implications. Paul Guyer turns to the

Preface

IX

barriers the Kantian things-in-themselves place in the way of adopting transcendental idealism. He argues that Kant does not derive the transcendental ideality of space from any modesty in knowledge claims about the noumenal. On the contrary, it is from the imn10dest supposition of certain knowledge of propositions necessarily true of space and objects in them that he derives the denial of the absolute reality of space. Guyer suggests that no contemporary defender of transcendental idealism would be likely to adopt that doctrine if the Kantian arguments were clearly spelled out - which is what his paper tries to do. Rolf Peter Horstn1ann meets Guyer's reading of Kant with head-on criticism. He reminds us that it was the German post-Kantian (absolute) idealists who saw in the Kantian thing-in-itself the main obstacle to successfully establishing transcendental idealism, and that this reading was based on a misunderstanding of Kant's text - which Guyer, in Horstmann's view, now perpetuates. 'Judgements and individuals', part IV, takes off from the Critique of Judgement. Reinhard Brandt offers a new account of the relation between analytic and dialectic in the third Critique, where the structure of the dialectic does not run parallel to the architectonic articulation of the first Critique. This, he argues, far fron1 being due to Kant's carelessness in the application of his own distinctions, throws new light on the development of his thought over the entire critical period. Wilhelm Vossenkuhl sees one of the main thrusts of the third Critique as being directed to the understanding of individuals. He explains why this could not be accomplished with what the first Critique had provided but had to wait for the mature analysis of the structure of the power of judgement. The construal of this structure proceeds in terms of our contemporary understanding of intentionality. Part V, 'Idealism and Transcendental Structure', the final part, has two contributions, both returning to the first Critique and both taking up issues that have occupied the individual authors for some time. Gerd Buchdahl here completes a new interpretation of Kant's central intentions in the Critique of Pure Reason, supplemented by the Prolegomena, which, he argues, become perspicuous only when read in a way that brings out the crucial dynamics of the project. This project is understood as realization, through developn1ental stages, of the object as it appears to the senses and the understanding, after successive reductions, from the object in general, via the transcendental object, to the categorized and schematized thing. Dieter Henrich gives a detailed critical reconstruction of the transcendental deduction, articulating first the conditions which have to be met, and then developing a step-by-step argument that fulfils them so that the 'I think' of the deduction can emerge fully as a subject with self-conscious identity and personhood.

x

Preface

There has in recent years been something of a renaissance in Kantian studies, fuelled, as renaissances are, by concerns which n1ay seem at first son1ewhat remote from their object. Transcendental arguments and the tenability of some form of idealism, however attenuated, are live issues. We would like to think these essays will keep the blaze going at the very least they may demonstrate that the reading of Kant is, as it has always been, a creative as well as a rewarding occupation. The greatness of a philosopher is not to be gauged by unanimity of reception, and does not require a definitive reading: there never will be one. We . hope the contributions to this volume show that Kant is still very much alive, challenging, and a thorn in the flesh of conten1porary philosophy. Eva Schaper Wilhelm Vossenkuhl

Part I

Transcendental Arguments

1

How Are Transcendental Arguments Possible? Eckart Forster '. . . und so wird das Ganze endlich iibersehen und eingesehen werden, wenn man nur ... von der Hauptfrage, auf die alles ankommt ... ausgeht'. Kant to Garve, 7 August 1783

In the last few decades or so, transcendental arguments have enjoyed a currency which has not been matched by an equal transparency as to their exact nature, intention, or procedure. In this essay, I should like to make an attempt at some further clarification of the issue by returning to the origin of transcendental philosophy, and by contrasting modern transcendental arguments more carefully than is often done with Kant's own paradigmatic procedure. Part I of this essay is concerned with Kant's conception of a transcendental proof. Part II contrasts with this some modern exponents of transcendental arguments. In the last part, I examine two standard objections that have been levelled against transcendental arguments.

I Kant introduced into philosophy a new form of reasoning which he himself characterized as 'transcendental'. Although the method of philosophizing was novel, the term itself was not: Kant adopted it from the tradition where it had been in frequent use. When, in a letter to Marcus Herz, he first referred to his endeavours as 'transcendentalphilosophie',l Kant thus felt no need to indicate a special use of the term. As his position developed and the critical position took shape, however, the need to distinguish it from 'the transcendental philosophy of the ancients' (B113 )2 became increasingly urgent. For what had hitherto borne this name was really a part of metaphysics; Kant, on the other

4

Eckart Forster

hand, purported to revolutionize this discipline in a way con1parable to that in which Copernicus had revolutionized astronomy_ Like many of his contemporaries and predecessors, Kant was painfully aware that the history of metaphysics, especially when compared with the continuous progress achieved in mathematics and the natural sciences, looked like 'a merely random grol?!ng, and what is worst of all, a groping among mere concepts'. (Bxv) Unlike most of his contemporaries and predecessors, however, Kant was not content to diagnose the lack of progress in metaphysics or to lament the sad state it was in. He purported to examine if, and how, a metaphysical discipline was possible at all. My purpose is to convince all those who find it worth their while to occupy themselves with metaphysics: that it is absolutely necessary to suspend their work for the present, to regard everything that has happened hitherto as not having happened, and before all elSIe> first to raise the question: 'Whether such a thing as metaphysics is possible at all?' (Pro/., 255)

This project, while revolutionary in one respect, was simple in another. As Kant realized, the entire problem could be reduced to one Hauptfrage, namely, How are synthetic a priori judgements possible? For the purpose of metaphysics is 'not merely to analyse concepts . . . and thereby to clarify them analytically, but to extend our a priori knowledge' (B 18). Since synthetic, that is, 'ampliative' judgements are thus the ultimate purpose of all speculative knowledge a priori (cf. A9-10/B13), the fortune of metaphysics, or its possibility, must stand or fall with the possibility of such judgements. To solve this problem was the task Kant set himself in the Critique of Pure Reason. 3 To this end he propounded a new type of reflection for which the old name of a transcendental philosophy was ready to hand: 'It can be said that the whole transcendental philosophy which necessarily precedes all metaphysics is itself nothing other than merely the complete solution of the question proposed here, only in systematic order and full detail (Prol., 279). In the present context I can only outline Kant's solution to the problem of metaphysical knowledge. As is well known, it is partly negative. About such objects of classical metaphysical speculation as God, the soul, or the world. toto genere, which necessarily lie beyond all possible experience, he argues, no theoretical knowledge is humanly possible. The knowledge we do have of things within our field of experience, on the other hand, is inevitably empirical or a. posteriori, not a priori. However, as Kant points out at the beginning of the Critique: 'it may well be that even our empirical knowledge is made up of what we receive through impressions and of what our own faculty of knowledge (sensible impressions serving merely as the occasion)

How Are Transcendental Arguments Possible?

5

supplies from itself'.(Bl) That is to say, if the subject of experience, although not entirely producing its own experience, nevertheless contributed so m.uch to it that withoutthis subjectivecontributian no experience was possible - if, that is, experience had to be constituted - then some synthetic a priori judgements would be possible in philosophy. For we could then anticipate the form, although not the content, of a possible experience and hence make valid judgements a priori about experience in general. The Critique, in a profoundly subtle and difficult luan11er, tries to prove the correctness of this contention. First it argues that. we do not experience things in themselves but merely the representations they occasion in our sensibility, and that even space and time are mere forms of our intuition, not properties of things in themelves. This step is important, for if the objects of our perceptions were things in themselves, all our knowledge would have to be a posteriori. 4 The impressions thus received by our senses, however, do not amount to knowledge. For sensibility is a completely passive faculty, a mere 'capacity of receiving representations (receptivity for impressions)' (A50/ B74). It does not connect and relate the manifold it receives. For knowledge of objects to arise, therefore, the manifold has to be ordered and related, it has to be 'gone through ... taken up, and connected' (A77/BI02).5 The second and decisive step takes place in the Transcendental Deduction. Self-consciousness, Kant here tries to prove, is possible only if I have experience of an objective order which can be distinguished from the merely subjective order of representations that occur in my mind. Since, on the one hand, the actuality of my self-consciousness is indubitably eviden~, yet, on the other hand, sensibility only provides a n1anifold of unconnected sense-impressions, it follows that I myself have to connect these in1pressions in a determinate fashion and thus impose the objective order on this manifold through which the objects of experience (nature) first become possible. All my experience is thus necessarily subject to rules or laws of the understanding, for only thus can it become my experience. That nature should direct itself according to our subjective ground of apperception, and should indeed depend upon it in respect of its conformity to law, sounds very strange and absurd. But when we consider that this nature is not a thing in itself but is merely an aggregate of appearances, so many representations of the mind, we shall not be surprised that we . can discover it only in the radical faculty of all our knowledge, namely, in transcendental apperception, in that unity on account of which alone it can be entitled object of all possible experience, that is, nature. (Al14)

With this remarkable tour de force, the riddle of metaphysics has thus finally been solved and the transcendental Hauptfrage received its

6

Eckart Forster

overdue answer: the conditions of possible experience have objective validity in a synthetic a priori judgement, for they are likewise the conditions of possible objects of experience (cf. A158/B197). This very broad and schematic account of Kant's solution to the problem of metaphysical knowledge must suffice here. Rather than going into any of the details of Kant's argumentation, I should like to add some general comments about the type of proof he thought possible in transcendental philosophy. First of all, Kant thought, a transcendental proof (i.e., a proof for a synthetic a priori conclusion) requires the truth of transcendental idealisn1. There is no ambiguity about this in Kant; it is 'the only feasible' reason, so the Critique declares (A130), why a transcendental deduction is possible. To which the Prolegomena adds: transcendental idealism is 'the sole means of solving [the] problem [of synthetic knowledge a priori]' (Prol., 377). The same point is also emphasized several times in Kant's correspondence. 6 Because of this presupposition, secondly, transcendental proofs must always be direct, or ostensive. As they are conducted 'within the domain proper to dialectical illusion', where what is merely subjective often presents itself as being objective, a synthetic a priori proposition cannot be established by disproving its opposite: The apagogic method of proof is ... permissible only in those sciences where it is impossible mistakenly to substitute what is subjective in our representations for what is objective, that is, for the knowledge of that which is in the object. Where such substitution tends to occur, it must often happen that the opposite of a given proposition contradicts only the subjective conditions of thought, and not the object, or that the two propositions contradict each other only under a subjective condition which is falsely treated as being objective; the condition being false, both can be false, without it being possible to infer from the falsity of the one to the truth of the other. (A791/B819)

Both types of illusion Kant aptly illustrates with an example from the Dialectic. A proper transcendental proof, consequently, must always be direct or ostensive; that is to say, it must 'combine with the conviction of this truth insight into the sources of its truth' (A789/B817). Bearing this in mind it is not difficult to see why Kant, when he had to characteriz~ the peculiar nature of his proof-procedure, thought the term 'deduction' an appropriate title. We only have to remember that his paradigm is the legal deduction, not the strict proof-procedure in standard logic which we now generally call by that name. 7 In legal nlatters, jurists usually distinguish two things, namely, the establishment of facts, or the quaestio facti, and the investigation whether or not these facts exist rightfully, that is, the quaestio juris. A legal procedure which decides a quaestio juris requires the denl0nstration that a particular claim or possession is not obtained surreptitiously but

How Are Transcendental Arguments Possible?

7

has come off lawfully; that it is derived from descent, inheritance or legal contract. Such procedure, in Kant's time, was called a deduction, and its similarity with his own approach is plain to see. For like a legal deduction, the transcendental investigation concerns the origin of a particular 'possession' (of metaphysical knowledge), that is, the subjective conditions of its possibility. In strict analogy to a legal claim, a metaphysical knowledge claim is justified through the discernment of its origin; such a claim is justified precisely if one is entitled to assert the possession of that knowledge. For this reason, Kant noted: 'Everyone must defend his position directly, by a legitimate proof [rechtlichen Beweis] that carries with it a transcendental deduction of the grounds upon which it is itself made to rest' (A794/B822). And since the grounds in questiqn are the subjective conditions of possible knowledge, he could also write: 'In the transcendental science everything must be derived from the subject'; in this discipline, 'only a single proof is possible, namely, from the concept of the subject'. 8 Unfortunately, it is this concept of the subject which also introduces what seem to be insurn10untable problems into Kant's ingenious theory. The subject in question cannot be n1Y empirical self which, like any other object of experience, has to be constituted. This self cannot constitute itself - any more than a self-portrait, say, can paint itself. The Kantian model thus requires another, non-empirical or transcendental self: '1. The I which combines and separates. - 2. I as the composite [das Zusammengesetzte] of inner intuition.'9 Yet this may still not be enough. For Kant also speaks, and speaks repeatedly, of a 'real' self, or self in itself, of which my empirical self is only the appearance. This 'real' self, which also appears to be the locus of moral deliberation and free choices - is it or isn't it the same as the transcendental I whose 'sole function' is to combine a given manifold? Somehow these different selves have to be identical, yet it is not clear how they can be. Their interrelation is a mystery. But this is a problem I only want to n1ention in passing rather than dwell on, as it has been well exploited in the recent literature. 1o It is worth noticing, however, that Kant's constitution-theory has encountered considerable difficulties on the side of the object, too. Since the active mind is said to impose all order on the otherwise unrelated manifold, the unity of any given object can be 'nothing else than the formal unity of consciousness in the synthesis of the manifold of representations'(A105). 'Combination does not,' Kant insists, 'lie in the objects, and cannot be borrowed from them.' (B134) Yet it is difficult to see how, for instance, living organisms could- fit this picture. They seem to enjoy a unity, even spontaneity, which is independent of the subject of experience and which makes them alive. The parts of an

8

Eckart Forster

animal, say, seem to be related not just externally but through some inner (purposive) principle of organization. Most importantly, of this we learn through experience. On and off, this problem occupied Kant for the rest of his life. 11 He devoted a large part of the Critique of Judgement to it, trying to solve it with the help of the distinction between determinant and reflective judgement. But it may perhaps be seen as an indication of how deeply the problem cuts into Kant's system that when it came to solving the 'Antinomy' of Mechanism and Teleology, which arises from the need to reconcile determinant and reflective judgement, constitutive and regulative principles in the face of any particular experience of an organism, Kant offered two different, and incompatible, 'solutions'. One of them, presented as an 'Anmerkung' (§§ 76-8), is still in some accord with the first Critique; the other, developed in §§ 69-75 but probably written later than its competitor,12 treats both the mechanical and teleological principle, efficient cause and final cause, as mere maxims of reflective judgement! Judgement itself here becomes an 'autonomous' cognitive faculty - a status explicitly denied to it in the first Critique. (cf. A133f/B172f) The preliminary character of this 'solution' can hardly be in question. In the Opus postumum Kant returns to the problem of organisms, but again without bringing it to a fully satisfactory solution. 13

II Given these problems, it is hardly surprising that none of the basic ingredients of Kant's solution to the transcendental Hauptfrage has survived critical discussion within the analytic philosophy of our time. The idea of a constitution of experience in Kant's idealistic sense has become a non-issue; and with it, the belief in a transcendental self, a non-empirical'!' which constitutes nature from disconnected impressions but which itself is never to be n1et with in experience, has gone by the board. What is more surprising is that, in spite of these rejections of Kant's fundamental assun1ptions, a revival of transcendental reasoning has taken place within the analytic tradition, and has demanded attention for well over two decades now. This revival should seem all the more surprising as the very heart, or focal point, of Kant's transcendental theory, the notion of a synthetic a priori, has been the target of substantial criticisn1. This criticism of course has its own history; only in our days, however, has it been carried right into the centres of Kant scholarship. Strawson, for instance, in his masterly The Bounds of Sense, alleges that 'Kant really has no clear and general conception of the synthetic

How Are Transcendental Arguments Possible?

9

a priori at all', and suggests that the central problem in understanding the Critique is that of disentangling all that hangs on the doctrine of transcendental idealism and its 'Copernican resources' from the underlying, and 'independent', argument. 14 E. T. Wilkerson, in his comn1entary on Kant's first Critique, has gone one step further. 'I am going to suppose,' he writes, 'that instead of asking, How are synthetic a priori propositions possible?, Kant is really asking, What are the necessary conditions of a possible experience?'15 This is perhaps one step too far. But I do not here wish to qu~ry the philosophical sensitivity that underlies such identification of two different questions, if only for interpretative purposes. Nor am I questioning the fruitfulness of a separation of problems concerning the general conditions of possible experience from those that relate to the 'Copernican resources' of Kant's theory; this can hardly be in doubt. What I wish to suggest, however, is that the original Kantian question is not so easily disposed of. This will become clear, I think, if we look at some of the so-called transcendental arguments that have emerged in the last few decades: argun1ents by, for example, Wittgenstein, Strawson, Davidson or Malcolm, to mention just a few. All of them claim some necessity, or status of indispensability, for certain features of our conceptual scheme. Wittgenstein, for example, in his Philosophical Investigations, argues that it is not possible to obey a rule privately and hence to have a language which in principle no one but the speaker could understand. Strawson, in The Bounds of Sense claims that the fundamental or basic judgements of experience must be' objective judgements. More recently, Davidson has contended that a creature cannot have thoughts unless it is an interpreter of the speech of others. And Malcolm, finally, has tried to prove that mechanism, or neurophysiological determinism, cannot conceivably be true of hun1an beings. 16 All of these propositions would traditionally have been classified as synthetic a priori. The terms themselves are of course not important here. What is important, however, is that the mentioned conclusions are not arrived at inductively, on the basis of observation and empirical generalization. They are a priori. On the other hand, they are not analytic. It is hardly part of the meaning of, say, 'mechanism', or 'rule', that the former cannot be true of human beings, or that the latter cannot be grounded in anything but public behaviour. Nor does it seen1 to be an analytic truth about 'experience' that the fundamental experiential judgen1ents should be objective ones. The same holds also for 'thinking creatures' and the requirement that they should be interpreters of the speech of others. The Kantian problem, I take it, is thus alive and well: How are such non-analytic, non-empirical cognitions possible? The question arises

10

Eckart Forster

even if we dismiss Kant's transcendental idealism and investigate the limiting frame of our thoughts about, and experiences of, the world separately. We do not have to phrase the question in these words. Instead, we could ask, How is (descriptive) metaphysics possible? Or, as I will here put the question, How are transcendental arguments possible? Naturally it is to be expected that the answer will differ from the one Kant gave. Nevertheless, it is an answer to this question that we n1ust seek, I suggest, if we are to understand the nature of transcendental arguments. Now we have noticed earlier that for Kant any proof of a synthetic a priori proposition must be direct or ostensive, that is to say, it must proceed 'from the concept of the subject' and 'combine with the conviction of its truth insight into the sources of its truth'. And it is precisely for this reason that, according to Kant, any such proof takes the form of a deduction, a discernment of the origin of the claim in question. As for transcendental arguments, it is clear tha~ their proof-procedure cannot be a direct one, 'from the concept of the subject'. This Kantian subject, or transcendental self, is no longer thought to exist or at least does not play any role in transcendental arguments. In other words, transcendental arguments are not transcendental deductions. If their procedure cannot be direct, however, it seems that they can only establish their conclusions by showing that alternatives to these conclusions are incoherent. And thus indeed do our candidates proceed. Strawson sets out to establish his 'objectivity condition', not by means of a deduction but by testing 'how it stands up to attack'. The subsequent discussion then aims to show that the proposed alternative to the objectivity condition falls short of the requirements for genuine experience. (I shall return to this argument shortly.) Malcolm (1968), similarly, first assumes mechanism to be true and proceeds by 'deducing a consequence of mechanism' (p. 64), namely, the impossibility of intentional behaviour, hence of thought and speech. Now if mechanism is a true theory, it must be statable. But if it is statable, it is false. Thus, if it is true, it is false and hence is disproved, Malcolm argues, by reductio ad absurdum. Davidson's (1983) provocative article follows the same strategy although in a slightly less palpable fashion. Asking if there can be thought without speech, he points out, roughly, that thoughts depend on, and can only be identified against, the background of large patterns of interlocked beliefs entertained by the thinker. To have a belief, however, involves a grasp of the possibility of being mistaken and of the contrast between truth and error. Yet this contrast, it is then argued, and the concepts of objective truth and error, can only emerge in a

How Are Transcendental Arguments Possible?

11

context of interpretation. Hence no content can be given to the idea that a creature has thoughts without being an interpreter of the speech of others. That Wittgenstein's argun1ent against the possibility of a private language takes the form of a reductio ad absurdum has been pointed out many times and needs no repeating here. 17 Although it will be convenient to refer to the procedure of transcendental arguments as reductio ad absurdum, it must be emphasized that they are not reductiones in a strictly logical sense. Transcendental arguments are no more logical proofs than Kant's deductions are. If the proposition to be disproved by the argument entailed a logical contradiction, its negation, the proposition to be established, would be a tautology. Yet the conclusions of transcendental arguments are not. This raises a crucial question about the conclusiveness, or force, of transcendental arguments; a question reminiscent of Kant's quest for a 'third something' that warrants the connection of subject and predicate in a synthetic judgement in the absence of any confirming experience (cf. A155/B194). And just as in Kant's case, I would maintain, what supports the conclusion of the transcendental argument is the reference to the possibility of experience or thought, as the case may be. That is to say, we are invited to imagine if experience, say, would be possible if the conceptual feature at issue were missing. This point must not be misunderstood. The question is not if we now, intellectually developed as we are and with the conceptual resources we have, can form the idea of a string of purely subfective experiences. There is no doubt that we can. What has to be asked instead is whether, if experience were completely of such subjective order, we could have arrived at a conception of experience which fulfils the minimun1 requiren1ent for it to count as experience. This is a crucial but elusive point, and I think it best to illustrate it by looking at one of the argun1ents mentioned above in more detail, namely Strawson's 'objectivity thesis'. Strawson (1966, pp. 31-2) wishes to establish the Kantian conclusion that 'a certain objectivity and a certain unity are necessary conditions of the possibility of experience'. But he wishes to do so without any reference to a transcendental, nonempirical self - the 'imaginary subject of transcendental psychology' (p. 32) - and its associated faculties. Instead he takes his start from Kant's 'standard-setting definition' of what is to count as experience, namely, that it should be conceptualizable, and that particular contents of experience should be recognized as having some general character, as falling under son1e general concepts. 18 Now if particular iten1S are to be recognized as falling under general concepts, it must be the case, first, that it is the san1e subject which experiences the item and which entertains the concept under which the

12

Eckart Forster

item is to be subsumed. But it must also be the case, in order to apply

general concepts, that a presently encountered item can be linked with other past or possible experiences of the same kind, experiences which were or could be enjoyed by the same subject, and to which (s)he did, or could, apply the same concept. That is to say, experiential items which can figure in a possible experience must stand in mutual relations to the same subject; they must be united in a single consciousness (cf. p. 87). But they can only be thus united, so Strawson's thesis, if the subject's experience is at least in part of an objective reaItn: 'unity of diverse experiences in a single consciousness requires experience of objects' (p. 98). This conclusion he tries to establish, not by means of a transcendental deduction but by confronting it with an alleged alternative: 'We can test the strength of the thesis by seeing how it stands up to attack' (p. 98). The alternative proposed is that a 'purely sense datum experience' might be possible, an experience which consisted entirely of disconnected impressions like flashes, colours, whistles, smells, etc. which could be brought under sensory quality concepts but which did not allow for objective judgements in the sense that a distinction could be drawn between how things are and how they appear to the subject (cf. p. 99). Strawson's way of meeting this challenge is by enquiring whether the 'purely sense datum experience' could satisfy the requirement that experience must involve the recognition of particular items as being of some general kind. His claim is that it could not. The hypothesis of essentially disconnected impressions, he suggests, cannot give rise to the idea of a single consciousness to which the various experiences are supposed to belong. If the idea of a single consciousness is lacking, however, the recognitional element, necessary to all experience, cannot be maintained. The argument might be sketched as follows. When we examine a series of sense data and assert the disconnectedness of its members, we have already adopted a standpoint, as it were, outside the impressions from which we view the series. There is nothing in the series itself which could give rise to this claim: disconnected impressions cannot 'know' of their disconnectedness. Equally, it seems, there is nothing in such a series that could, by itself, give rise to the idea that its members all belong to a single consciousness: 'We seem to add nothing but a form of words to the hypothesis of a succession of essentially disconnected impressions by stipulating that they all belong to an identical consciousness' (p. 100). And it would be equally vacuous to stipulate that the unitary consciousness is that which is successively aware of the impressions: The trouble with such 'ohjects of awareness' as those offered by the hypothesis is that just as their esse is, to all intents and purposes, their percipi - i.e. there is no effective ground of distinction between the two - so their percipi seems

How Are Transcendental Arguments Possible?

13

to be nothing but their esse. The hypothesis seems to contain no ground of distinction between the supposed experience of awareness and the particular item which the awareness is awareness of. (p. 100)

What becomes then of the requirement that in all experience, 'even in the most fleeting and purely subjective of impressions', there must be a component of recognition which is not simply identical with the recognized item? The recognitional component can be present in such experience only if the impressions are relatable to something other than impressions. By hypothesis, however, there are no other things besides impressions to which they might be referred. The requirement can only be satisfied, therefore, if it is possible to refer the different experiences to one identical subject of them all. What is required is a potential selfascription of these experiences: 'It is the fact that this potentiality is implicit in recognition which saves the recognitional con1ponent in a particular experience from absorption into the item recognized (and hence saves the character of the particular experience as an experience) even when that item cannot be conceived of as having an existence independent of the particular experience of it' (p. 101). Yet the minimum that is required by the potentiality of such self-ascription of experiences is precisely what the hypothesis of purely sense datum experience attempts to exclude, namely, that some of the experiences which are recognized as falling under certain general concepts should allow for a distinction between an objective order of things and a point of view of awareness of this order. Some, not all. There are enough subjective experiences - momentary tickling sensations or suchlike - the objects of which have no existence independent of the awareness of them. What is argued to be impossible is that all experiences should be of this type. For if, per impossibile, they were so, even the basis of the idea of the referring of such experiences to an identical subject of a series of them by such a subject would be altogether lacking; and if the basis of this idea were lacking, it would be in1possible to distinguish the recognitional components in such 'experiences' as components not wholly absorbed by their sensible accusatives; and if this were impossible, they would not rate as experiences at all. (pp. 101f)

It seems worth pointing out that Strawson's thesis does not require that all experiences must actually be self-ascribed. 19 The argument is, rather, that only if experience is (partly) of an objective order is a distinction possible between the way things are and the way they seem to be; and only on the condition of this pcssibility can expe~·iences actually be self-ascribed. Nothing has to be added to these experiences to render such self-ascription possible. Strawson sometimes expresses this point by saying that objective experience 'provides room' for~ or 'contains the seed' or 'the basis' of, the idea of referring different experiences to an identical subject, and hence to render possible a

14

Eckart Forster

distinction between recognitional components and experienced items when the objects of awareness have no existence independently of the subject's awareness of thenl. Sense datum experience, on the other hand, does not allow for such distinction; it does not contain 'in itself the materials for the conception of itself as experience'. Hence, 'no true alternative has been advanced to the ... requirement that the fundamental or basic judgements of experience should themselves be objective judgements' (p. 110). We have here, it seems to me, in clear view the basic elements that make up a transcendental argument in the modern, post-Kantian sense. Such argument proposes to establish a non-analytical, non-empirical conclusion, thus warranting the label 'transcendental'. It does so by considering an alternative, and by demonstrating the internal incoherence of the alternative. It does so, more precisely, by showing that, in order to make itself intelligible, the alternative must borrow materials which it purports to rule out qua alternative. Although this is the procedure of post-Kantian transcendental arguments, it is interesting to notice that there is one argument in the Critique that exhibits exactly the same features: the Refutation of Idealism which Kant added to the second edition. It sets out to prove a non-analytical proposition, namely, that there are things in space outside me (B275). And it does so indirectly, and without evoking (or even mentioning) transcendental idealism; it proceeds by reductio ad absurdum: 'the game played by idealism has been turned against itself, and with greater justice' (B276). More precisely, the argument assumes the Cartesian premise that I can temporally determine my empirical consciousness without granting the existence of external objects, and then asks if I could, given that inner experience was all I had, ever arrive at a conception of a temporally determined consciousness of myself. And this, Kant came to think, is the only way the proof can proceed: 'It is absolutely impossible to prove from inner perception that the ground of representations is not in me. But if I say, suppose it is always in me, no temporal determination of my being is possible.'20

III I should like to conclude this discussion of transcendental arguments by considering two standard objections that have been raised against them. The first objection was, I believe, initially raised by Stephan Korner and has since gained wide acceptance. It insists that even if a transcendental argument succeeds in ruling out one particular alternative, it fails to rule out all possible alternatives - simply because it cannot

How Are Transcendental Arguments Possible?

15

consider all of them - and thus fails to establish its conclusion. Thus Korner writes: The person propounding a transcendental argument assumes that every and any thinker employs the same categorial framework as he does himself, and tries to show that, and why, the employment of this particular framework is 'necessary'. The defect of all transcendental arguments is their failure to provide a uniqueness-proof, i.e. the demonstration that the categorial framework is unique. 21

This line of objection can also be found in the writings of Richard Rorty, for instance. There can be no such thing as wholesale transcendental arguments for negative conclusions, Rorty insists, because we cannot make good on the notion of 'ruling out all alternative forms of knowledge'. We cannot do that because we cannot know that every alternative proposed will have the same defect: 'Nothing in heaven or earth could set limits to what we can in principle conceive.'22 And specifically on Strawson's argument Rorty comments that all it does is 'rule out one alternative - the sceptical, Humean 'sense-datum experience' alternative. We do not have the slightest idea what the other alternatives might be.'23 It is readily seen, however, that this objection is mistaken and rests on a confused sense of 'alternative'. A transcendental argument, we have noticed, in order to establish a particular condition of knowledge or experience, proceeds by considering an alternative, that is, the negation of the condition, and subsequently demonstrates its internal incoherence. Clearly, this exhausts the field of possible alternatives to this condition. For although one may perhaps imagine different philosophical positions or conceptions based on the negation of the original condition, this would not add to the number of alternatives to it. This is clearly illustrated by Strawson's argument. Its aim was not to refute the sense datum hypothesis as such, but to establish the 'objectivity condition' (i.e., 'that the fundamental or basic judgen1ents of experience should themselves be objective judgements'). To do so, Strawson had to refute what we might call the 'non-objectivity-condition'. A conception based on this latter condition is the sense datum experience hypothesis. To prove his point, Strawson tried to reduce it to absurdity. Now one might perhaps imagine other conceptions based on the 'non-objectivitycondition', but these would be alternatives to the sense datum hypothesis, not further alternatives to the objectivity-condition. It may be that Rorty wants to hold that Strawson has not really refuted the non-objectivitycondition itself but something intrinsic to the sense datum theory. And if this were the case, then indeed Strawson's argument would be unsuccessful. But of course it would not follow that there can be 'no

16

Eckart Forster

wholesale transcendental arguments for negative conclusions. '24 Another, more potent, criticism is due to Barry Stroud. Stroud takes transcendental arguments to be primarily directed against traditional scepticism, as demonstrating the illegitimacy of the sceptical challenge by proving that certain concepts are necessary for thought or experience. 25 Yet if this is their intention, they cannot, according to Stroud, be successful. For either they must rely on a dubious 'verification principle' to the effect that if a certain word or notion of our language has meaning, there must be things or situations to which it is, or was, truly applied; or, if not, the argument can at most show that we must believe that we have knowledge of what the sceptic doubts in order for thought or experience to be possible. The first option makes the transcendental argument redundant, since the verification principle refutes the sceptic right away. The second option, however, leaves the sceptical challenge untouched, as it fails to show that our beliefs in question are, or must be, true. It seems to be Stroud's conviction that most transcendental arguments, or at least those he discusses (by Strawson and Shoemaker), opt for the first horn of the dilemma and en1ploy an (unacknowledged) verification principle. But even if they opted for the second horn of the dilemma, the implication seems to be that they could hardly count as transcendental arguments, because falling far short of what Kant is said to have been trying, i.e., to give 'a complete answer to the sceptic' .26 I think neither the intentions of transcendental arguments nor those of Kant's position are correctly represented in this account. Stroud's primary example of a transcendental argument evoking a verification principle is Strawson's (1959) discussion of the general sceptical doubt regarding the identity of objects through non-continuous observation of them. Such doubt makes sense only if the objects can be accounted for in one and the same spatio-temporal framework. But since the identity of that framework in turn depends on the unquestionable acceptance of particular identity in at least some cases of non-continuous perception, the sceptic, according to Strawson, 'pretends to accept a conceptual scheme, but at the san1e time quietly rejects one of the conditions of its employment' .27 Stroud strangely misconstrues this argument when he suggests that it proceeds from the premise (1) We think of the world as containing objective particulars in a single spatio-temporal system, to the conclusion (6) Objects continue to exist unperceived. 28 Not surprisingly he wonders how such inference from how we think to the way things are 'could ... ever be justified' without evoking a verification principle. 29 Yet it was not continued existence of objects that was claimed by Strawson to be a necessary condition for the employment of our conceptual scheme, but 'the unquestioning acceptance of particular identity in at

How Are Transcendental Arguments Possible?

17

least some cases of non-continuous observation'. 30 We must be 'willing to ascribe' particular identity in some cases, Strawson argued, if we want to maintain a single spatio-ten1poral system - and if the sceptic's doubt is to make sense. Stroud himself seems to have noticed this when, after outlining Strawson's argun1ent up to the point where it is claimed that we must have satisfiable criteria for reidentification, he observes, 'Strawson's argument actually stops here'. 31 But his mistaken assumption that Strawson attempts to prove knowledge of particular identity in the sense the sceptic demands forces him to conclude that a verification principle must be a suppressed premise of Strawson's argument. However, the claim was precisely that such 'knowledge' cannot be had. The sceptic's standard for being sure, Strawson said, 'is set selfcontradictorily high, viz. having continuous observation where we have non-continuous observation. So the complaint that you cannot be sure reduces to the tautology that you do not continuously observe what you do not continuously observe. '32 So the argument shows, after all, only that we must believe in particular identity in some cases? If one wants to put it thus, yes. A better way of putting it would be the following. An argument of this type shows that there are necessary connections between certain parts of our conceptual scheme. We cannot abandon one of its parts, e.g., the idea of persisting particulars, without destroying the scheme itself. This is not a form of verificationism. For it is not argued that we do know, in the sceptic's sense, that objects continue to exist unperceived; nor is the claim that we merely believe them to persist. What the argument attempts to establish is that we cannot but have this 'belief', that a doubt here is idle because we have no option but to have this 'belief'. But if this is so, then to speak of 'belief' at all in this case is to strain an analogy to its limit. 33 Does such an argument fall short of what Kant intended to achieve? Did Kant attempt to give 'a complete answer to the sceptic'? This, too, seems to be a strange misconstrual. At one level, Kant's answer to the sceptic is of course that 'what we call outer objects are nothing but mere representations of our sensibility' (A30/B45). Scepticism about them is misplaced because we are as immediately aware of them as of our own existence. The philosopher can 'admit the existence of matter without going outside his mere self-consciousness' (A3 70). Presumably, this would not satisfy Stroud's sceptic. (S)he will want to know if there are 'really' things outside us which are not 'mere representations'. Kant's answer at this level is revealing: unless I take it for granted that there are things distinct from my representations of them there can be no temporal determination of my own ~xistence in time. 34 Consciousness of my existence in time is bound up 'in the way

18

Eckart Forster

of identity' (Bxl) with the consciousness of a relation to something outside me. It is thus not open to me seriously to doubt its existence. In this matter I have no choice. So again, to speak of a mere 'belief' here would seem inapt and inappropriate. Kant's concern, however, was not with terminology. His intention was to provide a critique of reason; to show where genuine knowledge is possible, and where 'my ignorance is absolutely necessary, and ... I am therefore absolved from all further enquiry' (A758/B786). As regards the sceptic, transcendental arguments and Kant's proofs are really in the same boat. 35 They do not, strictly speaking, demonstrate the falsity of the sceptic's position; they show the pointlessness, or idleness, of his or her objection by showing that the acceptance of certain conditions as necessary for thought and experience is not optional, but irrebuttable and inevitable. And, as Kant once remarked, 'if we can demonstrate that our knowledge of things, even experience itself, is only possible under those conditions, it follows that all other concepts of things (which are not thus conditioned) are for us empty and utterly useless for knowledge.'36 With determining necessary conditions of human thought and experience, transcendental proofs thus inevitably detern1ine limits to human knowledge. It is the determination and acknowledgement of such limits which seem to be at the heart of Kant's procedure and that of transcendental arguments alike. For, in Kant's memorable words, \'it is precisely in knowing one's limits that philosophy consists'37 (A727/ I 755).

NOTES Kant to M. Herz, 21 February 1772, Kant's gesammelte Schriften, Koniglich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin/Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter & Co. 1901 -), vol. X, p. 132. (Hereafter cited as Ak., volume and page.) 2 References to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, transl. Kemp Smith, are given in the text with the usual 'A' and 'B' numbering. References to Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (abbreviated Prol.) are to Ak. IV, the translation is P. G. Lucas' (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1953). 3 Cf. Prol., 376: 'the possibility of synthetic knowledge a priori ... was properly the problen1 on the solution of which the fate of metaphysics wholly rests and to which my Critique ... was entirely directed.' 4 'If the objects with which our knowledge has to deal were things in themselves, we could have no a priori concepts of them.' (A128; cf. also A114; Prol., §§ 9, 10; Bxvii; Reflection no. 5925, Ak. XVIII, 387.) In what follows I will mean by 'transcendental idealism' this complex thesis that we experience only appearances and that experience is constituted from the sensible manifold. That experience has to be constituted is something on which 'in my 1

How Are Transcendental Arguments Possible?

7

8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17

18

19 20

21 22 23

19

judgement everything depends'. Kant to Beck, 16 October 1792, Ak. XI, 361. Cf. also Kant's letters of 3 July 1792, 1 July 1794, 11 December 1797. ' Cf. A84f/Bl16f. In the next two paragraphs I am greatly indebted to Henrich, 1975. Henrich's position is developed more fully in 'Kant's Notion of a Deduction and the Methodological Background of Kant's "Transcendental" Strategy in the first Critique', in: E. Forster (ed.), Kant's Deductions in His Three Critiques and His Opus Postumum (Stanford: Stanford University Press, forthcoming). Refls 5058 and 5002, Ak. XVIII, 75, 57. Refl. 6337, Ak. XVIII, 658. Cf. esp. P. F. Strawson (1966, pp. 38f, 170-4,247-9; and R. P. Wolff (1973, pp. I1ff). Only one year after the publication of the second edition of the Critique, Kant noted regarding 'the basic principle of purposiveness in the construction of organic (mainly living) creatures': 'I have ... occasionally attempted to steer into the gulf of assuming here a blind mechanism of nature as the cause, and had thought to discover a passage to an artless concept of nature [kunstloser NaturbegriffJ, but I was constantly stranded by reason, and have therefore preferred to hazard myself upon the shoreless ocean of ideas.' 'Vorarbeiten zu: Ober den Gebrauch teleologischer Prinzipien in der Philosophie', Ak. XXIII, 75, trans!' in McFarland (1970, p. 65). This has been argued by F. Delekat (1969). Cf. also Low (1980, pp. 206ff). Cf. Mathieu, 1967, pp. 184-91. Strawson 1966, pp. 43, 16. Wilkerson (1976, p. 13). Cf. Wittgenstein, 1953; Strawson (1966, pp. 97ff); Davidson (1975, pp. 7-23); Malcolm 1968, pp. 45-72. In view of the elusive nature of Wittgenstein's presentation in the Investigations, I would rather add this qualification. Insofar as one wants to attribute a wholesale argument to Wittgenstein here it seems quite clear that it proceeds by reductio ad absurdum of the idea. of a private language. Whether his real intentions are best represented in this way is, however, a matter of debate. This does not rule out other forms of sentience like those of infants or animals which fall short of this standard. The claim is, rather, that we cannot know what such forms are like, and that any idea we may have of such experiences will be in terms of concepts derived from our own. (Cf. Strawson, 1966, pp. 28, 273) This has been misunderstood by, among others, Mackie (1974, pp. 100f), and by Cerf (1972, p. 611). Ak. XX, 367. Cf. also B418. I have discussed the problems Kant had with the Refutation, and with its integration into his system of transcendental idealism, in Forster, forthcoming. Korner (1974, p. 72). Categorial Frameworks (Oxford: Blackwell 1974), 72. This criticism was first raised in Korner, 1967. Rorty (1979, p. 82). Ibid., p. 83.

20 24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

Eckart Forster It hardly needs pointing out that the other transcendental arguments mentioned above likewise admit of only one alternative each, i.e., that one can follow a rule privately; that mechanism is conceivable; that a creature can have thoughts without interpreting the speech of others. Cf. Stroud (1968, p. 242). Cf. ibid., pp. 245, 256. Strawson (1959, p. 35). Cf. Stroud (1968, p. 245). Ibid., p. 246. Strawson (1959, p. 35; my italics). Stroud (1968, p. 246). Strawson (1959, p. 34). Strawson speaks, more appropriately, of 'original, natural, inescapable commitments which we neither choose nor could give up' (1985, p. 28). Cf. ibid., p. 20. Although, pace Stroud, not all transcendental arguments are directed against scepticism. Kant to Herz, 26 May 1789, Ak. XI pp. 51f, trans!' in Zweig (1967, p. 153). Kemp Smith's translation an1ended.

2

Kant's Transcendental Arguments Graham Bird

1

SOME PRELIMINARY RESTRICTIONS

Kant's interest in transcendental arguments is an ancestor of the interest in such arguments shown by many contemporary philosophers, but there should be no presumption that these interests, or the associated arguments, are the same. It is for this general reason that I explicitly restrict my main concern to Kant's transcendental arguments, and do not embark on a general comparison between his arguments and those of later philosophers. But although such a restricted account of Kant's argun1ents would provide only one leg of the general comparative task, it may also offer some clues to possible misunderstandings of the ancestral arguments, which reveal differences between Kant and at least some modern transcendentalists. 1 There is one such difference that I hope to make clear. I want further to restrict the scope of my discussion to Kant's epistemology, and even to certain aspects of that epistemology. It may be that Kant employs other types of transcendental argun1ent in his moral philosophy or elsewhere, but if so I shall not consider them. Such a restriction is far fron1 arbitrary, however, since it is plausible to think that the notion of a transcendental argument has its primary application in the Critique of Pure Reason. But even in that work the notion of a transcendental argument is elusive in at least two ways. Kant himself does not seem to use the term 'transcendental argument', though he has a section on the proofs of transcendental synthetic propositions (B810 ff) which is generally regarded as a record of the peculiarities of such arguments. But that account, though clear and uncontroversial in some respects, is also puzzling and obscure in others. 2 For the n10st part I shall consider Kant's practice of arguing transcendentally rather than his theory about the special features of such arguments. Kant's practice, however, might be illustrated from any number of

22

Graham Bird

different contexts within the first Critique. Natural examples of such transcendental arguments will be those passages where Kant speaks explicitly of 'transcendental expositions' (in the Aesthetic) or of a 'transcendental deduction' (in the Analytic). Indeed it is initially plausible to take the common view that the transcendental deduction of the categories is the best, most central and most important, of Kant's transcendental arguments. 3 But I shall resist this view for both tactical and longer term reasons, some of which I now summarize. First, the transcendental deduction is notoriously difficult and controversial. To treat it as a paradigm case of transcendental argument will inevitably raise all the complex issues of Kant interpretation and so will tend to obscure the form of such arguments. For one thing the deduction operates with two highly abstract notions, those of a conceptual and a personal unity, the connections between which remain obscure. It is true that those abstract notions occur at the very centre of Kant's thought but just for that reason they ramify throughout the whole argument of the Critique. Their very centrality is thus an obstacle to their use in this context. Of course it could be replied that since this will be true of any other candidates we are at least no worse off in selecting the deduction. I shall suggest, however, that this is not so, and that there are better, more immediately accessible, candidates. Second, if we are interested, as I shall be, in the bearing which Kant's arguments have on scepticism, then the transcendental deduction suffers from further handicaps. The argument there is a quite general one about the role and status of categories 4 , and is therefore not directed at any particular sceptic's view of any specific concept. It is, certainly, directed at an empiricist thesis which rejects the possibility of certain a priori concepts, or better of any synthetic a priori principles in which such concepts might figure, but that issue raises a question about that complex classification of concepts or principles and in any case is not necessarily related to sceptical problems at all. Sceptical arguments nowadays are rarely put in the form: are there' a priori concepts? or: is this principle a priori but synthetic? These questions might be raised without directly involving what we now think of as sceptical issues, and sceptical issues might themselves be raised without concerning those questions. Kant himself raises these questions without directly involving sceptical issues in relation to Locke's empiricism; and Strawson's work shows how it is possible to canvass transcendental arguments, and even to endorse then1 against scepticism, without also endorsing Kant's classification of synthetic a priori principles. 5 Third, it may be objected that Kant, after all, does refer to specific Humean, sceptical, issues in his introduction to the transcendental deduction. The passages at the end of §13 and §14 (B122-4, B127-9) make specific reference to the concept 'cause' and to the empiricist

Kant's Transcendental Arguments

23

failure to recognize a 'dignity' which attaches to that concept. Although Hume is not mentioned by name his spirit is undeniably present. But, notoriously, there is little else in the main text of the deduction which takes up this specific issue, and this is exactly what should be expected at this stage in Kant's project. Kant wants at this stage to establish, as he says, the possibility that categories in general are a priori6 , but he is not yet attempting to prove this specifically of such a concept as that of 'cause'. That proof is designed to, and does, follow in the Analytic of Principles, and so offers abetter, more direct, example of a Kantian transcendental argument against a sceptic. I shall, therefore, take the argument of the Second Analogy as my central example of such a transcendental argument. There is a final reason for disregarding the claims of the deduction in this context, though I cannot yet make it wholly clear. It is that the deduction is not merely a tactically poor choice in trying to understand Kant's transcendental arguments, but also that such a choice is apt to be seriously n1isleading. Generally when comn1entators fasten on the deduction as the central use of a transcendental argument against a sceptic they see that argument as an attempted resolution of a problem of 'objectivity' or of Hegel's 'subject-object' problem, or of modern worries over privacy and publicity. It cannot be denied that Kant is in some way concerned with objectivity in the deduction, but to adn1it that concern itself raises some difficult issues. The most obvious of these is the connection between the argument of the deduction and that of the Refutation of Idealism. It is in that latter passage that Kant plainly and explicitly addresses the issue of scepticism about 'outer experience', and so provides a clear transcendental argument against Idealist sceptics about a certain kind of objectivity or publicity. But if Kant is doing the same thing in the transcendental deduction it is puzzling that he thought it necessary to introduce the Refutation of Idealism into the second edition of the Critique, particularly when he had so extensively rewritten the deduction itself for that edition. In fact, of course, it is quite clear that the two arguments are not identical, and should not be confused with, or assimilated to, each other, even though it is no doubt not a simple matter to specify the diffferences between them. 7 It is also quite clear from the point of view of grasping the forn1 of a transcendental argument that the Refutation of Idealism presents a far clearer case against scepticism than does the deduction. I shall therefore choose the Refutation of Idealism as a further example of a Kantian transcendental argument along with that fron1 the Second Analogy. What I propose to do is first to consider briefly the way in which the Refutation of Idealism attacks scepticism, and draw some conclusions from this. Second I shall consider at greater length the

24

Graham Bird

corresponding form of argument in the Second Analogy, and attempt to assess how that argument bears on Hume's views about the concept 'cause'. Once it has been made clear how Kant hopes to 'refute' Hume in that context"! want finally to return to the claims of the transcendental deduction. I suggested earlier that an appeal to the transcendental deduction in this context was not only tactically unwise but also potentially misleading, and in the final section I shall offer some illustration of that view.

2

THE REFUTATION OF IDEALISM

In the Refutation of Idealism Kant believes that he can demonstrate an unexpected connection between two general features of our overall experience, nan1ely what he calls 'inner' and 'outer experience'. The argument is placed explicitly in the context of an Idealism of a weak (Cartesian) or strong (Berkeleyan) form which canvasses a scepticism about 'the existence of objects in space outside us' (B274). It is clearly this passage which keeps the promise Kant makes in the Preface (Bxl, note) to relieve the scandal to philosophy that the existence of things outside us has to be accepted n1erely on faith. Kant's strategy is first to represent the sceptics as accepting our inner experience but doubting or denying any genuine outer experience, and then, second, to argue that such a position is incoherent. For he claims to prove that the inner experience, which the sceptics accept, is possible only on the assumption of that outer experience, which they variously reject. If Kant's proof works, then he succeeds in showing that to doubt or deny outer experience the sceptics must also doubt or deny inner experience; and that in accepting inner experience they must also accept outer. What they cannot coherently do is to accept inner but reject outer experience. One noteworthy feature of such a plan is its specific sceptical target. Kant is not considering some quite general form of scepticisn1 and attempting to refute it out of hand. Rather he is carefully identifying a specific sceptical position, with its particular assumptions, and then arguing that the sceptical conclusion does not cohere with those assumptions. The argument, even if it works without qualification, has nothing to say to scepticism in general, but provides only a claimed refutation of one central and familiar type of sceptic. Indeed the argument may seem in its £orn1, and its direct bearing on a sceptical position, to be so straightforward as to be hardly a genuine transcendental argument at all. One commentator 8 recently considering Kant's transcendental attacks on scepticism says: 'Scepticism for Kant represents a way of posing the threat of "illegitimacy". A condition of adequacy for any "legitimizing" project is that the threat of scepticism be completely

Kant's Transcendental Arguments

25

disarmed.' If such a view is taken seriously then the Refutation of Idealisn1, despite its evident direct relevance to a central forn1 of scepticisn1, could not be regarded as part of Kant's supposed 'legitimizing project'. Although that absurd conclusion is by itself enough ground not to take the stated view seriously, nevertheless other points might be made. It might be said, for example, that transcendental arguments are supposed to involve 'possible experience' and to outline the 'conditions of a possible experience', and yet there is no overt appeal to these notions in the Refutation of Idealism. It might also be said that there is no hint of the circularity which Kant's transcendental arguments are popularly supposed to be vulnerable to. For it is sometimes supposed that transcendental arguments draw conclusions about th~ conditions for a certain experience where it is the validity of that very experience itself which the sceptic queries. The Refutation of Idealism escapes this difficulty by drawing its conclusions from the very assumptions made by the sceptics to be attacked. I want to answer these points in two ways. First, of course, it will help the claim that this is a quite standard form of transcendental argument if it can be shown that the argument of the Second Analogy has the same structure, and operates in the same way against a Humean scepticism over the concept 'cause'. That point will be pursued in detail in the next section. Second, however, I want also to indicate some misconceptions which may be responsible for these doubts about the transcendental form of the Refutation of Idealism. Suppose, for example, that we ask where the idea of a 'possible experience' comes into that argument. Certainly it would be odd to think that it appears as some sort of a premiss from which transcendental truths can be derived. The argument claims simply that if one accepts inner experience, as the sceptic in this case does by hypothesis, then one must also accept outer experience. What is initially shown to be impossible is the denial of this conditional, that is an experience in which only inner features have a place. The idea of a possible experience, or better that of an impossible experience, comes into the argument as a self-evident consequence of the sceptical incoherence. It may still be suggested that the form of the argument falls short of establishing any strict necessity for outer experience. For the argument, if it works, shows only that it is impossible to have inner but no outer experience. It might be said that this cannot disarm even this type of scepticism completely, since it leaves open the possibility that a sceptic' might coherently deny both inner and outer experience. Such anarchic scepticism, partly defined by a refusal to accept any assumptions at all, is plainly not at issue in Kant's argument. If such a sceptic refuses to' accept even the Cartesian or Berkeleyan assumptions in Kant's argument then he will not be vulnerable to that argument. But I take it that such

26

Graham Bird

invulnerability is bought at a high price, namely that of reducing a position which might have had some interest philosophically to one which totally lacks any serious interest at all. It is always possible to find some such residual anarchic scepticism, but perhaps William James was right to say 'General scepticism is a permanent torpor of the will ... and you can no more kill it off by logic than you can kill off obstinacy or practical joking.'9 These points have a bearing on some common current ways of characterizing transcendental arguments. Bernard Williams, for example, writes: 10 The presupposition-forms: We can Q only if P, or: We can Q only if we accept P (disregarding the important differences between these) yield an argument for P evidently only if it is accepted that Q. SO they will refute scepticism about P only if the sceptic must accept that we Q. The best known case would be where we can show that even the assertion of his scepticism commits him to Q.ll

Apart from one minor' puzzle what Williams says is formally correct. But his characterization of transcendental arguments covers two kinds of case which it is important to distinguish. For it would be natural to take Williams's description of an anti-sceptical argument as one in which it is shown that the sceptic tacitly, but not explicitly, commits himself to Q, for exanlple just by virtue of speaking a language, or of being a human, or of asserting his sceptical conclusion. Such an argument probably derives its current force from Strawson's appeal to a similar strategy in Individuals 12 , and that origin may also account for the belief that it is essentially Kant's strategy too. Yet nothing is plainer than that this is not at all Kant's strategy in the Refutation of Idealism. Kant is not arguing that his sceptics, still less any sceptic, tacitly but not explicitly are committed to the relevant Q in virtue of their humanity, or their linguistic capacities. Rather he simply, and plausibly, identifies his sceptics as making an explicit commitment to Q. The distinction between 'tacit' and 'explicit' anti-scepticism is important because the two projects operate in quite different ways. The tacit anti-sceptic seems interesting and powerful for several reasons. In claiming to unearth implicit commitments he nlakes it seem plausible that the sceptic might be unaware of these assumptions. Moreover, in deriving those commitments from sonle quite general feature of the sceptic, he opens up the prospect of an equally general refutation of scepticism as a whole. Unlike the 'explicit' anti-sceptic who is restricted to those philosophers who overtly accept the relevant commitment, the tacit strategist seems to offer the chance of disarming the sceptic completely. On the other hand the tacit theorist faces the difficulty of establishing that the sceptic really is conlmitted, though not explicitly, to the relevant assumption. The more general and complete his attack

Kant's Transcendental Arguments

27

on scepticism becomes the more difficult it will be to establish this. By contrast the explicit theorist restricts the range of his attack but should have no problem at all in ascribing the relevant assumption to his opponent. The explicit anti-sceptic is naturally in the field against what has sometimes been called 'local' scepticism, that is, a scepticism which accepts clearly certain items of knowledge or experience but rejects others which appear to be based on the former. It is for this reason that the explicit theorist can so easily come to grips with the relevant assun1ption. By contrast the tacit anti-sceptic is naturally associated with what has been called 'global' scepticism, that is, a scepticism which calls for some foundation for all knowledge or experience, and so makes no allowance for any assumptions about that knowledge. It is for this reason that the tacit anti-sceptic has to find implicit assumptions which are at odds with, but also implied in, the sceptic's conclusion. Traditionally the global sceptic is answered by the production of some indubitable, or self-evident, foundation for knowledge or experience. The tacit theorist is apparently more subtle in disclaiming such a search, but instead trying to show that the sceptic must be committed to certain assumptions, however little he nlay think so. In terms of these contrasts recent interest in 'refuting the sceptic' has tended overwhelmingly to be global and implicit. No doubt it is for that reason that Kant's transcendental arguments have so commonly been thought to fall into the same pattern. What can be unhesitatingly said at this stage is that at least one central transcendental argument in Kant belongs firmly in the other camp. It remains to be seen whether this is also true of the second such transcendental argument.

3

THE SECOND ANALOGY

Kant's argument in the Second Analogy may be controversial in its details but I believe that it is not so controversial in its general form. Kant begins by recalling, and presupposing, the resources he clainlS to have established in the First Analogy with respect to substance, and he goes on in the Second Analogy to extend the argument to events. In line with the First Analogy Kant assumes that in our experience there are substances (objects) with accidents (properties), and that while objects may alter but not change, their properties may change but not alter. 13 As in the First Analogy Kant again assumes that our inner sense provides us with a succession of experiences in which the resources of the First Analogy may be deployed, and also that those experiences do not directly present time to us. So far as I can see Kant's argument at this stage is quite general, that is, does not at all specify the kinds of

28

Graham Bird

things which we primarily regard as substances. Such a further specification of the application of these categorial terms belongs, as Kant indicates, to the empirical criterion for such terms (B232), while the transcendental argument operates with the general terms themselves. Kant thus assumes at the start of the Second Analogy that we have a successive experience in which we can identify objects (substances) and properties (accidents), and can characterize the same object as having different properties at different points in that experience. The question that Kant then sets for himself is this: What is additionally needed to provide a similar deployment for the concept 'event'? Kant supposes that this concept embodies the idea of a determinate temporal order, so that in giving the conditions in which we can deploy the concept 'event' he takes himself to be giving the conditions for the possibility of a determinate time order. Kant thinks that this question is in order because the resources he has so far outlined, while they may be necessary are not yet sufficient to make the concept 'event' possible. Those resources, he thinks, do not yet enable us to discriminate between perceived property changes in a substance which yield an event and those which do not, or consequently between property changes in a substance with the order A-B as opposed to the order B-A. Crucially, and controversially, Kant thinks that it is required for these discriminations to be possible that we deploy the concept 'cause' so that the general causal principle, variously formulated as the principle of the Second Analogy, holds. Kant takes the notion of an event to be simply that of different properties of the same substance placed in a determinate successive order. For him the requiren1ent of a determinate order implies the need for something to determine that order, and this he believes to be the concept of a cause or the general principle of causality. The validity of the steps in this argument has been widely questioned in at least the following terms: 1

Why should not the mere perception of an order in changing properties of some object be sufficient to determine events as against substances, and one event as against another?

2

Why should Kant assume that substances are prior to events? Could we not equally construct a version of our experience by treating events as independent particulars?

3

How does the notion of an event relate to the idea of a unified temporal order in which all events have their place? The two may be connected but they do not seem to be identical.

4

Even if the notion of an event does require that of a cause why does it also require the truth of the general causal principle? Why

Kant's Transcendental Arguments

29

should that principle have to hold universally? Might it not be enough for Kant's purposes to require only that some, or 1110st, events have causes? 5

Is it really so important, or so correct, to insist that if events are different states of the same substance in a determinate successive order, then there must be something that determines that order? Even if that claim were conceded might not the determinant be some quite specific causal law rather than the general causal law itself?

Though I do not believe that any of these objections count immediately and decisively against Kant's argument, my aim here is not to consider the validity of that argurnent by pursuing these objections but only to consider the form of the argument. In particular the aim is to consider that form in relation both to the earlier argument in the Refutation of Idealism and to a relevant scepticism about the concept 'cause'. In this case the relevant scepticism is that of Hume over the alleged necessity to be found in causal connections. In order to consider such a dispute between Kant and Hume it is therefore necessary to outline Hume's argument about causality in the Treatise. The general pattern of Hume's argument in the Treatise is important because it throws light on the relation between his account of time and his discussion of 'cause', and on his attitude to the general causal principle. In Book I, Part II Hun1e considers space and time before he moves on to a discussion of causality in Part III. In Part II Hun1e is mainly concerned with the problem of the infinite divisibility of space and time, and he devotes far more attention to space than to time. But he is also concerned specifically with the question whether our ideas of time could be derived directly from some temporal presentation or only from what Hume calls a 'perceivable succession of changeable objects' (p. 35).14 His answer is that 'time cannot make its appearance to the n1ind either alone or attended with a steady unchangeable object.' Hume believes that he can explain why we are tempted to think that we might still have an idea of temporal duration even if we experienced only unchangeable items. Characteristically he explains this as a kind of fiction (pp. 37, 67). The discussion of infinite divisibility has relevance to Kant's Antinomies but not to the Second Analogy. Hume's other point about the need for a succession of changeable objects in developing an idea of temporal duration is in one respect very close to Kant's assumptions in the Analogies. For although Kant does not express Hume's views about the fiction in which we extend the notion of temporal duration from what is changeable, and in motion, to what is unchangeable, and at rest, he nevertheless agrees with Hume that time and temporal relations are not

30

Graham Bird

directly given to us in our experience or perception. Kant expresses this as an explicit assumption throughout the Analogies in the simple form 'time cannot by itself be perceived' (B225). Both Hume and Kant agree in this way that our idea of temporal duration depends upon our perception of other items in our successive experience. In other respects, however, Kant and Hume diverge even at this early point. For one thing Hume is concerned n1ainly, perhaps only, with ten1poral duration, whereas Kant notably distinguishes this from other aspects of time such as its order. For another Hume does not clearly distinguish between our subjective experience of succession and our belief in an objective succession and in an objective time series. And finally although Hume agrees with Kant that our discrimination of tin1e depends upon our experience of changeable objects he does not offer an account of the way in which the dependence operates. By contrast Kant is concerned quite evidently with that specific and complex dependence. At this stage, then, Kant and Hume agree on one basic claim, but diverge on some further corollaries of that claim. The divergence is, however, not at all a simple disagreement between them on these issues. Rather it is that whereas Kant puts those issues at the centre of his discussion Hun1e barely discusses them at all. It may be thought that Hume remedies these deficiencies in his next discussion of causality in Part III, but I think it fair to say that this is not so. Hume seems to assume at the start of Part III that certain basic temporal relations of succession and duration are already built in to our experience in order to raise the further question about the analysis of 'cause'. That enquiry generally supposes that we are presented with events which we collect into similarity classes in order eventually to formulate specific causal claims. IS The crucial issue for Hume is whether our causal language n1akes any justified reference to an objective necessity, and I take it as uncontroversial that Hume's answer is quite clearly that it does not. At the start of his enquiry in Part III (p. 78) Hume raises two questions: 1 For what reason we pronounce it necessary that everything whose existence has a beginning should also have a cause?

2 Why we conclude that such particular causes must necessarily have such particular effects; and what is the nature of that inference we draw from one to the other, and of the belief we repose in it?

He thus clearly separates the two candidates for harbouring son1e necessity, that is, specific causal connections (2) and a general causal principle (1). Although Hume does not formulate his general causal principle in the same way as Kant I take it as evident that (1) is a version of such a principle. If we now ask how Hume sets about answering the two questions one thing is quickly apparent. It is that,

Kant's Transcendental Arguments

31

although Hume appears to give the questions equal weight, his subsequent discussion of them is disproportionately in favour of (2). In Section iii of Part III Hume dismisses, effectively and correctly, four bad arguments for the necessity of the general causal principle. It takes him less than four pages to dismiss what he calls 'every demonstration which has been produced for the necessity of a cause' (p. 80). And at the end of that section he announces his intention to devote the rest of his enquiry to question (2). The justification for this is given in his final paragraph (p. 82): Since it is not from knowledge or any scientific reasoning that we derive the opinion of the necessity of a cause to every new production, that opinion must necessarily arise from observation and experience. The next question, then, should naturally be: How experience gives rise to such a principle? But as I find it will be more convenient to sink this question in the following: Why we

conclude that such particular causes must necessarily have such effects, and why we form an inference from one to the other? we shall make that the subject of our future enquiry. 'Twill perhaps be found in the end that the same answer will serve for both questions.

In other words Hume satisfies himself that the right tactic is to move from question (1) to question (2), and also that in the end this will prove the right strategy since the answer to question (2) will provide the answer to question (1). Hume thus abandons his interest in the general causal principle and concerns himself exclusively with a question about the necessity of particular causal claims. Hume keeps his promise to return to question (1) almost one hundred pages later, and deals with it in one short paragraph (p. 172). In the intervening space he has provided his own analysis of particular causal claims in which no reference is made to any objective necessity. Hume then produces his definitions of 'cause' and argues that both definitions yield the clear answer that there is no necessity in the general causal principle. Rather, the suggestion is, we repose our faith in such a principle as a consequence of the success we have had in formulating particular causal laws. Since those causal laws are themselves based on experience the general causal principle, which is epistemically dependent upon them, must also be based on experience and can have no necessity. Because Hume attaches overwhelmingly more importance to question (2) commentators have perhaps assumed that question (1) is relatively insignificant. There is, then, a natural tendency to suppose that any disagreement between Kant and Hume over 'cause' must arise over question (2), that is, over the analysis of particular causal claims. Such a view appears in the popular belief that while HU1l1e denied any objective necessity to particular causal claims Kant intended to reinstate that necessity, that 'dignity', to those claims. In fact, however, it can now be clearly seen that this is the reverse of the truth. Kant himself

32

Graham Bird

is essentially dealing with question (1), and not question (2), while Hume is essentially concerned with question (2), and not question (1). On Kant's side this can be seen in the form of the Second Analogy itself, but it is also made quite explicit in the passage at B793-4 where Kant reviews his disagreement with Hume. If, therefore, wax which was formerly hard melts, I can know a priori that something must have preceded ... upon which the melting has followed according to a fixed law, although a priori, independently of experience, I could not determine in any specific manner either the cause from the effect or the effect from the cause. Hume was therefore in error in inferring from the contingency of our determination in accordance with the law the contingency of the law itself.

Kant makes it clear in that passage that he has no wish to deny Hume's claim that there is no objective necessity in particular causal connections. He precisely concedes this point but disagrees with Hume on the inference drawn from that contingency. He ascribes to Hume an inference from the contingency of particular causal claims to the contingency of the general causal principle and then claims that the inference is fallacious and the conclusion false. These clain1s are supposed to be established in the transcendental argument of the Second Analogy itself. Kant is not always an accurate commentator on earlier philosophers, but, as I have shown, in this matter he is entirely on target. Hume does draw the cited inference, and if it were fallacious then indeed Kant would have refuted Hume. The same general n1essage is available from the Second Analogy itself. In a passage at B240-1 which clearly invokes I-lun1ean ideas, though Hume is not mentioned by name, Kant says: This may seem to contradict all that has hitherto been taught in regard to the procedure of our understanding. The accepted view is that only through the perception and comparison of events repeatedly following in a uniform manner upon preceding appearances are we enabled to discover a rule according to which certain events always follow upon certain appearances, and that this is the way in which we are first led to construct for ourselves the concept of cause. Now the concept thus formed would be merely empirical and the rule which it supplies that everything which happens has a cause, would be as contingent as the experience upon which it is based. Since the universality and necessity of the rule would not be grounded a priori, but only on induction, they would be merely fictitious and without genuine universal validity.

Kant here simply reformulates the point made at B793-4, namely that the contingency of particular causal claims is to be distinguished from the non-contingency of the general causal principle; but he also adds a slightly different way of characterizing his disagreement with Hume. If we suppose that Hume's epistemological programme gives a priority to the recognition of time, goes on to the rcognition of patterns in events,

Kant's Transcendental Arguments

33

and is then followed by the formulation of particular causal claims, and a just conception of the general causal principle itself, then the disagreement with Kant can be described in an extended way. It is not just that Kant believes particular causal claims to be contingent and the general causal law necessary; nor just that he believes the general causal law to be prior to particular causal claims. It is also that he believes the general causal principle to be prior to the recognition of an objective time order embodied in the notion of an event. Though, no doubt, the notion of priority needs more clarification the central disagreement between Hume and Kant over causality is that Hume puts the general causal principle at the end of the order of priorities, while Kant puts it at the beginning. The general pattern of the dispute between Hume and Kant in this context is, consequently, similar to that in the Refutation of Idealism. There it was suggested that Kant argues against the Idealist priority of inner over outer experience, and in the Second Analogy Kant similarly argues against the empiricist priority accorded to particular causal claims over the general causal principle. In the latter case Kant wants; also to extend the argument to dispute the empiricist priority of time,'~, recognition over the recognition of causality. In both cases Kant argue~,~-.J for the reversal of the Idealist and empiricist priorities. '",,,' There is a similarity, too, between the way in which the two argument /1\ attack a sceptical position. Of course, as I have suggested, Kant is, demonstrably not simply claiming an objective necessity in the analysi~ ~ . ; of particular causal claims. Equally since I have not represented Hume, as believing that particular causal claims are 'subjective' and so correspond to no 'objective' matters of fact, I have not represented Kant as wishing to deny such a scepticism merely by re-establishing the supposed objectivity of such particular causal claims. The two philosophers agree that our particular causal claims are based on recurrent patterns of events, and both assume that these are objective matters of fact. Kant's rejection of Hume's scepticism would be only misrepresented if it were put in that way. Kant ascribes to Hume the assumption that we can locate objective temporal relations in our experience as the basis for Hume's argument that the general causal principle is itself dependent upon that assumption. Just as in the case of the Refutation of Idealism Kant's strategy is to show that such a position is incoherent, since the very assumption is possible only if the general causal principle holds. In this way Kant's argument in both contexts has a form which puts it firmly in the ranks of explicit, local, anti-scepticism rather than in the ranks of tacit, global, anti-scepticism. In neither case is Kant arguing for some incoherence with the sceptic's implicit humanity or linguistic capacity; instead he is arguing for an incoherence between an explicit assumption which the sceptic makes "0

34

Graham Bird

and a conclusion he draws from that assumption. In neither case is Kant attempting to disarm scepticism completely; instead he is attempting to refute a quite specific sceptical position. In one particular respect the two transcendental arguments may seem to differ. In the Refutation of Idealism it was suggested that a determined sceptic might escape Kant's refutation by denying even the Idealist assumption of a legitimate inner experience. In that case the suggestion was that such a position does escape Kant's attack, but at the cost of total implausibility. In the case of the Second Analogy, however, it may be said that Kant's argument leaves more scope for such a determined sceptic. If we suppose that such a sceptic, perhaps Hume himself, is prepared to reject even the assumption of objective time relations, then Kant's argument would be ineffective. But in that case, it might be said, there is no similar high price to pay, for while it seenlS absurd to canvass the possibility of experience which is neither inner nor outer, it may not seem so absurd to canvass the possibility of an experience without any objective time features. Three things might be said about such a claim. First, as far as Kant's argument in the Second Analogy goes, such a sceptic is simply not at issue. Kant simply assumes that Hume, for example, is not taking up such a position at least in the argument over causality. Second, however, Kant might take the view that it is also just intuitively implausible to consider the possibility of experience which lacked any objective time discriminations. As in the Refutation of Idealism Kant is not specifically arguing for the impossibility of such an experience, but rather, for the purposes of the Second Analogy, taking it for granted that such an experience is impossible and that the sceptic in this argument would agree with that. Third, it could also be said that for this reason anyone who wished to pursue scepticism to this point would have to supply some argument for his claim. Now one such argument might be precisely the Idealist scepticism which Kant identifies in the Refutation of Idealism. That argument turns in detail on the claimed impossibility of an inner experience which lacked such objective time discriminations. It is not, then, that Kant has no answer for such a sceptic, but that his answer is to be found in the Refutation of Idealism rather than the Second Analogy.

4

SCEPTICISM AND THE TRANSCENDENTAL DEDUCTION

I have argued so far that at least some of Kant's central transcendental arguments are pretty unmysterious in form. Moreover I have also attempted to show that their relevance to scepticism is straightforward

Kant's Transcendental Arguments

35

in their ascribing explicit assumptions to a sceptic when those assumptions, according to Kant, do not cohere with the sceptic's own conclusions. Not only is Kant not attempting, in those arguments, to refute scepticisnl in general; he is also not adopting the strategy of claiming an incoherence between the sceptic's conclusions and some presupposition implicit in thenl. But the unmysterious form of the arguments is, of course, not matched by a similar lack of nlystery over their validity. Kant's arguments undeniably contain gaps which would need to be bridged if they are to be entirely successful. The task of assessing those arguments for success is, however, sometimes confused through misconceptions about their aim and their form. I suggested earlier that one of these misconceptions had to do with the view that the Transcendental Deduction does offer some general refutation of 'the' sceptic. Indeed my account so far is vulnerable to the conlmon view that while what I have said may be true of the Refutation of Idealism and of the Second Analogy, it is not true of the Transcendental Deduction itself. While those former arguments may exhibit what I called an explicit, local anti-scepticism, the suggestion is that the Deduction contains a more powerful, implicit and global, antiscepticism. Plainly I cannot now offer a positive view of the Deduction's tortuous argument, though I have done so elsewhere 16 , but I want in this final section to consider one recent advocate of that suggestion. It cannot be denied, of course, that the Transcendental Deduction contains a transcendental argument, or rather arguments, or that such arguments will quite trivially bear on some sceptic or other. Earlier I noted Kant's own account of his argument in which he speaks of making comprehensible how a priori concepts in general can relate to objects. Any philosopher, therefore, who is sceptical about the existence of a priori concepts, or of their role in applying to objects, or even what it means to be a priori, might find a refutation in the passage. Even in that context, however, Kant's argument seems more to assume the existence of a priori concepts and then to offer an account of how it is possible for them to apply to objects, rather than actually to prove their existence. But these issues anyway seem to involve fairly specific forms of scepticisnl, and also the dispute between Kant's richer and the enlpiricists' more austere classification of judgements. They do not seem directly to involve a global refutation of scepticism, even though the Deduction is sometimes presented in that way. Certainly two general dangers in so representing the Deduction stand out. The Transcendental Deduction is, after all, only one section of the total mosaic of transcendental Idealism. There is a temptation to treat it, however, as if it were simply a general statement of that overall philosophy. It is worth remembering, then, that other arguments such as those in the Refutation of Idealism and the Second Analogy are

36

Graham Bird

clearly also intended to contribute essentially to that overall view. Less importantly the deduction contains also more than merely a reference to categories and their role. It invokes a puzzling reference to a personal unity and its connection with the categories. Any account of the Deduction which aims to be complete would have to take both the ideas of a personal and a conceptual unity, and their supposed connection, into consideration. It is clearly Stroud's view 17 that the Transcendental Deduction does contain some general refutation of the sceptic, and that it is, as was noted earlier, designed to 'disarm the sceptic completely'. For him the deduction asks a 'very special question' which is at once deep, elusive, tempting and yet suspicious. The question is to be distinguished from those so far located in the arguments of the Refutation of Idealism and the Second Analogy. Stroud says, for example: 'We want to understand not just how it is possible for us to think or know this or that particular thing, given that we already think or know something else: we want to understand how human thought or knowledge in general is possible.' In this way the anti-sceptical arguments so far discussed are set aside, for these are arguments which depend on the claim that we could not think or know some particular thing without thinking or knowing some other such thing. Stroud's 'special' question differs from these in its generality, in its lack of specific assumptions, and so appears to belong firmly to an in1plicit and global anti-scepticism. The question, however, is not an easy one to express. Stroud concedes at one stage that the philosophical interest which underlies it cannot be identified by him unequivocally, though he thinks that we all have enough of a sense to recognize it and be attracted by it. One way of putting it would be to ask whether it was possible for our ways of thinking to fail to n1atch the way things are, or for our 'subjective conditions of thought' to lack 'objective validity'. Stroud believes that Kant's answer to this question is essentially an Idealist view in which we somehow constitute objects for the categories 18 , so that no question of such a gap or mismatch can arise. But he also holds the view that such a resolution is dubious since he can see no good reason to set aside the distinction we ordinarily draw between the way we think and the way things are, even at an exalted categorial level. More particularly he attempts to clarify the issue by eliminating some inadequate candidates. At one crucial place he says: It might be thought that the 'categories' we employ could not fail to be legitimate since (as Kant believes) we simply could not think without them. But again that is not enough to secure the legitimacy Kant is concerned with. Even Hume could insist that for us there is no alternative to our thinking in terms of cause and effect, say; we cannot help thinking that way. But Hun1e's is precisely the sort of view Kant thinks does not establish the 'objective validity'

Kant's Transcendental Arguments

37

of the concept of causation among others. So there is a very special question at the heart of the Kantian project.

Stroud admits that this tells us only what would not be an adequate answer, without yet telling us what an adequate answer would be. Indeed it is clear that Stroud believes that the question, deep and tempting though it is, deserves to have its foundations examined so that perhaps we may no longer ask it, or ask it in this perplexing way. Nevertheless, despite these obscurities he thinks that the question is adequately defined and is ascribable to the Transcendental Deduction. Certainly if Stroud's account of the deduction were to be accepted then those two claims would be required to be established. I shall suggest that neither requirement has been met. For one thing the question itself remains unclearly defined. Stroud thinks the question 'very special' because it is not adequately answered by the claim that there is no alternative to our ways of thinking. But surely it might be argued that if that answer is ruled out, then there is simply no genuine question left to answer. For if it is true that our ways of thinking are necessary, so that we cannot think in any alternative way, then the very idea of a mismatch between our ways of thinking and the way things are seems in one way quite impossible. However things may ultimately be, if we cannot think them in any alternative way, then surely there is no real possibility of a gap between those ways of thinking and the way things are. It n1ight be argued that we have neverthless some formal inkling of such a failure in some world to which we have no access, but Kant rightly and notoriously, does not regard such appeals to inaccessible worlds as fruitful. Stroud has in the past 19 associated this line of thinking with the Positivists' verification principle, but I think it is now clear that Kant did not adhere to such a principle. 20 For this reason alone the very special question which Stroud links with the Transcendental Deduction remains unclear. That same unclarity is confirn1ed if we turn more specifically to the disagreement between Kant and Hume. For Stroud is able to regard the relevant question as so special partly because he represents Kant and Hume as agreeing that categories, such as 'cause', are necessary in that we could not think at all without them. But if Hume anywhere does stress this idea it is because he conceives of such a necessity as natural or even biological 21 , whereas it is clear that Kant thinks of the categories' necessity in some other way. The disagreement between Kant and Hume even at this abstract level does not arise despite their agreement over such a necessity; rather it appears because Kant and Hume, importantly, conceive the necessity in different ways. Once again the issue returns to well known questions about a priori concepts, synthetic a priori principles, and

38

Graham Bird

these background classifications. It is not my view that these issues are crystal clear, but only that by giving an inaccurate account of Kant and Hume Stroud inevitably directs attention to the wrong issues in the debate. The same conclusions can be drawn from a wider view of the disagreement between Kant and Hume. Although Stroud is officially offering an account of the transcendental deduction his own references to Kant's anti-scepticisnl cover not only that argument but also the arguments of the Refutation of Idealism and the Second Analogy. But to conceive the Transcendental Deduction alone as providing the antidote to Hume's views about causality is to commit the mistake described earlier of investing the deduction with an overall significance which it could not have. It we want to be clear about the disagreement between Kant and Hume over the concept 'cause' then we must examine the Second Analogy. When we do so, then I have argued that we arrive at a forn1ally clear account of the disagreement in that respect between Kant and Hume. It is not, however, that the Transcendental Deduction provides a general refutation of scepticism to which the Second Analogy adds some interesting but formally irrelevant details. On the contrary the Second Analogy is the point where the strategy envisaged in the transcendental deduction is actually carried out. One way, then, of resolving problems about the general strategy is to consider how the particular cases are dealt with in the Analytic of Principles. By failing to distinguish the different roles of the argun1ents in these related sections Stroud confuses rather than clarifies Kant's position against sceptics. Stroud's interest in scepticism is the modern interest in some form of global scepticism, but I have argued that this importantly misrepresents Kant's concern.

NOTES

1 I include in this term not only those, like Strawson, who endorse transcendental arguments in some form, but also those, like Stroud, who are unwilling to do so. Cf. also a recent attempt to follow Strawson's line of thought in Stevenson, 1982, and my review of it in Bird, 1984. 2 Kant's account of 'possible experience' and his first rule for such transcendental proofs seem uncontroversial. The requirements for a unique proof and for a direct rather than an indirect method of proof are less easy to understand. 3 One recent example of this view is the symposium in Lear and Stroud, 1984. 4 See Bird, 1962, chs 6-9. 5 Strawson 1966, pp. 42-4. 6 B117: The explanation of the manner in which concepts can thus relate a

Kant's Transcendental Arguments

39

priori to objects I entitle their Transcendental Deduction. 7

8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15

16 17

18

19 20 21

I have argued elsewhere that Strawson's interpretation of the transcendental deduction is in danger of confusing these arguments. See Bird, 1974, pp. 1-15. Stroud, 1984a, p. 247. James, 1978, pp. 273-4. Williams, 1984. The minor puzzle is why the antecedent is expressed as 'We can Q' when the required conlnlitnlent on the sceptic's side is rather 'We Q'. There is, of course, a colloquial reading of the former which is equivalent to the latter, but in the Kantian context where the idea of possibility is both important and often neglected it may be dangerous to read it in that way. I have retranslated from the German what was originally written in English, and it may be that something has got lost in the process of translation. Strawson, 1959, pp. 35-6. B230-1. Page references are to H ume, 1955 b. In 'specific' or 'particular' causal claims I include such claims as 'This (A) caused that (B)', as well as 'As cause Bs'. The contrast is between the general causal principle which specifies no events or event-types, and causal claims which do specify events or event-types. See Bird (1962, chs 6, 8, & 9); 1974. Stroud, 1984a, pp. 243-58. Stroud's argument is puzzling in many ways which cannot be considered here. I shall restrict myself to two of the central points. Stroud gives the impression that he believes Idealism is obviously mistaken, even though he now recognizes that Kant's form of Idealism is designed to be imnlune from the faults of conventional Idealisnl. Partly this is because he cannot take seriously Kant's crucial distinction between empirical and transcendental Idealism, though in his paper it is hard to believe that he has nlade much of an effort to understand it. But what is especially puzzling in his treatment of these issues is that though he admits an unclarity in the 'very special' question which yields Kant's Idealist answer he seems nevertheless to be quite clear that that Idealism is mistaken. But it would be at least possible, and in my view better, to wait to condemn that Idealism until it is clear what it amounts to, that is, until it is clear which question, or questions, it is designed to answer. I should anticipate an objection to what follows in the text which would claim that current issues about semantic realism and anti-realisnl offer a clear sense to Stroud's 'special' Kantian question. But I do not believe either that these questions are independently clear, or that they have any bearing on Kant. I make some reference to this in Bird, 1982. Stroud, 1968. See also Stroud, 1984c and Bird, 1984b. See Bird, 1982. Hume 1955a, Section IV, pp. 52-3; Section V, p. 68.

Part II

The Refutation of Scepticism

3

Atemporal Necessities of Thought; or, How Not to Bury Philosophy by History Ross Harrison In this paper I wish not to bury transcendental arguments but to praise then1; however anyone engaged in either activity faces the initial problem of identifying the class of arguments that he wishes to praise or bury. Since Kant invented the label, anything properly called a 'transcendental argument' must have some analogy to the arguments which Kant used. On the other hand, arguments in recent Anglo-American philosophy called by their proponents or commentators 'transcendental arguments' also have some clear disanalogies with Kant's argun1ents. In particular, they do not normally rely on the presupposition of son1e kind of idealism. Obviously any identification of transcendental arguments, whether by description or enun1eration, will be stipulative; in this paper my own stipulation will be to consider arguments which share a particular purpose, subject matter, and form with Kant's. The purpose is the refutation of scepticism, the subject matter is cognitive or conceptual (understanding, language, knowledge ...), and the form is that of a regress back up a series of necessary conditions (A only if B, B only if C, C only if D ...). So a typical transcendental argument attempts to refute a sceptical position by showing that the denial of its clain1 is a necessary condition of (a necessary condition of a necessary condition of ... ) having thought or language of that subject matter at all. Either the sceptic's claim cannot be con1prehensibly formulated or else it is mistaken. For example, a fan1ily of arguments inspired by Wittgenstein's Private Language Argument appeared in the fifties and the sixties designed to refute scepticism about other minds or an external world. This scepticism was based upon the assumption of incorrigible, 'Cartesian', first-person access to one's own mental states together with the denial that such states could be the basis of any valid deductive or inductive inference to other people's states, or to external objects. It was met by showing that the premiss on which it was based, nan1ely

44

Ross Harrison

that one could have cognitive awareness (or linguistic description) of one's own mental states, is true only if one can also describe public objects, and only if one can describe the mental states of other people. So if the sceptic's claim could be conlprehensibly formulated, then it could be refuted by showing that the state of affairs that it doubted or denied was a necessary condition for such a formulation. Analogously, a Humean scepticism about causal relations, based on the supposition that we can identify particular events in time but deny that this forms an adequate basis for attributing law-like relations between events, can be refuted by a Kantian style argument showing that the supposition that there are such law-like relations is a necessary condition for being able to identify particular events in time. These arguments, old and new, share purpose, subject matter and form; and these are the kind of argument which I shall attempt to defend in this paper. Defence is necessary because, after having been used for some time with little explicit methodological self-awareness, this kind of argument has been subject to much criticism in the past fifteen years. It has been thought that transcendental arguments presuppose some unacceptable kind of idealism, that they presuppose some unacceptable kind of verificationism, or that they make the mistaken presupposition that it is possible to establish atemporal necessities of thought or language. Although I shall touch on the first two criticisms in passing, my chief concern here is with the last. My brief sketch of the nature of transcendental arguments shows why the criticism is relevant; an argument which attempts to establish a conclusion by regress back up a series of necessary conditions can only work if it is possible to establish necessary conditions. For example, part of a highly influential modern transcendental argument runs 'One can ascribe states of consciousness to oneself only if one can ascribe them to others. One can ascribe them to others only if one can identify other subjects of experience ... ' (Strawson, 1959, p. 100). Here the argument works only if it is possible to establish, or at least only if it is permissible to assume, propositions of the form A only if B, that is propositions which state the necessary conditions of making judgenlents of particular kinds (ascription, identification). So if there are no necessary conditions for making judgements, or if we have no means for telling what these necessary conditions are, then no such arguments can properly be made. The inlportance of nlaking the point that modern transcendental arguments only share some features with Kant's own arguments now becomes relevant. For as well as necessities of this kind, that is the necessary conditions for thought or judgement, Kant also seems, at least at times, to have wished to establish that some of these necessary conditions are necessary not just hypothetically but absolutely, that is that they are necessary not just if there is to be tho~~E~_E~t~_~~~h~rL__

Atemporal Necessities of Thought

45

are necessary features of the objects thought about. This would fit in with those descriptions of Kant's enterprise which take him to be explaining how we can have knowledge of the necessary features of the world we experience, such as the necessary truths revealed in Euclidean geometry. By contrast, features identified as hypothetically necessary are not essential features of the objects themselves. They are merely features which it has to be the case that the objects have if they are to be the objects of thought or judgement. The objects could still exist without these features, only it would no longer be the case that they could be thought about. Now, as long as we assume some kind of idealism, so that the only objects there are are objects of thought, there is no real distinction between the two kinds of necessity. However, once we drop idealism the distinction is crucial. It means that we can still talk in a way analogous to Kant of the features necessary for thought or experience of objects, but need not take these features to be essential features of the objects of thought, nor as being features constituted by the experiencing subject. In one respect this is a loss, because it means that the necessities can no longer be established or defended by an account of how the mind imposes itself on objects. However, this is offset by the much greater gain that transcendental arguments do not now need to go down with the sinking ship of idealism. The form-content distinction, and the problem of the imposition of form by the mind without the imposition of content by the n1ind may be held to be insuperable problems for Kant's argument. Yet transcendental arguments, by detaching themselves from idealism, do not need to be bothered by these problems. They can establish and use the necessary conditions of thought or judgen1ent of a world without needing to assun1e that the world depends in any way upon its being so thought or judged; hence they can avoid all the problems of idealism; and hence they can avoid any objections to the establishment of necessities of thought which are really objections to idealism. If we separate transcendental arguments from idealism, however, we still lack an account of how such necessities of thought are to be established. Idealism was meant to achieve this in Kant not just because the mind imposed necessary formal features on the world (hence solving the ontological problem of the origin of the necessary elements) but because it was assumed that the mind had perfect, a priori, access to itself (hence solving the epistemological problem of how we can know which elements are the necessary elements). If, as mentioned before we cease to be confident about the picture of the mind with perfect, transparent, 'Cartesian' access to itself, then we lose this method of establishing necessities by mere inspection. The idea that the mind has a priori and incorrigible knowledge of its own nature is independent of idealism, and so, if it were valid, could be used to establish the necessary

46

Ross Harrison

conditions of the mind's thought of objects even if idealism is rejected. However, in that it has its own problems and no longer has the compelling certainty that it might have had in Kant's day, it seems that we can no longer claim that necessary conditions of thought are selfevident to the mind while reflecting on its own nature. So we seem to lack any good method of establishing necessities of thought, and, on the other hand, there seem to be powerful considerations which suggest that no such necessities could ever be established. These contain reference to, or are based upon examples drawn from, the history of thought. Just as I have mentioned that our picture of the nlind has changed since the tilne of Kant, so it is supposed that increased historical awareness will show that all those things which were taken to be necessary conditions of thought at one particular time will subsequently turn out to be merely pervasive but contingent elements of the thought of that time. Looking back from our supposedly superior point of view, we can see that in the past philosophers often held things to be necessary which have turned out not to be so. Yet there is no reason to think that our own point of view is so superior; it is surely quite reasonable to suppose instead that we are in a similar position to the one in which they were in, so that people in future will look back on us and see that we are now making a similar kind of mistake. The lesson of history is that there are no necessities of thought, and so, insofar as transcendental arguments in particular and philosophy in general rely upon establishing necessities of thought, the lesson of history is that philosophy cannot fulfil its pretensions. Since we cannot say how things must be, but only how they are or have been, we should give up philosophy and take instead to history. The attempt to historicize philosophy and to relativize conclusions which once were held to be absolute no doubt started immediately after Kant's death; but in modern Anglo-American philosophy, I think that it is useful to identify this kind of objection as having been made in three waves. It starts with Collingwood in the 1940s, gets picked up by Stephan Korner as one strand of the many particular criticisms of transcendental arguments made at the end of the 1960s, and has recently been powerfully promoted by Richard Rorty. Collingwood declares in the Essay on Metaphysics (1940) that the idea of metaphysics 'as a deductive science is not only an error but a pernicious error' (p. 76), and holds that 'all metaphysical propositions are historical propositions' (p. 49). He makes an extended case study of Kant with the aim of showing that all those features which Kant had attempted to demonstrate as being the essential features of any world were in fact merely the absolute presuppositions of the Newtonian science of his day. As science has advanced, these features have been discovered after all not to be necessary : causality and substance are discarded in relativity theory,

Atemporal Necessities of Thought

47

and quantum physics dispatches the principles of continuity. In the same way Korner (1966) holds that both Kantian and more modern arguments have been overtaken by the advance of physics. Rorty in his recent book does not repeat this particular historical case study, but he draws the same general lesson. He comments with respect to changes in schemes of belief The historian can make the shift from the old scheme to the new intelligible, and make one see why one would have been led from the one to the other if one had been an intellectual of the day. There is nothing the philosopher can add to what the historian has already done to show that this intelligible and plausible course is a 'rational' one. (Rorty, 1980, p. 272)

There are, that is, no atemporal criteria of rationality; or, as he later puts it against Habermas, there are no inevitable subjective conditions of inquiry but 'just the facts about what a given society, or profession, or other group, takes to be good grounds for assertions of a certain sort' (p. 385). There are no absolutes, no necessities; and philosophy can add nothing to history. The particular historical case studies are suggestive, but however suggestive they are, they are not by then1selves sufficient to support the general conclusion. All that they can show is that particular makers of transcendental argun1ents, or particular attempts to establish something as necessary, have made particular mistakes. This is not sufficient to show that there is a mistake in the very idea of a transcendental argument, or of any attempt to establish necessities. Kant may have made mistakes about the necessity of Euclidean geometry or about the conservation of matter, but this does not show that others of his arguments might not still be valid, or might be made valid by being put in a more general form. Even if all of Kant's arguments are shown to have been overtaken by science, this does not show that other transcendental arguments might not survive. So to show that there can be no necessities of thought, or that transcendental argun1ents are impossible, it is necessary to add to the particular case studies some argument. It involves, in fact, leaving history for philosophy; leaving the area of description and entering the area of possibility and impossibility. This may be atten1pted by taking the historical facts as given and then constructing an inductive argument upon this factual basis; or it may be attempted by arguing in a n10re direct way that transcendental arguments are impossible. Both methods have problems; the former is an example of those sceptical arguments in which it is argued that because we are son1etimes mistaken we might always be mistaken, while the latter, since it holds that at least one thing can be shown to be necessary, namely that there are no necessities of thought, is in danger of self-refutation.

48

Ross Harrison

Korner attempts to make such a direct argument in his paper on 'The impossibility of transcendental deductions' (Korner, 1967), the main substance of which is repeated in an improved form in chapter 13 of Fundamental Questions in Philosophy (Korner, 1971). I have criticized this paper elsewhere and so do not wish to criticize it again in detail here (Harrison, 1976; see also the direct criticisms in Schaper, 1972). Korner claims that there are only three possible ways in which the necessity of certain concepts for any judgement of the world could be established. None of these is effective, and so transcendental arguments which attempt to establish such necessities are impossible. The most important method is the second in which someone tries to show that a particular fran1ework of thought is necessary 'by comparing it with all its possible competitors. But this cannot be done, since there is no reason for assuming that the competing frameworks, which someone can conceive at any particular time, exhaust all possible competitors' (1971, p. 215). Korner exposes himself to the possibility of an ad hominem reply, not just because he argues that any such necessities of thought are impossible, but because the particular method he uses, namely of discussing all the possible ways in which something could be done, falls foul of the principle that he himself here enunciates, namely that there is no reason to assun1e that all the possibilities that we can think of are all the possibilities that there are. However, ad hominem points apart, the central point here is obviously a powerful one, being an application of the long-standing objection that it is improper to move from conceivability to possibility or from inconceivability to impossibility. Just because we cannot think of an alternative to some central concept or framework principle at a particular stage in the history of thought does not show that there is not one. The point can be made abstractly (conceivability and possibility are obviously logically independent of one another) and then the particular historical case studies can be used to give the point bite (mistakes have indeed been made). Yet the point is most powerful when it is applied, as Korner applies it, to arguments which attempt to establish the uniqueness or necessity of something by elimination of alternatives. Here we are always liable to overlook an alternative which we have not been able to conceive of. So, if we hold with Rorty that 'nothing in heaven or earth could set limits to what we can in principle conceive; the best we might do is to show that nobody has in fact conceived of an exception' (Rorty, 1979, p. 83), then it seems that indeed we cannot show that there are any necessary concepts for thought about a world by using such elimination arguments. As Mackie (1974, p. 79) puts it, commenting more generally on transcendental arguments, 'Only the limits of our limagination ... make what is pervasively actual seem essential.' This argument is most persuasive, however, when applied to cases

Atemporal Necessities of Thought

49

where it is attempted to establish something not just by elimination, but where the elimination is of all but one of a large and heterogeneous collection of alternatives. The larger the collection and nlore various the alternatives are, the more likely it is that one has been overlooked. By contrast, if we know in advance that there are only two alternatives to consider, then the argument is not so compelling. Yet this is what happens in the case where all that is being considered is a putative necessary condition and its contradictory; here something in heaven or earth does set linlits, namely logic. (This is not to clainl that, for anything we consider, either it or its negation is a necessary condition; it is just to claim that it and its negation provide a complete initial survey of prima facie candidates, neither of which may in fact be necessary.) Furthermore, this i,s what happens at some steps in actual transcendental arguments. Another way of putting this point is to say that often the establishment of necessary conditions in a transcendental argument is not by elimination of putative alternatives and so is not at the mercy of the overlooked alternative. To show this, and to bring out the general point about the nature of many transcendental arguments which lies behind it, I would like now to look at one actual transcendental argument, which is a (no doubt over-simplified) version of part of the argument of chapter 1 of Strawson's Individuals (1959). I lay it out as before as a regress back up a series of necessary conditions, but to save repeating all the intermediate features, let me write it like this: There is communication about a world only if (1) there is reference to individuals (2) only if there is reidentification of individuals only if (3) we can use more than pure descriptions to identify (4) only if there is one individual referred to by a proper name, and a unique way of relating every other individual to this one (5) only if there is a unique spatio-temporal framework (6) only if there are material objects. If we think of Korner's objection, only the last step obviously falls to it. Material objects are only one of many possible ways in which a unique spatio-temporal framework would be ensured; other ways are not only conceivable but have actually been conceived. Yet it is not clear on the other hand that Strawson wants the transcendental argument

50

Ross Harrison

to proceed as far as step 6. For when he considers and rejects one such alternative, which he calls 'process-things', he comments 'the category of process-things is one we neither have nor need' (1959, p. 57). In other words, it looks as if we should regard this part of the argument not as a transcendental argument establishing the necessary conditions for communication but, rather, as what Strawson calls 'descriptive metaphysics', that is filling in how as a matter of fact the necessary conditions are realized in our present conceptual scheme. We could have done it with process-things, but we happen to do it with material objects. When we turn to the other steps of this argument it is less obvious that any of them depend upon the selection of the claimed necessary condition as one among a whole heterogeneous collection of putative conditions, at the mercy of an overlooked or as yet unimaginable counterexample. At step 1, it is a natural assumption that there are two very basic elements in thought, language, or communication, that is, reference and description. Since it is practically beyond question that language has to be descriptive, the only thing at issue is whether it also has to be referential. Perhaps the argument is wrong in claiming that it is, but it is certainly not wrong because it has just picked reference as one possibility out of a heterogeneous set and eliminated the others. Reference is clearly the first candidate to be considered, and the alternatives are either that it is referential or it is not. No other alternatives need to be considered. If we can eliminate the alternative that it is not referential, then we have shown that it must be referential. I hope to show shortly why this, and other, alternatives can properly be eliminated in transcendental arguments. Similarly at step 3, we can start in advance with the knowledge that a central question to establish with respect to reference is whether proper names are necessary, or, to put it another way, whether we can refer while using only pure descriptions. Again the alternatives to be considered are clear in advance, either we can just do it with pure descriptions or we cannot. If we eliminate pure descriptions, then we have shown that we need something more (step 3), and it is not just to pick up one possibility an10ng many that may be around at various stages in the history of thought to say that this shows that we need proper names (part of step 4). So I do not think that the picture of transcendental arguments selecting one alternative among many possibilities is true to every stage of actual and important arguments, and so it is more difficult to relativize or historicize these arguments than has been made out. More importantly, this and the other argun1ents referred to at the start enable us to see how alternatives can be rejected, or, to put it more directly, how necessary conditions can be established. For lying underneath many of the steps of the argumen~i~~EiY~J2,_a_ng_12ebipg _

Atemporal Necessities of Thought

51

the arguments in the philosophy of nlind and Kant's Second Analogy argument mentioned at the start, are claims about the way in which it is possible to verify statements. The necessary conditions for judgement (or thought or language or conlmunication) are provided by showing how it is possible to verify judgements of the kind under consideration. This probably applies to the first line of the argunlent just given, and seems to me certainly to apply to the subsequent lines. It is only if we can identify individuals that we can verify statements; we can only identify individuals if we can verify that we have done so (that is, reidentify them); we can only verify that we have reidentified them if we use proper names, because descriptions, however complete, are ambiguous (that is, do not provide logically sufficient conditions, or verification); the individual referred to in another way has to be at the starting point of verification (so it is I, here, now). This is how verification underlies the Strawson argument just given; however it is natural and appropriate to see it as underlying such arguments as the private language argunlent or Kant's argument. It is because we cannot verify in a private language that Wittgenstein thinks that private languages are impossible; and Kant is interested in establishing the timedetermination of objects, that is the conditions for judging the times at which events occur, that is (or so at least it is plausible to argue) how we can establish or verify the times of events. The relation of transcendental arguments to verification is of course familiar and has itself stirred up a considerable debate (Stroud, 1968; verification defended in Stine, 1972; Nielsen, 1972). I think myself that it is not only defensible but also important and that it reveals the power of transcendental argulllents against scepticism. Scepticism shows that the truth of certain propositions does not entail, or even provide inductive support of the standard kind for, other propositions, such as our sensations for external objects, or other people's behaviour for their sensations. The transcendental arguments which refute these scepticisms by showing that the beliefs which are doubted are in fact necessary conditions for the accepted premisses (as I described at the beginning) work not by denying this but, rather, by shifting the attention from the necessary conditions of the belief being true to the necessary conditions of it being believed. They show what must be the case for judgenlent of this truth to be possible. Here it is natural to assume that verification is one such necessary condition. For while it might be quite possible to assume that something could exist without possibility of verification (super-spartans with always undisplayed pains), it seems to me right that there could not be nleaningful, coherent, judgement of the area in question unless sonletinles it was possible to distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate beliefs (Harrison, 1974, ch. 3). If it is right to claim that (some possibility of) verification is a necessary

52

Ross Harrison

condition for nleaningful, comprehensible, judgement of an area, then we can see how other necessary conditions can be established by discovering the necessary conditions for verification of that area. This explains, I think, why transcendental arguments were such a powerful tool in the philosophy of mind in the fifties and the sixties, for in this area, unlike many others, there is general agreement that verification of the mental states of other people has to be by their behaviour. So here we get an acceptable necessary condition for verification, and we have only to assume that verification is necessary for judgement to end up with the conclusion that the behaviour of others is necessary for the judgement of their mental states; to this we only need to add the private language argument showing that no alternative route of verification is available to the person whose states they are, to show that behaviour is necessary for any judgement of mental states. So not only can many transcendental arguments be seen to rely upon verificationist moves (as Stroud originally brought out with critical intent), but this is an inlportant key both to their manner of production and to their power of application. It explains, I think, where the necessary conditions conle from, and explains it in a manner which is relatively impervious to the historicist argument. This applies to the original move about the necessity of verification itself. It is not simply that this is one among many heterogeneous possibilities to be considered. It is central and, as before, either there must be verification or not. Someone who decides that there must be verification by elin1inating the alternative of comprehensible judgements without any possibility of verification is not at the mercy of further alternatives to be thrown up by the advance of history. Rather, he considers the one relevant alternative and decides that in such a situation there would not be any real, comprehensible, judgement at all. So he concludes that verification is necessary. The last point I would like to draw from the particular argument that I am using as illustration is that the moves between the lines in which the necessary conditions are established are not nlade by discovering the analytic consequences of the concepts involved in previous lines. This follows from what I said about verification, and the distinction between what must be the case for something to be true and what must be the case for it to be judged to be true. If the necessary conditions established in the argument were analytic truths, then they would be logically necessary conditions for the truth of the previous lines of the argument. If, however, as I claim, it is verification which is important, then the conditions established are only the conditions for the judgement by us of the kind of things described in the previous lines of the argument. Hence the steps of the argument are not analytically necessary steps, true by virtue of the meaning of the terms used in the argument and holding in all possible worlds. This ha~~!!__

Atemporal Necessities of Thought

53

important consequence. For although it n1eans on the one hand that analytical procedures cannot be used to establish the steps of such arguments, it also means on the other hand that transcendental arguments can survive the demise of analytical truths, meanings, and the analytic-synthetic distinction. Just as it was claimd above that transcendental arguments do not have to be involved in Kant's scheme-content distinction, so now it can be claimed that they do not need to be involved in any analytic-synthetic distinction. Hence they can survive the collapse of both distinctions; and showing that both distinctions are untenable does not abolish transcendental argun1ents. Once verification is established as a defensible and central feature of transcendental arguments, it can then be used in defence of this kind of argument as a whole against the historicist type of objection. For the objection relies upon suggesting that the advance of thought will throw up ways of thinking which are so different from our present ways of thinking that everything which we now think to be necessary n1ay well have been dispensed with. As Korner puts it: It is possible that man will one day apprehend the world in a manner which is as different from what we call 'thinking' as is our thinking when compared with the manner in which, say, an earthwornl apprehends his environment. I have no conception of what such super-thinking might be. But what is inconceivable to me nlay nevertheless be possible. (1971, p. 219)

However, once we introduce a n10derate amount of verificationism, then we cannot allow so large a gap between the possibility of conception and the conception of possibility. If we allow that it really is possible that there could be such a kind of thinking, then we have to show how it could be possible; that is, what the possibility would be like, how it could be established that it was the case. Yet if such super-thinking really is inconceivable, then we cannot do this. To put it another way; the historicist sceptical argument which depends upon induction upon past cases of mistakes about necessity to the conclusion that we could be wrong in the present depends upon assuming the possibility pf a position, such as the distant future, in which it could be seen that we are wrong in the present. This is a position in which something which we now think to be a necessity of thought does not hold. Yet if this is really thought by us to be a necessity of thought, then we can have no conception of what a position is like in which it does not hold. If we think it to be necessary, then we n1ust think that it holds in any position about which we can think. Otherwise it is not really being thought to be necessary. Hence we cannot represent to ourselves what the position is like in which this necessity does not apply; hence we cannot say that there possibly is such a position; hence we cannot allow the sceptical, inductive, argument about necessities. Whatever history may do to

54

Ross Harrison

thought, it cannot make us now think that it is possible that these things are not really necessary. Korner's super-thinkers are as unrecognizable by us as thinkers as his earthworms are as thinkers. In considering a similar fable, Rorty asks the rhetorical question: 'Why should we ignore the possibility that the trees and the bats and the butterflies and the stars all have their various untranslatable languages in which they are busily expressing their beliefs and desires to one another?' (1972, p. 657) and adds the comment 'The inclusion of this last possibility may suggest that something has gone wrong.' I think that Rorty is being too liberal here; the parallel which he brings out so well shows that something indeed has gone wrong. It needs only a modest application of verificationisn1, of the ~ind of point Wittgenstein was making when he asked 'Could one imagine a stone's having consciousness?' (1953, §390), to see that not only do the super-thinkers and the earthworms stand or fall together, but that they fall together. Otherwise anything would be possible; that is, nothing could sensibly be said about possibility. Even if this is wrong, these historicist arguments based upon descriptions of the possible future advance of thought ignore one very important point about transcendental arguments. This is that they are directed against scepticism and hence, inevitably, against scepticism expressed in our present language at our present stage of thought. The problems are our problems, not those of possible future beings. It is our doubts, or possible doubts, which have to be laid to rest. Hence it is only our present thought or language which is relevant to the arguments. If we can establish necessities for this thought, necessities for us, then this is quite sufficient for us to use them in transcendental arguments addressed against any scepticism that we could understand or have any interest in. History may indeed produce new problems; but for the problems we have, since we can establish the kind of necessities that we need, we can properly use transcendental arguments as. a means to their solution.

4

Transcendental Arguments and Scepticism Ralph C. S. Walker Twenty years ago transcendental arguments were full of promise: they seenled the key to epistenlological advance. They appeared to offer a powerful method for defeating scepticism and establishing securely our knowledge of the world about us. They held out the hope of a warranted title to knowledge claims in such contentious areas as ethics. Doubts, it is true, were never absent. But attractive and ingenious arguments were being put forward, either newly created or quarried out of Kant, which appeared either to achieve their ainlS or to come so close to doing so that a little chipping and polishing here and there would perfect them. Few people are now so optimistic; indeed their principal former exponent, Sir Peter Strawson, no longer sees them as a defence against the sceptic at all, but only as 'investigating the connections among the major structural elements of our conceptual scheme'. 1 The decline in enthusiasm is mainly due to the fact that so many transcendental arguments have turned out on examination either to be simply invalid or to achieve a great deal less than they claimed. This by itself is not a very good reason for despair about the method, for it may yet be that new and more satisfactory arguments can be found. But a nUlTLber of more general objections have been raised, and these have reinforced the feeling in many quarters that transcendental argumentation is a dead end. Three of these objections seem to me particularly important. One, due to Korner, is that transcendental arguments seek to do the impossible, because they seek to take us outside our own conceptual scheme: we can explore our own scheme from the inside, but we cannot compare it with others or intelligibly ask whether certain of its features must carryover also to them. 2 Another, due to Stroud, is that transcendental arguments generally need support from the verification principle if they are to establish conclusions about how things are in

56

Ralph C. S. Walker

the world, and not just about what we must believe or what concepts we must employ.3 The third doubt has been widely expressed, and arises because transcendental arguments typically concern the necessary conditions for something (experience, knowledge, language): how is it to be shown that the proposed conditions really are necessary, and what sort of nlodality is being claimed for the conditional?4 In what follows I want to make clear why I think these objections do not, in fact, carry much weight against transcendental argumentation as a method for answering the sceptic. The method, I shall argue, is in principle effective against him, provided he is accessible to argument at all - though what helps to generate some of the objections is that it is not effective against all forms of scepticism. How much can be done with the method in practice is a much larger question, and I shall not touch on it here; it would require the construction and the detailed examination of a great variety of actual arguments which either are, or are meant to be, of the transcendental type. Before going further, however, I must enter a caveat. Transcendental arguments I understand to be anti-sceptical arguments which seek to justify their conclusions by exhibiting thenl as necessary conditions for experience, or knowledge, or language; or for experience, knowledge, or language of some general type. I am not at present in any way concerned to defend the historical claim that Kant's arguments fit this model (though I believe it to be true and have argued it elsewhere).5 Discussion of the philosophical issues that transcendental arguments raise keeps getting entangled, in the literature, with historical questions about Kant, who is often thought to have taken out a copyright on the word 'transcendental'. In this paper I should like to leave those questions aside. Even if the style of argument I am discussing is not Kant's, it is one that has been taken very seriously by nlany people in more recent years, and as it has been widely called 'transcendental' in our own day it n1ust be allowed to have gained at least a custon1ary right to the title. A second warning is needed as well. Transcendental arguments gained their recent currency in large part fron1 the work of Strawson, which includes a number of the most important arguments of that type to have appeared. Nevertheless what Strawson hinlself said about the method - even when he was more sanguine. about it than he has since become - was seriously misleading. In Individuals he describes the sceptic as attempting to reject, say, a belief in the external world, and as being refuted by an argument which shows that his doubts are unreal because 'they amount to the rejection of the whole conceptual scheme within which alone such doubts make sense'.6 The idea is that the sceptic undercuts his own position, and is left with the dilemma of accepting the belief that he sought to question or abandoning any claim to intelligibility. This is unfair to the typical sceptic, for it misses his

Transcendental Arguments and Scepticism

57

point. Very few sceptics make any real attempt to deny our ordinary beliefs about such things as material objects, other minds, the past, etc.; like Hume they are usually content in practice to share the beliefs of the vulgar on these matters, and what they question is whether such beliefs are justified. 7 There is therefore little value in an argument which does no more than oblige the sceptic to accept such a belief, for he generally accepts it anyhow; what is needed is an argument which will show him that the belief is justified. It was this that transcendental arguments - including the ones that Strawson put forward - seemed to offer; and it was because of this that they seemed to provide a way forward in epistemology. Sceptics are often described as denying that we have knowledge about this or that, or about the world in general; and it is sometimes then thought that they can be answered by examining the ordinary use of the word 'knowledge'. If this were right it would make the recourse to transcendental arguments quite unnecessary. It is argued that as the word 'knowledge' is ordinarily used, the beliefs about which the sceptic has his doubts count as clear cases of knowledge. Many of those who take this line hold that a belief does not have to be justified in order to be known, provided it stands in the appropriate causal or counterfactual relationship to the fact that makes it true. Others hold that it does have to be justified, but that the required standards of justification are comparatively low and easily met - they are the standards that we use in everyday life, not the much higher standards imported by professionally suspicious people like philosophers. But either way the sceptic is claimed to be wrenching the word 'knowledge' and its cognates from their standard meanings and thereby creating a pseudo-problem. He is worried about our lack of knowledge only because he thinks a belief cannot be called knowledge unless it can be justified to an extremely high standard; but this is just a n1istake about what the word means. However the sceptic does raise a substantive issue, which is quite independent of how words like 'know' and 'knowledge' are used. If a belief is allowed to count as knowledge without being fully justified, there is no need for hin1 to deny that many of our beliefs do indeed amount to knowledge. He need not, and generally does not, deny that the standards of justification we regard as satisfactory for everyday purposes are quite often met. What concerns him is that those standards are not high enough, for they can be met in cases where he thinks the beliefs in question are strictly unwarranted. In the past, for example, the propensity to float when thrown into water has been regarded by the ordinary man as sufficient proof of carnal intercourse with the Devil.

58

Ralph C. S. Walker

I If a transcendental argument is to be of use against a sceptic it must start from premises the sceptic will not dispute; and if it is to convince him that its conclusion is not only' true but justified, they must be premises he accepts as justified (or else as needing no justification, which for these purposes conles to the saIne thing). The sceptic is conceived as raising his epistemological doubts wherever he can, so finding satisfactory premises is not easy. Transcendental arguments traditionally start from the premise that there is at least some experience, or some knowledge. If this is to be an acceptable starting point 'knowledge' nlust not be taken in a questionbegging way; in particular .it must not be assumed that we have knowledge of a world external to us, for this is one of the things that sceptics often raise doubts about. What is usually meant, however, is only that we have some knowledge of something - knowledge of some of the contents of our own thought will do. Even sceptics will admit that we can sometimes know about these, and even sceptics will admit that we do have experience. Indeed, anyone who questioned these claims, or suggested that they lacked justification, would be adopting a peculiarly unattractive position. To be capable of formulating thoughts at all he must be aware of his experiences (though certainly it may be a more complex nlatter whether he must be aware of himself as their subject). It is not that it would be impossible to deny this - in a sense it is possible to deny anything; but it would be renlarkably perverse, and would place him beyond the reach of serious argument. These premises are justified if anything can be justified at all. Admittedly the sceptic might try rejecting the notion of justification altogether, but this is a less attractive argument than it may seem, for unless he accepts that the premises of an argument can justify its conclusion he renders himself impervious to argument of any sort. It is no defect in transcendental argunlents that they will not convince someone who is impervious to argument. In recent years it has been fashionable to use instead the premise that there is language. If what is meant by that is that there is intelligible thought - thought which has a content - it is as unexceptionable as the more traditional premises, and for the same reason. If more than that is meant - e.g. if it is meant that there is a conlplex conlmunicationsystem which can be publicly expressed in sounds - the sceptic will have something to object to. Occasionally people have thought that to use a premise like 'I am now speaking English' or 'These words are English words' would be all right, on the grounds that such sentences

Transcendental Arguments and Scepticism

59

are true whenever uttered. But this is a confusion. The fact that a sentence may be true whenever uttered does not make it in any way indubitable, and it is perfectly possible to be uncertain what language one is speaking (or even to question whether there are public communication-systems at all). Some transcendental arguments start not fron1 the bare pren1ise that there is experience, knowledge or language, but from the premise that there. is experience, knowledge or language of some very general kind. Premises of this sort can also be immune to doubt. If anyone pretended to doubt that experience contains more than one presentation, or is arrayed in an apparent time-order, we could not understand what he had in mind; nor could we see what he was looking for if he asked for some further justification. Arguably the same applies with much more specific descriptions of the content of one's awareness, and many philosophers would give a similar status to my beliefs about how things seem to me at present to be. This is not uncontroversial, however; and it need not concern us; for the arguments that are called transcendental start from premises that are more general than that. Either they simply take the claim that we have knowledge, or experience, or language; or else they take the more restricted premise that we have knowledge, or experience, or language of some rather general kind, where that is beyond sceptical doubt. If this means that there is no very sharp dividing line between transcendental arguments and argun1ents about the conditions for having experience with one specific content rather than another, that is not necessarily a bad thing. Kant himself, and others following Kant, would insist that there is a sharp dividing line, because the specific content of experience can only be known a posteriori whereas the relevant general features are in son1e sense a priori - a structural matter. This issue is a con1plex one, but for our present purposes it need not concern us; it is enough to note it and pass on. To get a conclusion from the fact that there is experience, knowledge or language - or experience, knowledge or language of some appropriate general kind - a transcendental argun1ent requires a second premise, which will have to be conditional in form. To give us the anti-sceptical conclusion we want, it must be to the effect that if the first premise is true, then the conclusion is: the truth of the conclusion is a necessary condition of that of the premise, or in more Kantian terminology a condition of its possibility. This second premise must also be one that the sceptic will accept, not only as true but as justified (or as needing no further justification). That makes it natural to think that it will be analytic, for sceptics are normally in the business of raising doubts both about empirical conditionals and about non-analytic necessities. Transcendental arguments seek to avoid relying on empirical conditionals for another reason as well, which is that they are philosophical

60

Ralph C. S. Walker

arguments, investigating not how things are but how they must be, if experience (etc.) is to be possible; and Kantians often hope that their conclusions will be synthetic and a priori, which they cannot be if they depend on an empirical premise. Some of the proponents of transcendental arguments have been quite clear that they do not intend their conditional premises to be analytic. I shall return shortly to the question what alternative status these premises could have. But if they are to be analytic we immediately have two prima facie difficulties. Transcendental arguments will in that case be pieces of conceptual analysis, and it may be objected that the concept of experience (etc.) is too vague and imprecise to yield interesting conclusions in this way unless we cheat by covertly building them into the concept to start with. Also, the status of analytic propositions may be questioned. An analytic proposition is an application of a logical law; but do logical laws deserve the privileged position, the security from doubt, that is often ascribed to then1? The first of these difficulties is not very serious, at least in principle. In advance of looking at the details of the arguments there is no reason to think that the concepts of experience, knowledge and language are any vaguer or more imprecise than other concepts on which analysis can be satisfactorily carried out. It might of course be claimed that conceptual analysis can never get us anywhere, because any analysis which was informative would have to be wrong - the alleged 'paradox of analysis'; but this turns on the assun1ption that we are always clear about what our concepts involve, an assumption which is shown to be mistaken by the success of conceptual analysis in philosophy as well as in logic and mathematics. In practice, of course, the fact that we are not clear what our concepts involve does make conceptual analysis a difficult business, here as well as elsewhere. When one philosopher contends that experience requires a certain condition to obtain, and another claims to be able consistently to describe experience obtaining without that condition, it is easy to sympathize with the frustration this may induce over the prospect of ever getting anywhere; easy too to share the feeling that it is hard ever to be sure that something is an analytically necessary condition for experience, since there will always be bizarre circumstances one has not thought of in which, perhaps, there might be something recognizable as experience without the condition. But these are difficulties of practice, not of principle, and in reality they are no more serious here than in any other branch of conceptual analysis. It is often hard to see just what a concept involves, but it is not impossible, nor do we have to examine every odd case in which the concept could apply. Once it is clear (to take a very elementary example) that bachelors must be unmarried there is no need to think further about peculiar circumstances:

Transcendental Arguments and Scepticism

61

we know in advance how they are to be handled. At first sight the second difficulty is not very serious either, though it affects not only the second pren1ise but also the rule of inference that is used to draw the conclusion. In seeking to convince the sceptic at all we assun1e his acceptance of the appropriate rule of inference (modus ponens), and son1ebody who went so far as to reject so basic a rule as that would have made his position impregnable at the cost of depriving it of interest - like someone who will not accept that there is such a thing as experience. There would be no arguing with him. But at the same time he could not argue with us, or persuade us to listen to him; unless, perhaps he were to argue indirectly, and seek to show that a reliance on our rules of inference leads into incoherence. If he were wrong in this, it would be possible to show him that, since for the sake of the argument he would be treating our rules of inference as though they were valid. If he were right, and our most basic rules do lead into incoherence, there would be no more to be said; rational thought would be at an end. If the sceptic were to accept the rule to the extent of drawing the conclusion from the premises, but were to clain1 that although in fact he does this he is not justified in doing it, he would be in no better case. For if argument is to amount to more than just one n1ethod of inducing others to hold an opinion - and a less efficient one than propaganda or brainwashing - it must be conceded that in at least some cases an argument may succeed in justifying its conclusion, which no argument can do unless we are justified in relying on such basic rules as modus ponens and the elementary principles of logic. We do, certainly, make use of less basic (and more questionable) inference rules, as for example the rules governing inductive inference, but there is no possibility that reliance on these could be justified if reliance on the rules of elementary logic were not, for we require elementary logic in order to make any use of the less basic rules. In the same way the sceptic who is able to argue at all will have to accept the conditional premise as both true and justified, if the conditional premise is really analytic - or rather, he will have to accept it once he comes to understand the concepts involved, and thus to see its analytic character. Understanding the concepts involved will be a matter of coming to seethe premise as having some such form as 'If P and Q then p', and anyone who failed to rely on such propositions would be as inaccessible to argument as someone who rejected modus ponens, and for the same reason. Argument (as opposed to mere disagreement) requires the use of the conditional, and there is therefore no possibility of arguing with people who do not share our reliance on the elementary principles governing the conditional's use. More generally, a sceptic who refused to accept - both as true and as justified - the

62

Ralph C. S. Walker

most elen1entary logical laws would be calling into question those basic rules of inference which make argument possible at all. Doubt about whether these laws are a priori is another matter, and may be perfectly reasonable; what cannot reasonably be doubted is that they are true and need no further justification. Except perhaps for the Law of the Excluded Middle: but since intuitionistic logic can proceed without it it is natural to think of it as lacking the elementary character of the Principle of Non-contradiction, or the law that 'If P, and if P then Q, then Q'. Actually this requires some qualification. A sceptic with doubts about generality might accept as valid each particular instance of a modus ponens argument that he was offered, and reject as false each specific proposition of the form 'P and not-P', while yet hesitating to subscribe to such universal claims as we make when we say that for all values of P and Q, if P and if P then Q then Q, and not both P and not-Po Such doubts could be quite intelligible; they would not prevent our arguing with him, since he will accept the individual moves we make (if they are valid moves). Nor need such doubts as these worry us in the present context, since he will accept the rule of inference applied in a transcendental argument, and also the conditional premise (still assuming the conditional premise is analytic). Slightly more worrying would be someone who accepted modus ponens in a wide range of contexts, but refused to allow it in others; or who held that though usually P and not-P cannot be true together, there are certain specific areas in which they can or even must be. I once n1et a Russian philosopher who, through a misunderstanding of the dialectic (and various other things as well), contended that in some parts of mathematics self-contradictory propositions are strictly and literally true; and I knew an American physicist who seriously believed that self-contradictory propositions were true in Japan. It was perfectly possible to argue with these people about other matters, despite their rejection of an utterly basic logical principle in its general form; a rejection which was deliberate and conscious, and not itself to be removed by logical argument. (They would not, for instance, be moved by the contention that from a self-contradiction anything follows, since their logics effectively contained stop-rules preventing that derivation in these cases.) Our conclusion must therefore be slightly qualified; but only slightly. For argument to be possible at all, it is necessary to accept the most fundamental logical principles as both true and justified, in so far as they apply to a wide range of cases. Someone who places limitations on the contexts in which he will accept modus ponens, or the Law of Non-contradiction, is nevertheless very likely to accept them in the cases on hand. If he does not, his refusal will seem arbitrary and uninteresting;

Transcendental Arguments and Scepticism

63

more importantly, it will be impossible to argue with him in this area, however possible it may be on other matters, and that by itself gives us a reason for dismissing him. We all know that the sceptic who refuses to argue with us can never be shifted from his position; but it is not this kind of scepticism that is felt to pose a problem.

II If the sceptic accepts that the premises are true and justified, and likewise accepts the rule of inference, the argument will oblige him to accept the conclusion in the same way. So far, at least, it looks as though there is nothing wrong in principle with the idea of a transcendental argument, for it looks as though there are premises and rules for inference that the sceptic will accept. It may however be felt that if the second premise has to be analytic the amount we can hope to show by such arguments will be small. Must the second premise be analytic? I think, and have argued elsewhere, 8 that for Kant it nlust be, because it is only an analytic second premise that his sceptic will accept. Empirical conditions for experience are not in question so far as Kant is concerned, and if the second premise is not analytic it will have to be synthetic a priori: but Kant's objective in the Critique is to show that, and how, synthetic a priori knowledge is possible without actually presupposing that we have any. By no means everyone agrees with that, but this is not the place to discuss it. Setting Kant aside, would sonle non-analytic second premise do? The answer, of course, will depend on whether there are non-analytic second premises that our sceptic will have to accept. One suggestion, which I think merely obfuscates the issue, is that the conditional might be conceptually necessary without being analytic. This cderives from a misunderstanding of analyticity. Analyticity is sometimes defined as 'truth in virtue of meaning', which encourages the thought that it has something to do with words rather than with the concepts they express; that it is essentially verbal. But nothing could be true simply in virtue of word-meanings, and the truth-value of any sentence (however empirical) will partly depend on its words meaning what they do. Even the most elementary of analytic truths, like 'All men are men', must depend on logical laws, and more complicated ones like 'All bachelors are unmarried' also depend (as Kant said) on analysing the content of the concepts involved. The discernment of what is contained in a concept is the process of conceptual analysis, and conceptual analysis has its problems. But nothing is to be gained by calling truths 'conceptual' rather than 'analytic' when the analysis is

64

Ralph C. S. Walker

complex or unobvious, for there is no clear line between the obvious and the unobvious cases; and all such truths, even the most elementary, depend on the content of their concepts as well as on logical laws. ('All men are men' would hardly be a truth if the concept expressed by 'men' had a different content on the second occurrence.) A more interesting suggestion is that the conditional n1ight depend upon some principle which is not analytic, but which nevertheless shares the feature I have been claiming for analytic truths: that they must be accepted as true and as justified once it has been made clear what they involve. I know of no general reason why there should not be nonanalytic principles of that sort; but I doubt whether there are any. Traditional scepticism is wide-ranging, and it extends to all our nonanalytic principles, without apparently rendering the sceptic incapable of arguing and thereby depriving his position of interest. The inductive principle, or the principle that the simplest hypothesis is likely to be true, might be thought to be suitably basic and indispensable (or for a Kantian, perhaps, the principle that every event has a cause). But though perhaps they may be indispensable, in that one cannot avoid making use of them, it does not follow that one has to think then1 justified, and it is their justification that the sceptic 'doubts. The matter can perhaps be clarified by considering a possible reply, to the effect that I am inventing a non-existent distinction between these principles and elementary logical ones. I have been contending that the sceptic loses interest for us if he fails to accept logical truths, on the grounds that only through a shared acceptance of them is argument possible. But it might be said that a similar argument is possible in the ~ase of these other principles as well. People regularly seek to construct transcendental arguments in support of them; let us suppose, for the moment, that a valid transcendental argument can be found which shows (for example) that the sceptic must at least accept the inductive principle as true if he is to have any experience or knowledge at all. Thus he could not reject that principle as false without failing to satisfy a condition that is required for him to have experience or knowledge - which would certainly put him beyond the range of argument. In general, wherever it can be shown by a transcendental argument that we must accept or believe something for experience to be possible, anybody who seriously refuses to accept or believe it puts himself as much beyond the range of argument as someone who rejects elementary logical truths. Hence any truth of that kind can equally well be relied on for the conditional premise. This threatens a regress, since it begins to look as though the conditional premise of a transcendental argument can be guaranteed acceptable only through a further transcendental defence. 9 But it is

Transcendental Arguments and Scepticism

65

based on a nlistake. The conditional premise requires no defence, either transcendental or otherwise. It is important to bear in mind that the philosophical sceptic's primary concern is with justification. He doubts whether some claim can be justified; if a transcendental argument is to convince him he must accept both its premises as being justified (or as needing no justification, which is effectively the same thing). The point of the argument I gave earlier was to show not only that he n1ust accept the logical propositions in question as true, though he must, but that he must accept them as justified, since otherwise no argument would be possible with him. And it was not itself thought of as a transcendental argun1ent, for it was not addressed to the sceptic and designed to convince hin1 of anything; on the contrary, it was an observation that if he refused to accept these things he could be convinced of nothing. There may be other principles, besides the logical ones, which must be accepted as both true and justified for argument to be possible; I am doubtful whether there are, but if there are, they could equally be used to furnish the conditional premises for transcendental arguments. And in their case again no transcendental defence would be needed: if it is a condition for my entering into any argument that I should treat P as justified, I do not need to have this proved to me before coming to treat P as justified (indeed I cannot have anything proved to me in advance of that). The only case in which a transcendental argument might be useful would be one in which although the sceptic did treat P as justified he was not aware that he did; here the argument might help him to such an awareness. It could do so, of course, only by relying on the fact that he does actually accept the premises as justified. If he did not he would be inaccessible to argument.

III Transcendental arguments are designed to convince sceptics. But convincing somebody is a different thing from establishing a conclusion in the abstract. The arguments work by treating the sceptic as a person, a participant in the debate: as such there are certain things he is committed to accepting (the reality of experience, the legitimacy of the principles on which argun1ent depends). But then it seems that in a way he is caught by a trick; the argument plays on his weakness, his willingness to play our game, and establishes not that its conclusion is viarranted but that he cannot deny it to be. That is by no means the same thing. The demand for justification is prompted by the feeling that we need an assurance that the contents of human minds and the

66

Ralph C. S. Walker

principles of hun1an thinking really match the way things are in the world - a feeling put most graphically by Descartes' hypothesis of the malin genie when that hypothesis is taken in its n10st radical form. Descartes uses the hypothesis to induce a doubt about the reality of the external world, but he also takes it very n1uch further, and uses it to raise the possibility that I might be deceived 'even concerning things which seemed to me most n1anifest' - including the truth of elementary logical and arithmetical principles. 10 And it is indeed not obvious why 'this little agitation of the brain which we call thought'll should operate in such a way as to yield the truth about reality. Admittedly we have no serious alternative to accepting elementary logical propositions as justified, and the same applies to the conclusions of transcendental arguments we can see to be valid; but we may feel dissatisfied none the less, for it is one thing to show that we must regard them as justified and another to establish that they actually are. We could go through the same moves and reach the same conclusion even if the malin genie were hard at work. It seems particularly inadequate to have an argument against the sceptic turn on concessions he is bound to make if he is to claim knowledge, experience, or openness to argument, because most sceptics are not real people at all, but creations of the philosophical imagination. They are created to play a dramatic role as the proponents of doubt. If it can be shown that over certain matters the sceptic's role is unplayable that does not seem to remove the possibility that the doubt was quite correct, it only shows that it was wrongly dramatized. It is not immediately obvious that the only philosophical possibilities worth considering are those that real people could seriously hold in debate whatever Plato may have thought. Stroud has suggested that transcendental arguments cannot generally yield results about how the world must be, but only about what people must believe; unless, perhaps, they rely on some form of verification principle which will bridge the gap.12 There are two quite separate ways of getting to a conclusion that could be put in that fashion. One of them has just been given. Transcendental arguments can show the sceptic that because he must accept certain premises as true and justified, he is committed to recognizing that certain conclusions are justified as well. The other is the argument in Stroud (1968), and is to the effect that because these arguments concern conditions for experience, language, etc., it is hard to see how they can reach conclusions about how the world must be rather than about how it must be believed to be; a suspicion which is fortified by examining a variety of transcendental iarguments put forward by a variety of authors. Stroud does not claim that this latter argument is decisive, he just does not see how such tonclusions could be reached. But I think the first argument is decisive

Transcendental Arguments and Scepticism

67

- though how much damage it does is another matter, to which I shall return in a moment. First of all it is important to notice that although it sounds as if both argun1ents give the san1e result, their conclusions are really quite different. The general form of a transcendental argument, as we have seen, is something like the following: There is experience (or knowledge, or language) (of general kind

K) It is a necessary condition of experience (etc.) that P Therefore, P. Stroud's point is that if the argument is to be valid, and is to avoid drawing on some kind of verification principle, P must be expected to take some form such as 'We believe Q'. It is true that on examination most transcendental arguments hold out little hope of getting further than that, including most of Kant's, for they are designed to establish what the world of appearances must be like, and the world of appearances is a construction out of (certain of) our concepts and beliefs. Nevertheless I think, and have argued elsewhere,13 that there is some prospect of producing satisfactory transcendental arguments for which P makes a claim not about our beliefs (or our concepts) but about what the world must be like, in itself and independently of what we think about it. A Kantian argument of this kind can be put forward to show the reality of things in themselves, as well as of the self as subject of experience. It would be too much of a digression to establish this here, however. What matters is that it is at least an open possibility. Stroud presents no general objection to it, nor does he take hin1self to have done so. He only expresses a doubt as to whether any such argument can be successful, a doubt which can be answered only by providing a satisfactory example. The feeling that there is a general proof that it cannot be successful - a feeling which many people seem to share, though not I think Stroud himself - may be due to a conflation of Stroud's point with the earlier, decisive, argument; which however makes an entirely different point, even though its conclusion can be expressed in confusingly sin1ilar words. Our earlier conclusion had nothing to do with the form taken by P in the above schema, and had no tendency to show that P must always be something like 'We believe Q'. Rather the point was that the argument did not provide, in the abstract, a proof of P (regardless of its form). It constituted a justification of P only to someone who already accepted the premises as true and justified. Adn1ittedly, everybody has to accept the premises of a good transcendental argument as being true and justified because otherwise he would not be able to enter into the debate, and he should therefore accept the conclusion likewise. But

68

Ralph C. S. Walker

there seems to be a difference between establishing that everyone must believe P to be true and justified, and establishing that P actually is true and justified. This applies whether P itself makes a claim about the world independent of us, or only a claim about what we must believe or think. The verification principle could help with Stroud's difficulty, but it cannot help us here; for it will not serve our turn unless it is true, and indeed justified. But what reason have we to suppose it is? Even if we could give an argument in its defence - something its proponents are not always very good at doing - that argument would achieve its objective only if its premises were true. And even with premises as basic as the elementary laws of logic we have so far not succeeded in showing that they are true, only that everybody must think them to be. The same applies equally to the suggestion - made by Stroud more recently 14 - that it would be possible to overcome the gap between what we must believe and what is true by adopting an idealist solution, according to which the real world is in some way a function of our beliefs: or at least a function of those beliefs we should have under certain ideal conditions (which would of course include all those beliefs that everyone has to have) .15 Any argument the idealist advanced would be subject to the same limitation, as any argument whatever would. The arguments in this paper are of course subject to it too, and there is another difficulty for the idealist there. I have been arguing that the sceptic, like everyone else, is bound to accept certain things, and that he can therefore be shown to be committed to certain conclusions and can be convinced of them if he follows his own principles. This contention itself rests on such things as the laws of logic. Now the idealist thinks he has a firm grasp on what we must believe, and seeks to construct the real world from it; but he has to start from the assurance that it is really true that we must believe these things. But is it? Even if I have made no mistake, and the arguments I have given are convincing, the same point applies to them again. I have claimed that in certain cases everyone must believe P to be true and justified. But in fact that was incautious: rather I should have said that everyone must believe everyone must believe P to be true and justified. Or indeed not quite that either, but that everyone must believe everyone must believe everyone must believe ... etc. without limit. The idealist has no firm ground here on which he can start his construction. Just as one n1ay feel in certain moods that there is a gap between showing that something really is true and justified and showing that everyone must believe it to be - a gap staked out by the malin genie hypothesis in its most radical Cartesian form - so in other moods one may feel that this idea is just absurd, and that if valid arguments can be produced to show us that even the sceptic must admit some

Transcendental Arguments and Scepticism

69

conclusion then that conclusion has been fully established. It is this second feeling which prompts both the verificationist and the idealist reactions. But it can also pron1pt the thought that nothing so grand as the verification principle, or so odd as an idealist n1etaphysic, is needed to bridge the gap, because there is really no gap. Consider, for example, the suggestion that the elementary laws of logic are not true, and that the world therefore contains contradictions. Why are we expected to pay any attention to this? It is not even a possibility, for the notion of possibility is derived from those logical laws which delineate its boundaries. And more generally, what is the point of contending that a claim has not been established when a proof has been given for it that even the most hardened doubter must accept? To do that is only to show that you have lost your grip on what it is to establish or justify something. Sensible though that may sound, it is mistaken, at least as it stands. Someone who sees the malin genie hypothesis as constituting a problen1 can readily concede the word 'possibility' to his opponent; it is no part of his case that the hypothesis is a 'possibility'. (He can say he is afraid it may be true, but the modality here is epistemic, not logical or ontological.) What he contends is that it has not been established that the hypothesis is false; no doubt it is, ex vi terminorum, 'logically impossible' that the world contain contradictions, but to assume the real world must be logically possible would be to beg the question. Nor is there any real difficulty about what he has in mind when he speaks of eliminating the malin genie hypothesis. What ,worries him is not that he is inclined to think it true - he is not, for he is as bound as anyone to accept the laws of logic and any other fundamental principles of thought - but that he would be in just the same epistemic position even if it were true. His conviction that the laws of logic are true and justified would be equally strong. But of course this worry can never be ren10ved, at least by rational means; the hypothesis cannot be eliminated. Any argument which sought to do that could only, at best, produce in him a further conviction, and it would still be the case that that conviction could have been implanted in him by the malin genie along with everything else. Because of this a great many philosophers would say we are 'entitled to disn1iss' the hypothesis; it 'ought not to worry' us. How Illoral judgements of this kind obtrude themselves into epistemology is not very clear· to me. Palpably they are moral judgements; so, perhaps less obviously, are many of the atten1pts to disn1iss such n1etaphysical discussions as foolish or absurd. No doubt it is not a productive use of time to spend it in attempting to solve an insoluble problem, but those who say these things must mean more than that, or they would merely be reiterating that it is insoluble. Obviously I am not claiming

70

Ralph C. S. Walker

either that the matter should worry us; only that we should take note of it. What is worth while, in my view, is to spend some time trying to become clear about what doubts can be answered and what doubts cannot, and about how far transcendental argumentation can take us. For once we have set the unsatisfiable demands clearly to one side, we have some chance of seeing how other demands can perhaps be satisfied.

IV Much discussion of these issues is clouded by the foggy notion of a conceptual schen1e. 'Our conceptual scheme' is generally taken to be more than a set of concepts; it is taken to include principles of reasoning like the laws of logic, the principle of induction, and a variety of others. But it is generally not supposed to include all the principles of reasoning that anyone ever uses. Some such principles, for example, are simply superstitious, like the principle which leads us to expect bad luck on Friday the thirteenth, and are evidently inconsistent with others (like the principle of induction). They are supposed to be left out. What is often not made at all clear is how much is supposed to be left in, and why.16 The obscurity is made worse by thinking of our conceptual scheme as a sort of net in which we are entangled and trapped. As we have seen, we cannot do without such basic principles as the most elementary logical laws, and if that is all that is meant by those who say we cannot get outside our conceptual scheme it must be conceded that it is obviously true. It does not however entail that we cannot coherently raise questions about the status of those same logical laws, and recognize that our inevitable belief in them does not settle the question of their truth. For on any plausible understanding of what 'our conceptual scheme' involves, it includes conceptual . resources that allow us to go beyond that scheme itself and contrast it with the reality that it seeks to formulate and describe. Concepts like those of truth and reality are designed for exactly that purpose, and it is because we possess them that we are able to consider such large-scale metaphysical issues as we have just been discussing. There may be 'conceptual schemes' which do not possess these resources; those who operated with them would not be able to think about those questions, and by the same token would lack the concepts of reality and truth. (Which is not to deny that they might be able to get along with alternative notions which did equally well for everyday, non-philosophical purposes; what shows that we are not people of that sort is just that we can consider these metaphysical issues, which they could not do.) Not only can we raise grand and unanswerable questioEJ__'!Q9_l.!!_tb~

_

Transcendental Arguments and Scepticism

71

nature of reality; we can also raise questions of an answerable kind ab.out how reality might differ from the way we ordinarily take it to be. If 'our conceptual schen1e' is internally coherent, and includes n10st of the concepts and principles held most of the time by the many (or the wise), it may serve to determine one single description of the way the world is, but even so we can still ask what alternatives become possible if one or another subset of our ordinary principles is suspended. We can, for instance, imagine suspending all the principles involved in induction and theory-formation; we can imagine suspending all our principles of inference except the basic laws of logic, and ask whether some suggestion coheres with them. More interestingly, we can ask whether some proposal about the nature of the world is consistent with the possibility of experience. We are also quite able to recognize the possibility of conceptual schemes alternative to our own. If (as seems natural) the acceptance of the Law of Non-contradiction in its full universality is taken to be an essential feature of our scheme, we have already done this, by noting the eccentricities of the American physicist and the Russian philosopher. Again, if the identification of spatio-temporal particulars is thought to be fundamental to our scheme, that does not prevent us from considering how alternative feature-placing systems might work, or systems which dispensed with space or with time. Much entertaining philosophy can be done in this area, and has been. And there is nothing particularly puzzling about how it is done. It is done by examining whether working with such and such a systen1 of concepts and principles would be compatible with the possibility of experience. Of course in thinking about such things we must use our own concepts and principles of reasoning, but it is an intrinsic feature of these concepts and these principles that they enable us to recognize our, and their, limits, and drive us on to ask questions of the unanswerable metaphysical kind. Kant was well aware of this, but more recent philosophers have often lost sight of it. Quine for example thinks we should dismiss the metaphysical questions as incoherent, and rest content inside the structure of knowledge that science gives us, naturalizing even epistemology so that it becomes part of the scientific enterprise. 17 But to avoid asking the metaphysical questions is not even an option for us if we are to retain our present conceptual scheme (and Quine certainly does not wish to suggest we abandon it), for the questions are thrown up naturally by the concepts we possess. And just as unanswerable questions are generated about reality, by raising the suggestion that we might be completely wrong about everything, so in the· same way unanswerable questions are generated about alternative conceptual schemes. On the malin genie hypothesis we may be entirely wrong in our ideas about what scope there is for

72

Ralph C. S. Walker

alternatives. It might seem that this was not so: is it not clear, for example, that a measure of respect for some basic logical principles must be a feature of any conceptual schenle? For someone who lacked such respect could not have concepts at all; he could not h~ve experience or coherent thought; and it is no good saying that the concepts of experience, thought, concept are coloured by our ways of thinking and that he nlight have perfectly satisfactory substitutes instead, for we really do have no grip on what that could possibly mean. But although this argument is correct so far as it goes, it does not establish the point, just because it is itself an argument. Analytic though it is that experience requires some respect for logical laws, the malin genie hypothesis allows for a self-contradictory world in which analyticities do not hold, however compelling they may seem. Setting aside the unanswerable questions, I think it is clear that transcendental arguments promise to be of particular help with the answerable ones; though whether the promise can be fulfilled depends, of course, on how successful we are in finding transcendental arguments that work. Transcendental arguments are not the only arguments that can exhibit conceptual interrelations, or that can be used (in Strawson's words) 'to establish the connections between the major structural features or elements of our conceptual scheme'.18 But among such arguments they have a special role to play, because of the undeniable nature of their premises. To investigate (say) how the inductive principle supports our belief in the external world is inlportant and worth while, but the investigation will not be a properly transcendental one since it just does not seem necessary to accept the inductive principle as justified, in the way we found it unavoidable to accept the laws of logic as justified, and the initial claim that there is experience. We have seen that transcendental arguments do not answer scepticism. At least, they do not answer a scepticism so thoroughgoing that nothing can answer it; and such a scepticism seems to make good sense. But they do answer the sceptic. They answer any sceptic who is prepared to argue with us seriously. Because he must accept their premises as true and as justified, and the rules of inference that they employ, he is committed to their conclusions. And this, though less than we might have hoped for, is valuable. Its value is reflected in the fact that whether we ask about alternative conceptual schemes or about the nature of independent reality, transcendental arguments seek to give us answers by drawing only on assumptions which are as minimal as possible. No argument could get started without assuming that the laws of logic are true and justified, at any rate on the whole; no one could think or argue without being aware of things, even if the only objects of his experience were his own thoughts. Conclusions reached from so exiguous a basis are well worth having. They convince sceptics, provided only

Transcendental Arguments and Scepticism

73

that they are open to conviction at all. They answer scepticism so far as it can be answered. They also promise to identify certain features, of thought or of reality, as being in a clear sense fundamental, because the recognition of them is the unavoidable consequence of unavoidable pren1ises. It remains an open question how far transcendental argun1ents can actually get us; that can be assessed only by searching for good transcendental arguments and by examining the candidates that are put forward to see whether they are satisfactory. As I said at the start of this paper, that is too large a matter to be discussed here. But at least we have not found any general reason for defeatism. The objection that transcendental arguments seek to do the impossible, by trying to take us outside our conceptual scheme, we have found to be mistaken. There is no real difficulty, at least in principle, over their providing analytically necessary conditions for experience. The other principal objection, the one due to Stroud, has fallen into two parts. First there is Stroud's original thought, that because of the character of its first premise a transcendental argument cannot yield conclusions about how things must be, but only about how they must be believed to be or what concepts we must employ, unless they draw upon son1e kind of verification principle. About this I have said little; Stroud does not claim to have established it conclusively; it could be refuted conclusively only by producing a satisfactory transcendental argument which establishes a conclusion about how things must be, and not just about how they must be believed to be. This I believe has been done, by Kant, as I have argued elsewhere. 19 Much of the persuasiveness of this original claim of Stroud's arises from confusing it with another and quite different claim, which is perfectly correct. Because transcendental arguments convince sceptics, rather than answering scepticism, there is a sense in which they can at best show only that everyone (including the sceptic) must accept their conclusions as true and justified, and not that they must be true of an independent reality. I should like to finish by saying something about Kant. But not about his transcendental arguments: about his transcendental idealism. For I think that Kant also failed to distinguish the two claims just mentioned, and that this helps to explain his ambivalence over things in themselves. He has always seemed to be pulled in two directions over things in themselves: on the one hand he firmly declares that we can know nothing at all about things as they are in themselves, while on the other he con1mits himself to saying at least that they exist, and affect us in such a way as to provide the source for the given element in our experience. But these two pressures both become highly intelligible if we suppose that Kant is suffering from something like the confusion just described.

74

Ralph C. S. Walker

Kant's world of appearances is in effect a construction out of (certain of) our concepts and our beliefs about the world. 20 The transcendental arguments to which he gives pron1inence in the Critique are arguments to the effect that we must apply certain concepts and believe certain principles to hold, which is equivalent to saying that in the world of appearances those concepts do have instances and those principles are true. Kant clearly thinks, as Stroud does, that the main use of transcendental arguments is to yield conclusions about how we must believe things to be (the world of appearances) rather than about how they actually are (in then1selves). Nevertheless there seems to be nothing in the nature of a transcendental argument which makes it impossible for such arguments to reach conclusions about how things must actually be, and Kant is himself committed to such conclusions, though he tends to shy away from saying so explicitly. It is on such grounds that we are entitled to infer that there must exist a real world which is independent of our beliefs about it, a world of things whose real (an sich) nature affects us in intuition. Our knowledge about what these things are like is no doubt inevitably very limited. But it is an exaggeration to say we can know nothing about them at all; and new transcendental arguments might be found which would enable us to know n1ore. The conclusions which such arguments established would be as much entitled to be called knowledge as our knowledge-claims ever are. On the other hand, the malin genie hypothesis reminds us that all our beliefs and all our inferences might be completely astray. There is therefore a sense in which none of our knowledge-clain1s can ever be completely secure against falsity, for our epistemic state could be just the same even if they were false. It is quite natural - whether or not it does violence to the ordinary use of the word 'know' - to put this by saying that we can never properly know anything at all about the way the world really is; and it is this, I think, that accounts for Kant's feeling that the world as it is in itself must be strictly unknowable. It is not even essential that there be anything at all. If reality can be contradictory, and wholly out of line with all our thinking, then nothing that we believe about it is altogether secure, and we cannot even be assured that it exists (even if its existence is required to make our account consistent). In its most radical form the malin genie hypothesis simply serves to point out that even the most basic principles of our thought might fail to match the way things are; indeed the malin genie himself is dispensable; he only provides a dramatic way of expressing the gap between our beliefs and reality. What Kant never realized was that he makes the an sich play these two quite different roles. On the one hand it contrasts with the world of appearances, as the largely unknown reality which must underlie

Transcendental Arguments and Scepticism

75

that picture of the everyday world which we construct synthetically from the given by reading in the categories and the forms of space and time. On the other hand it stands in contrast to all that we can discover by any means, and thus in contrast not only to the world of appearances but also to the largely unknown reality which we are obliged to assun1e. It serves to mark the unrefuted and irrefutable suggestion that all our beliefs and all the principles of our thought might fail to match the way things are.

NOTES General Note. The stimulus to write this paper was partly due to the editors of this volume, but partly to reading Barry Stroud's (1984) book The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism and Quassim Cassam's (1985) thesis Transcendental Arguments and Necessity. I am particularly grateful to Stroud and Cassam, with both of whom I disagree considerably. I am grateful also to a number of people with whon1 I have discussed an earlier draft of the paper, especially Simon Blackburn, David Bostock, Julie Jack, John Kenyon and Hugh Rice. 1 Strawson, 1982. 2 Korner, 1967. 3 Stroud, 1968. 4 See esp. Wilkerson (1976, ch. 10). 5 Walker (1978, chs I and II). 6 Strawson (1959, p. 35). 7 Annas and Barnes (1985, pp. 7f and 166ff) contrast modern scepticism with ancient scepticism in this respect. Since Descartes, sceptics have typically retained their beliefs but worried about their justification; ancient sceptics went further and (so far as they could) abandoned their beliefs as well. This interpretation of ancient scepticism is worked out and discussed by M.P. Burnyeat (1980). 8 Walker (1978, pp. 18-23). 9 The suspicion of some kind of regress or circularity here seems to be one of the things recent writers have had in mind in calling transcendental argun1ents 'self-referential'. Another is the thought that they cannot take us outside our own conceptual scheme, which is discussed in section. IV below. See e.g. R. Bubner (1974-5) and R. Rorty (1979). Neither of these ideas seen1S to me to have much to do with what Hintikka (1972) contends, despite what Bubner himself says. So far as I understand him, Hintikka simply seeks to reserve the name 'transcendental argument' for argun1ents which show how a certain type of knowledge is due to our own constructive activity (see p. 275); this would allow in the arguments Kant uses to support his transcendental idealism, but exclude most other arguments that I (and others) would call transcendental. 10 Descartes, 1897-1909, VII, 36; IX, 28 or Haldane, £.5. and Ross, G.R.T., 1911, I, p. 158. 11 Hume (1947, p. 148).

76 12 13 14 15

Ralph C. S. Walker

Stroud, 1968 (see note 4 above). Walker (1978, pp. 131-5; see also Walker, 1981; 1983). Stroud, 1984a. Obviously the ideal conditions must not simply be specified as those under which we would believe all and only the truths, or the idealism would collapse into vacuity. 16 It should be noticed, though, that this criticism cannot be directed against Korner, who takes unusual care to specify just what he takes to be intrinsic to a conceptual scheme - or, as he calls it, a categorial framework. See Korner 1967; 1974 esp. ch. 1. There is, however, a careful reply to Korner by Eva Schaper (1974). 17 Quine, 1969. 18 Strawson , (1985, p. 23). 19 See note 13 above. 20 For a defence of this account see Walker (1978, ch. IX).

5

Scepticism and Intentionality Peter Bieri

In this paper I want to present some reflections on the connection between intentionality and sceptical hypotheses. Sceptical hypotheses are hypotheses to the effect that the causal origins of our beliefs might be totally different from the way we take them to be. I want to pursue the question of what this would mean for our intentional states, particularly our beliefs, given that causal considerations are involved both in the ascription and the identification of intentional states. More specifically, I want to know if sceptical hypotheses can be, or can be designed to be, coherent in the light of the causal aspects of intentionality. Given that 'transcendental arguments' in one of the many senses of this term are arguments which probe into the coherence of philosophical scepticism, I shall be occupied with a sort of transcendental argument. My reflections will have two parts. In the first part I shall discuss the nature and function of sceptical hypotheses, and in the second part I shall focus on the question of their coherence in terms of intentionality.

I To know something is, at a minimum, to believe something true. What more is involved in knowledge? Intuitively, two further requirements come into play: (1) For a person S to have knowledge, S's beliefs n1ust not only be true, but also epistemically justified, i.e., S must have, and must know he has, reasons for his beliefs. (2) It must not just be an accident that S's beliefs are true. There must be a lawlike connection between his belief that p and the fact that p - a connection to support twocounterfactuals: (a) If p were not the case, S would not believe that p. (b) If P were the case, S would believe that p, if he were in a suitable position to discover that p. It must, in other words, not be that S would believe p, no matter if p were the case or not, and it n1ust not

78

Peter Bieri

be that S would not believe p even if he were in a suitable position to discover it. Our beliefs must be - metaphorically speaking, in contact with the world - they must be tracking the facts. 1 These two intuitions ought not to be played off against each other. It would be implausible to say that what n1atters is only that someone is a reliable producer of true beliefs. Someone completely incapable of commenting on his epistemic reliability in terms of reasons for his beliefs might act for others as a sort of instrument for measuring the world. But he would be struck with episten1ic blindness: The truth of his beliefs would de facto not be an accident, but it would, so to speak, be an accident for him. On the other hand, it would be odd to say that knowledge ascriptions merely depend on someone's capability to advance reasons for his beliefs, no matter if these beliefs relate to the world in an ordered fashion or not. The true story about our concept of knowledge must combine both intuitions and this combination is obviously achieved by the notion that it is the function of epistemic principles to place us in a non-accidental cognitive relationship to the world's facts. What else could be the point of epistemic justification? We can have good reasons for believing something and still be wrong, by failing to track the world with our beliefs. We want to put a requirement on epistemic justification which minimizes this possibility. The requirement is that someone, in order to know, must be able to exclude sources of error or deception. Excluding such sources means mobilizing knowledge about our causal position in the world. A fully competent epistemic subject is someone who knows under what external and internal conditions he is likely to produce false beliefs. He knows about unfavourable conditions of illumination, distortions of perspective, hallucinations and dreams. He will, in evaluating his beliefs, be careful to exclude such deceptive factors. He will, in the process of belief fixation, both apply certain epistemic principles or principles of reasoning, and rely on certain assumptions about the causal origins of our beliefs. We may call the sun1 of all these considerations our methodology in the acquisition of knowledge. General scepticism, then, is the thesis that this methodology is altogether incapable of providing us with knowledge about the world, although we do not have any other and better methodology. This cannot mean that we do not have any criteria for a rational evaluation of our beliefs. We obviously do have such criteria, namely the criteria defined through our methodology. Rather, the sceptical thesis is that the rationality of our beliefs is compatible with the assumption that these beliefs are altogether radically false and that they do not, therefore, constitute knowledge. In order to establish this stunning thesis the sceptic typically asks us to consider certain sceptical hypotheses: we might be dreaming, and the rationality of our beliefs might be nothing

Scepticism and Intentionality

79

but the coherence of a dreanl;2 we might be brains in a vat which are stimulated to produce all our ordinary beliefs, including the belief that we are not brains in a vat;3 we might be floating in a tank near Alpha Centauri with our brains b~ing stimulated to believe we are on the earth in familiar surroundings. 4 Sceptical hypotheses have three features in conlmon. (1) They are causal hypotheses, namely hypotheses about the causal origins of our beliefs. And they are, of course, wildly different from our usual assumptions about these origins. They amount, if spelled out in detail, to a complete redescription of our causal position in the world. (2) If a sceptical hypothesis were true, we would not be tracking the world's facts. We would be in the situation of believing p although p would not be the case. We would, for instance, believe that the sceptical hypothesis is false although it is true. Also, we would not believe p if P were true. We would, for example, not believe that the sceptical hypothesis is true, if it were true. Our beliefs would be completely out of contact with the real world as described in the sceptical hypothesis, and we would therefore not have any knowledge of this world. (3) Sceptical hypotheses are built to be empirically irrefutable. It is in the nature of the hypothetical situation that any piece of empirical evidence which we nlight want to use against the sceptical hypothesis is itself part of our universal deception. If we clain1 to have woken up from a former dream, this counts as just one more episode in the Big Dream; if we protest that we can very well distinguish a brain in a vat from a real person and that it is a real person that we see in the mirror, this is declared to be one more illusory experience, one more product of the brain's stimulation, and so forth. In this sense, sceptical hypotheses are carefully designed to neutralizes all our empirical evidence. The point of all sceptical hypotheses is the claim that everything in our experience could be exactly the way it is now, even if the world were completely different from the way we take it to be. It would, therefore, be pointless and futile to try a refutation of a sceptical hypothesis on the basis of this (possibly illusory) experience. Finally, the sceptic reminds us of the intuition that to know is to be able to rule out possible sources of error and deception, and he applies this intuition to the hypothesis he has advanced: knowing that the world is the way we usually take it to be would mean ruling out the sceptical hypothesis as false. However, since that hypothesis does not contain a logical contradiction, and since it cannot be refuted on empirical grounds, we have no means to rule it out. But if we cannot even exclude a possibility like that - how can we clainl to know anything at all about the world? The question I want to focus on In this paper is this: can a situation of universal deception, as depicted by a sceptical hypothesis, be coherently described? Is a situation like th~~!_e~~-ti~le_~i!l.:l~nQ!11_M_o1~- __

80

Peter Bieri

specifically, is the assumption that the causal orIgIns of our beliefs might be totally different from the way we take them to be, compatible with the assumption that the intentional or sen1antic content of our beliefs would still be the same? Before addressing this question directly, however, I want to go quickly through some familiar steps in the discussion with the sceptic, in order to give his position more profile and to make it as strong as possible. First, we must guard against a misunderstanding. Being 'sceptical' about the picture of the world arrived at through our methodology can mean a number of things which must not be confounded with the particular thesis of philosophical scepticism. If we call our present picture of the world, somewhat carelessly, our theory T, being sceptical about T might simply mean that we consider the following possibilities. 6 (a) Perhaps the logical space of possible theories contains one that would organize the past and present data better than T, although T appears to be better than anything else we know of. (b) Perhaps there are data which we have overlooked, although they are in principle available. These data might force us to replace T with another theory. (c) Perhaps we shall, in the future, encounter data which will force us to replace T with another theory. All of these possibilities are, of course, perfectly coherent. To be sceptical in this sense is not only a coherent attitude, it is the only rational attitude to assume. It is, however, not yet the attitude of philosophical scepticism. This particular attitude can be brought out by assuming that theory T is in fact superior to any rival which could be devised, in relation to any data which will or could be encountered. We suppose, in other words, that theory T is the ideal theory - ideal in the light of our methodology, which is the only standard we have. The philosophical sceptic, then, will grant us that T is the most rational theory in the sense that it is optimal compared with our strongest epistemic criteria. But he will clain1 that the ideal theory T might still be false. It is, he says, still an open question whether T is in fact true. Ideality in the sense of optimal rationality does not guarantee truth. This is so precisely because a sceptical hypothesis might be true, i.e., because T might have been produced in us through causal channels belonging to a world radically different from the world depicted in T. Now, the first classical objection to this position is to say that we do not really understand the idea that even the ideal theory about the world might be false. We do not understand it because the notion of truth is intelligible only within the framework of our epistemic procedures, i.e., our methodology. If a theory were optimal in the light of our best and strictest epistemic principles, it would necessarily have to be true because that is what 'being true' means. There is no coherent question about a theory's truth over and above all the questions about its comparative success in conceptually unifying the data which fall

Scepticism and Intentionality

81

under it. This view may be called verificationism. 7 It should be clear very quickly what the sceptic's reaction to it will be: he will object that this doctrine begs the very question at issue. Of course, he will say, if we stipulate that a theory's being true is nothing more than its being optimally rational according to our methodology, it follows that the ideal theory must be true. But, he will continue, that is really no more than a stipulation. It does not capture our plain and straightforward notion of truth. This notion is entirely non-epistemic, i.e., it is not relativized to any methodology. To say about a theory that it is true is to say quite simply that the world is the way the theory says it is. If a sceptical hypothesis were true and'the world were not the way the ideal theory says it is, then the ideal theory, although ideal, would plainly be false. It is true, and trivially true, that the operation of determining a theory's truth is bound to our epistemic principles. In fact, it just is the application of our methodology. But it does not follow that a theory's being true depends in any way on epistemic procedures. All it depends on is the way the world is. The sceptic, in other words, is a realist, and his realism is incompatible with verificationism. The second well-known objection to the sceptic's position attacks his realisnl from a slightly different angle. 8 Is not this realism completely empty because the notion of 'the world' which it invokes is completely empty? When we are told that the world n1ight be completely different from the way we conceive it to be, what do we refer to by the expression 'the world'? Ex hypothesi, we cannot be referring to anything within reach of our conceptual resources and descriptive powers. Does that not make the sceptic's reference an empty gesture, meaning nothing? The sceptic, I think, has a good answer to that. Yes, indeed, he can say, 'the world' as opposed to 'our experience' is an empty label in the sense that we do not know what that world is like. But by pointing out this fact we do not make an objection to scepticism; we simply state the sceptic's position. The point of sceptical hypotheses is not to give us a new, alternative description of the world with which to replace our old description. That would defeat the sceptic's own claim. The point of such hypotheses is, rather, to demonstrate that we possess no description of the world which can claim to represent knowledge of that world. If sceptical hypotheses, by virtue of their very structure, can not be eliminated, and if the sceptic is right in claiming that knowledge would require an elimination of the possibilities he mentions, then that is precisely our predicament: we do not know what 'the world', as a matter of fact, refers to. But is the sceptic right in claiming that knowledge requires the elimination of sceptical hypotheses? This question opens a third fan1iliar objection: it is true that our concept of knowledge contains the requirement that we exclude possible sources of error and deception.

82

Peter Bieri .

We n1ay also put this by saying that a fully competent epistemic subject will always consider alternatives to what he believes. But we can and must distinguish between relevant and irrelevant alternatives. 9 How do we make this distinction? Well, first of all it is not sufficient for an alternative to become relevant that someone just thinks it is relevant. There must be good evidence to think something is a genuine possibility. What counts as a relevant alternative is, in other words, a function of what else we know or believe to know. Secondly, the relevance or irrelevance of a considered alternative is, at least partially, relative to a certain context. What counts as relevant in one situation may count as totally irrelevant in another one. Consider my knowledge of the gasoline level in my car which I get by looking at my fuel gauge. 10 Whether I know how much fuel I have left depends, as a matter of objective fact, on the proper functioning of the gauge. It might be out of order, and in this case I wouldn't know. Is this a relevant alternative - one which ought to be taken seriously? It depends on the implications of being wrong. There is a difference between driving by a string of gasoline stations and driving in the middle of the desert. Running out of fuel in the first case may be merely unpleasant; in the latter case it may be a matter of life and death. The possibility of a broken fuel gauge is, accordingly, a relevant alternative in the latter situation whereas it is not normally considered relevant in the former one. Sceptical hypotheses fare badly on both criteria. There are many cases where we have good evidence to believe that we might be in a deceptive situation. But they are particular cases, and the relevant alternatives to consider are particular sources of deception. Furthermore, the 'sceptical hypotheses' we develop in such cases grow in a medium of knowledge, and the question of their truth or falsity can, therefore, be settled. The sceptical hypotheses typical of philosophical scepticism, on the other hand, are by their nature beyond the reach of evidence, both positive and negative. If they are intuitively appealing, it is because they rest on the step from particular cases of deception which we all acknowledge to the idea of a universal deception. But it is precisely this step which leads to possibilities or alternatives that are irrelevant on our first criterion, because they are merely conjured up and not backed up by a single piece of evidence. The same holds if we apply our second criterion. Except for the context created by philosophical scepticism itself there does not exist a context or type of situation relative to which sceptical hypotheses might become relevant. And this is, again, a consequence of the way they are designed: since they are compatible with all our experience being the way it is, there is no need, either theoretical or practical, to consider them within the framework of that experience. They are just too remote to be taken seriously - so remote, in fact, that they strike the unprepared as a kind of joke. Unlike certain

Scepticism and Intentionality

83

remote possibilities which are only relatively irrelevant because they may, after all, become relevant at some point, the sceptic's hypotheses are absolutely irrelevant. Does this not mean that the sceptic has no justification whatsoever for his claim that we cannot have knowledge of the world unless we can rule out his hypotheses? I think this is a tough objection for the sceptic to meet, mainly for two reasons: First, a lot can be said for the view that, according to our shared concept of knowledge, knowledge is an evidential state in which all relevant alternatives are eliminated. 11 Second, it must be our shared concept of knowledge which we are talking about, if there is to be a genuine debate with the sceptic. If he sets conditions which lie far beyond our common concept, he runs the risk of advancing a thesis which is unexciting and which we will shrug off with the remark: 'Well, if you decide to define knowledge like that, then of course . .. '12 Still, there is a way for the sceptic to respond to this challenge. To begin with its second point, he will distinguish between two claims. (a) Sceptical hypotheses are so remote that there is no experiential context in which it would be appropriate to consider them as genuine possibilities. (b) Scepical hypotheses are false or make no sense. The sceptic will then point out that (a) does not imply (b). It may, for all con1mon purposes, be a joke that we might be dreaming all the time or that we might be brains in a vat. Unless we intend to make a joke, it would be conversationally inappropriate to mention a possibility like that and to insist on it. Measured against this standard, we may even call such hypotheses 'nonsensical'. Accordingly, we will never blame anyone for not taking them into account. But all this does not show that they are literally nonsensical and that they could not, after all, be true. We must not let conversational standards or other conventional standards of human interaction be the arbiter of possible truth. I3 As to the first point of the challenge, the sceptic will point out that it is a disguised form of verificationism and therefore question begging. If we first define the class of relevant alternatives through the requirement that there has to be empirical evidence for them, and if we then restrict the range of alternatives to be eliminated to that class, we are, in effect, saying that nothing counts as possibly true unless it is in principle verifiable. If we are, however, realists in the sense that we stick to our plain notion of truth which is non-epistemic, we have, apart from conventional standards, no reason to exclude sceptical hypotheses from theoretical considerations about the possibility of human knowledge. After all, if a hypothesis like that were, as a matter of objective fact, true - would that not make it theoretically, if not practically, very relevant? This reply rests on what is probably the intuitive basis and recurring theme of all philosophical scepticism: the notion that we want to view

84

Peter Bieri

human knowledge completely objectively. 14 I say 'we want' because the claim is that this aim is built into all our epistemic efforts, into all our aspirations to knowledge. To seek knowledge is to try to go beyond the particular limitations and idiosyncrasies set by our biological makeup and by the particular sort of causal interactions between us and the world. To look for a more and more objective understanding of the world is to rely less and less on individual aspects of our original point of view given by our particular causal position in the world. It is, in other words, to go in the direction from subjective appearances to objective reality, in the direction of an increasingly detached view of the world. But why should we suppose that the products of detached reflection are more reliable guides to reality than the initial appearances? Why should we assume that they are less deceptive than, e.g., our sense impressions? To be sure of that, we would have to be capable of taking up a standpoint which is completely external to ourselves and from which we could assess exactly which elements in our world picture correspond to reality and which ones are merely due to our accidental and distorting constitution. But taking up an external point of view like that is, of course, impossible, because it would have to be we who take it up, and if we did, it would no longer be external. This is exactly what the sceptic is trying to tell us by means of sceptical hypotheses and by insisting on his realism. To envisage the possibility that the causal origins of our beliefs might be totally different from the way we take them to be, and that we might, therefore, not be tracking the world's facts, is equivalent to pointing out that we do not have a completely objective understanding of human knowledge and that we never will. For having such an understanding would mean being in the position to rule out positively all sceptical hypotheses. It would, thus, not be to the point to blame the sceptic for pretending to have an external standpoint. He knows as well as we do that there is no such thing as a completely detached perspective on our beliefs, the world and the relation between the two. The point of his hypotheses is precisely to remind us of that very fact. And, he concludes, if it is true both that we are necessarily or inherently striving for complete objectivity, and that we can never reach it, then scepticism is inevitable. This brings me to the last two familiar objections against scepticism. The first one is that sceptical doubts are scientific doubts, i.e., doubts which could only arise within science and which, therefore, presuppose science or knowledge. The sceptic, therefore, is either involved in an outright incoherence or, at least, he is overreacting. IS The second objection blames the sceptic for pretending to do something impossible, namely to pull all our beliefs into doubt all at once. In a sense, these two objections amount to the same thing. Even the sceptic, the argument goes, must hold some of our beliefs stable if he wants to be able to

Scepticism and Intentionality

85

express his position. Sceptical hypotheses, after all, draw on a lot of information, particularly scientific information, about the world. So how can the sceptic claim that all our information might be misinformation? But this argument is, strictly speaking, just an ignoratio elenchi. It would only count if the sceptic would, or would have to, believe in the truth of his hypothesis. But his point, as we saw, is not to give a redescription of the causal origins of our beliefs which he thinks is true. His hypotheses are merely illustrations of his claim that what we may take to be a completely objective understanding of hurnan knowledge is not one. The possibilities he sketches stand for lin1itless possibilities we cannot imagine. This same point may be expressed in yet another way: the sceptic in no way pretends, and must not pretend, that he can, miraculously, step outside our common sense and scientific beliefs. On the contrary, his point is precisely that we cannot do this and that, for this very reason, scepticism is inevitable. 16

II I have now given philosophical scepticism as much profile as I could within this limited space, and I have sketched the sceptic's dialectical resources as well as I could. I now turn to the question I mentioned at the outset: What does the sceptic's suggestion about totally different causal origins of our beliefs mean for our intentional states, given that causal considerations are part both of the ascription and the identification of intentional states? And, more specifically: can sceptical hypotheses be, or can they be designed to be, coherent in the light of the causal aspects of intentionality? We may begin by rephrasing the sceptical notion in a slightly different way. Adopting Robert Nozick's term,17 we may call a counterfactual situation or possible world doxically identical with the actual situation or world for a subject S if, were S in that situation or world, he would have exactly the same beliefs as he has in the actual situation or world. More generally, two situations or worlds are doxically identical for S if and only if S would have exactly the same beliefs in them. The sceptic's suggestion, then, is that there n1ight be worlds doxically identical with the actual world in which everything (or almost everything 18 ) believed is false. In fact, the sceptic claims, one of these doxically identical worlds may very well be the actual world, whereas what we usually take to be the actual world is not actual or real at all. Adopting another famous term, coined by Daniel Dennett,19 we may call the world as it is believed to be by S his notional world. S's notional world is, in other words, the world as it is represented in S's beliefs, i.e., in his mind. Someone's notional world may, by virtue of this

86

Peter Bieri

definition, correspond to the real world or it may fail to correspond to it. Or, at least, that is the way it seems. The sceptic's suggestion that there might be worlds doxically identical with the actual world in which almost everything believed is false, can now be rephrased once again: what he is assuming is that a notional world would stay fixed or remain the same, even if the real world were to vary and to vary so drastically that we would have to call it a totally different world. Differences; even very dramatic differences, in the real world would not have to be reflected in differences in the notional world of its inhabitants. More specifically, even very big differences in the causal or nomic structure between two worlds need not necessarily show as conceptual differences in the notional worlds of their respective inhabitants. Intentional or semantic contents - the stuff notional worlds are made of - stay fixed across different possible worlds and remain immune to even the most drastic differences between them. That is the doctrine behind the sceptic's notion that the world in which we were brains in a vat or the world in which we would be floating in a tank near Alpha Centauri with our brains being cleverly stimulated could, or would, be doxically completely identical to the actual world or, rather, to the world we take to be the actual world. If this doctrine were true, the sceptic's reasoning would seem to be very powerful. If we could not know whether our notional world corresponds to the real world or whether we live in a world merely doxically identical with, but, as a matter of fact, totally different from the world we suppose to be the real world, we could not be sure that our beliefs are not violating the intuition about knowledge according to which beliefs have to be tracking the world's facts. To fulfil this condition, beliefs must vary according to the way the world's facts vary. If they would not vary the way they should, they could not qualify as knowledge, because in that case they would not be sensitive to the truth. In a case like this it would not help if our beliefs would comply with the other intuition about knowledge according to which they must be linked by the epistemic principles which define our methodology. True, the point of such principles is to ensure that our beliefs are not free-floating with respect to the world. But the sceptic's background doctrine n1akes it conceivable that we are only under the impression that our methodology succeeds in that task whereas in truth our epistemic principles are idle wheels driving nothing. If a situation like that were to obtain, the rationality of our beliefs would be merely a structural feature of our notional world with no power at all to decide which among the innumerable doxically identical worlds is the actual world. And the doctrine which makes the intentional or semantic contents of notional worlds independent of the causal or ns>}!!_is:_~!!'!1~J!!I_~_

Scepticism and Intentionality

8

of the real world entails the impossibility for us to know that a situation like that does not obtain. But is that doctrine true? In order to evaluate it, it is essential to distinguish between three different clainls about our beliefs: 20 (A)

Our beliefs do not thenlselves testify to their causal origins.

(B)

Our having the beliefs we have is compatible with various known causal origins of these beliefs.

(C)

Our having the beliefs we have is compatible with an unlimited number of totally different causal origins of these beliefs including those sketched by sceptical hypotheses and including innumerable causal origins we are not even capable of imagining.

Let us begin by claim (A). In a broad sense of the term, this is a phenomenological truth. It says that beliefs do not wear their causal origins on their sleeves. Less metaphorically, we can know the intentional content of a belief - know, i.e., what belief it is - without thereby knowing how it came about. Consider, first, knowing what other people believe. You may believe that Katmandu is the capital of Nepal, and I may know that belief of yours. But my knowledge of the content of your belief does not presuppose any knowledge on my part of how you acquired it. You may have acquired it by reading, by being told, by seeing Katmandu on a map or by having travelled to Nepal. As far as my knowledge of your belief's content is concerned, it simply does not matter whether I am familiar with its causal origin or not. You nlay have told me or I may have inferred your belief from your behaviour, verbal or non-verbal. Knowing that piece of your notional world does not require knowing about its causal origin. Now consider a person's knowledge of her own beliefs. She is, of course, in a clearly better position to know about the causal origins of her beliefs than anyone else is, because she has been, so to speak, her own companion all her life. She can remember the causal origins of many of her own beliefs. If, for exan1ple, she, too, believes that Katmandu is the capital of Nepal, and if she did not discover this fact until arriving there on a trip, it is unlikely that she will forget how she acquired this belief. But even if she did, it would not make any difference, as far as her knowledge of the content of her belief is concerned. And although I may remember the causal origins of many of my beliefs, there remains a vast number lof them where this is not the case. I believe, for instance, that the earth lis rotating around the sun or that whales are mammals, but I have Geither the faintest idea about where, when and how I learned this, nor o I remember later causal reinforcements ~f_ ~~()se_ ~~!i~fs. _~11~ _illL

r

88

Peter Bieri

causal ignorance does not affect my certainty that they belong to my notional world. By gathering phenomenological evidence for claim (A) I have arrived at claim (B). By elucidating the neutrality of our belief contents with respect to the causal origins of our belief states I have indicated how having the beliefs we have is compatible with various causal sources of these beliefs. In forming beliefs we are not rigidly tied to only one type of source, but are plastic in the sense that we can build on many different sources. This is not merely an accidental feature of our biological make-up. Rather, it seen1S to be an essential feature of any system capable of having beliefs. 21 But it is important to emphasize that (B) restricts the scope of variation in our beliefs' genesis to the alternatives which are known to us. This restriction needs a comn1ent. To be acceptable, it must not be construed as meaning that all causal sources of beliefs so far unknown do not count. There are undoubtedly many causal factors involved in the emergence of beliefs which we just have not discovered yet, particularly causal factors in the brain. Our having the beliefs we have is, of course, compatible with the discovery of a lot of new causal chains. In fact, it is compatible with various mutually exclusive hypotheses about both the biological and the information processing structure of the brain. All of this cannot and need not be ruled out by our claim (B). All we need to put into it are two requiren1ents. (1) The familiar causal sources of beliefs which affect us through our senses count as real, and (2) to count as a possible source of beliefs, certain proposed causal factors must, in principle, be accessible by means of our ordinary epistemic procedures. Together these requirements ensure that in (B) we are not talking about varieties of belief production which are, in principle and forever, hidden to us. The degree of freedom in the production of beliefs is, in other words, restricted to the scope of causal discoveries allowed for in our methodology. Understood in this way, (B) is obviously designed to stand in sharp contrast to (C). Still, there is a certain easiness in the transition from (B) to (C), and it is this easiness which accounts for whatever intuitive appeal the sceptical reasoning may have. The entry move to this reasoning is an observation which may, at first glance, appear to be no more than just a corollary of the phenomenological claim (A), having no further implications. It is the observation that the known intentional content of our beliefs is neutral, not only with respect to ignorance about the beliefs' origins, but also with respect to error regarding their causal origins. To vary my earlier examples accordingly, a person may know about her belief that Katmandu is the capital of Nepal, even if she is completely wrong about where, when and how she acquired that belief. By the same token, I may be in serious error about the genesis

Scepticism and Intentionality

89

of my beliefs that the earth is rotating around the sun and that whales are mammals, without this fact affecting the content of these beliefs or my knowledge of their content. Everything remains the same with that piece of my notional world, even if, as a matter of objective fact, it was reached through causal paths which were very different from the way I took them to be. Now, this is precisely the point at which the sceptic slides from claim (B) into the much stronger claim (C), trying to drag us after him. 'How do you know', he is asking us, 'that what holds for these particular beliefs doesn't hold for all your beliefs, including those on the basis of which you want to restrict the possible causal sources of beliefs to those in principle accessible to you? How can you possibly know that, given that your beliefs, as we saw, aren't sensitive to error about their causal origins? It's not that only some of them aren't sensitive whereas others are. Beliefs are all alike in that respect. So what is your reason for holding on to (B) while refusing to accept (C) which is precisely my thesis of philosophical scepticisnl?' What would a really convincing answer to that crucial question look like? My reflections up to this point were designed to show that such an answer would have to fulfil three major conditions: (1)

It must not be verificationist because (as we saw in the first part of this essay) verificationism cannot help begging the very question at issue in the debate with the sceptic.

(2)

Without being verificationist it must show the sceptic's background doctrine about the independence of intentional contents from the causal or nomic structure of the world to be false.

(3)

It must at the same time explain the phenomenological fact that belief contents are neutral with respect to different causal origins.

To give an answer to the sceptic which would live up to these requirements would mean giving an account of beliefs which could prove that beliefs are veridical by their very nature. This would be tantamount to developing a sort of transcendental argument against the sceptic. It would have to be an argument to show that the easiness in the transition from claim (B) to claim (C) is an easiness of a superficial and deceptive kind. The argument would have to show that the sceptic, by moving from (B) to (C), becomes involved in a deep and fundamental incoherence, and it would have to prove this by showing that anyone accepting (C) fails to understand what a belief is. Ideally, an argument like that would not need to be verificationist because it would not be based on praising our epistemic procedures at all. Rather, the argument would emerge from probing into the nature or essence of beliefs generally.

90

Peter Bieri

Is an argument like that possible? In the remainder of this chapter I shall discuss four arguments which have been proposed. The first one can be extracted from Daniel Dennett's theory of intentional systems. The second one has been proposed by Donald Davidson as a conclusion from his theory of radical interpretation. The third argument is Fred Dretske's and is based on his theory of intentional states, and the fourth argument is Hilary Putnam's argument to the conclusion that if we can consider whether it is true or false that we are brains in a vat, then it is false. For reasons of space limitation my discussion will remain somewhat sketchy, since I will not be able to fill in all the details belonging to the background of· each argument. Hopefully, however, the arguments' basic structure will become clear so that they can be n1easured against our requirements. Let us begin, then, with Dennett's notion of an intentional system. Something is an intentional system if its behaviour can be explained and predicted by ascribing to it intentional states like beliefs and desires or, to put it differently, if it is a system that possesses intentional states like beliefs and desires. 22 The explanatory strategy which cites beliefs and desires is called the intentional strategy. This strategy is epistemically independent of other explanatory strategies like the biological (physical) strategy or the functional strategy (which provides explanations by reference to information processing structures). We can and do ascribe intentional states to a system without knowing its biological or functional details. But the intentional strategy is dependent on the biological and functional level of a system as far as its explanatory success is concerned. Unless the biological and functional design of a system is pretty good, we are let down by the intentional strategy. A badly built or n1alfunctioning system is not accessible to explanations which cite its beliefs or desires. It cannot, therefore, be said to have beliefs or desires. If, however, its biological and functional design is pretty good, we can ascribe to it beliefs and desires which possess a certain quality: they are rational beliefs and desires. And here is where Dennett's argument against the sceptic starts because part of what it n1eans for beliefs to be rational is, according to his account, that they are mostly true. Why? ... there is no point in ascribing beliefs to a system unless the beliefs ascribed are in general appropriate to the environment, and the system responds appropriately to the beliefs. An eccentric expression of this would be: the capacity to believe would have no survival value unless it were a capacity to believe truths. What is eccentric and potentially n1isleading about this is that it hints at the picture of a species 'trying on' a faculty giving rise to beliefs most of which were false, having its inutility demonstrated, and abandoning it. A species might 'experin1ent' by n1utation in any number of inefficacious systems, but none of these systems would deserve to be called belief systems precisely because of their defects, their non-rationality, and hence a false belief

Scepticism and Intentionality

91

system is a conceptual impossibility ... a soluble fish is an evolutionary impossibility but a system for false beliefs cannot even be given a coherent description. 23

Does this argument convict the sceptic of an incoherence? At first it may seem that it does. For consider the traditional Cartesian inquirer who subjects all his beliefs to n1ethodical doubt by considering the possibility that all his beliefs n1ight have weird causal origins which he, however, would never be able to fathom. If we apply Dennett's argument, it seems that he cannot thereby be thinking a coherent thought. For he knows, at a minimum, that he is an intentional system (putting his beliefs into doubt), and if it were necessarily true of such systems that they mainly believe truths, he could not coherently think of himself as having mainly false beliefs. But is Dennett's argument about the inherent veracity of intentional systems conclusive? Although the quoted passage makes it look as though it were one single argument, I think that there are, in fact, two quite different arguments in play. One of them is straightforwardly evolutionary and is, in fact, used wisely in so-called 'evolutionary epistemology'. 24 It says simply that only systems whose notional world largely corresponds to the real world could have survived in that world. This is, I think, a dubious argument. Firstly, it is far from clear that a system's beliefs must be more than somehow functionally adequate to its environment in order to serve the purpose of survival, and it may very well be that this functional adequacy is compatible with, or even presupposes, a large an10unt of what is, strictly speaking, a misrepresentation of the world. The illusory character of many of our perceptual beliefs and the massive amount of self-deception we need in our lives testify to this. At least, I have not seen any argument to prove that functional adequacy entails truth, and I doubt that there could be one. 25 Secondly, the evolutionary argument is not likely to impress our sceptic because it obviously begs the question against him. For an evolutionary account of something is shorthand for a causal account to be developed within our methodology, and it is, as we saw, precisely the power of this methodology to lead to truth which is at issue in the debate with the sceptic. The evolutionary strand in Dennett's reasoning is, therefore, not strong enough to convict the sceptic of any incoherence. There is, however, a second strand in his reasoning which looks much more promising. It is the idea that it belongs to the logic or meaning of belief ascriptions that we ascribe mostly true beliefs to an intentional systen1. Dennett's argument here seems to be this. 26 When we know the environment and the biography of a person, we ascribe to him or her those beliefs which we imagine ourselves to have under those circumstances. And since believing something means believing something

92

Peter Bieri

to be true, we cannot help ascribing mostly true beliefs to an intentional system. This is shown by the fact that we would not accept an explanation representing an intentional system as a believer of mostly false things. An explanatory result like that would count as an indication that we have not yet understood the system's behaviour because it does not yet make sense. And since it is in the nature of belief ascriptions to make sense of a system's behaviour, we must view beliefs as basically veridical. This is why an intentional system with totally false beliefs cannot be given a coherent description. It is a conceptual impossibility because it is an explanatory impossibility. How does this argument fare when measured against our requirements? It is not a verificationist argument. It does not say that an intentional systen1's beliefs are true because they can be justified in the light of some (ideal) epistemic standards. There is no mention of verification at all. The truth of our beliefs follows, rather, from their being beliefs, i.e., from their function or role in making sense of someone's behaviour. So the argument fulfils our first condition. What about the third one? Does Dennett have an explanation of the fact that one and the same belief can arise though different causal channels and that neither ignorance nor error about its genesis prevents someone from knowing what he believes? Well, he certainly describes the phenomenon, at least the part about different causal channels. 27 And the conclusion he draws from it may at the same time be viewed as an explanation. It is this: to attribute beliefs to a systen1 is not to postulate concrete inner states but to interpret its behaviour in tern1S of an abstract rationalistic calculus. Beliefs (and intentional states generally) are abstract features of a system, and as such they are neutral with respect to the different input channels available to the system. Their being neutral in this way is just an aspect of their being abstract states. Accordingly (we may extrapolate), it comes as no surprise that knowing about their content is compatible with ignorance or error about an intentional system's causal involvement with its environment. In that sense, Dennett's argument fulfils our third condition as well. But does it fulfil the second condition by showing the sceptic's background doctrine about notional worlds to be false? We may sharpen this question by considering the sceptic's reaction to the argument. He will grant its premise that the explanatory role of beliefs entails that we cannot help thinking about intentional systems as believers of truths. But, he will point out, it does not follow from this that intentional systen1s are, as a matter of fact, believers of truths. For suppose we were all brains in a vat cleverly interlocked so that we would be forming explanatory hypotheses about each other. Ex hypothesi, we would be talking about the behaviour of bodily persons just the way we do now because it would be bodily persons and not brains in a vat which belong

Scepticism and Intentionality

93

to our notional world. Our explanatory hypotheses would, in other words, be identical to those we develop in what we take to be the real world. Given Dennett's argument, we would, in that scenario, be conceptually forced to ascribe to each other and to ourselves mainly true beliefs, at least if the concept of belief were to function the way it usually does. We would, in other words, be conceptually fully coherent in our notional world, even measured against Dennett's standards of coherence. But most of our beliefs would, as a matter of hypothetical fact, be false. Brains in a vat would be precisely intentional systems with radically false beliefs. As it stands, Dennett's argument does not rule out this possibility, and it fails to do so because it does not fulfil our second condition. Can it be improved? An improven1ent would have to consist in showing that a radical alteration in the causal position of intentional systems in the world would not leave their notional worlds untouched. It would change their beliefs. If a connection like this between the causal origins and the identity of beliefs could be demonstrated, the sceptic's hypothesis would collapse. He could then no longer claim that the possible world of interlocked brains in a vat would still contain the very same beliefs as the actual world. The two worlds could then no longer be viewed as doxically identical. The backbone of scepticism would be broken. There are fragments of such an argument in Dennett,28 and their summary will serve me as an introduction to Davidson's argument. Consider the question: what (true) beliefs do we ascribe in the intentional strategy? How do we fix, determine or identify the elen1ents in an intentional system's notional world? Dennett's answer is that we have to know the system's causal position: what sort of information channels (n10des of perception) it possesses, i.e., in what ways it can causally be affected by the world; and what it can do, i.e., into what active causal contact with the world it can come. In fact, these are the only things we can go on - at least in the beginning of the intentional or semantic interpretation of a system in which we bulld up its notional world by determining the range of its possible beliefs. And although we do not have the detailed causal stories and may not be able to make a list of all relevant causal factors, we operate on the basis of rough causal considerations. The degree of sophistication of the beliefs we ascribe, for example, has to do with the complexities of perception and action that the systen1 is capable of. In this way our identification of beliefs depends on our knowledge of the system's causal position in the world. And part of that knowledge is our ascription of a certain range of causal origins to beliefs. In order to see how far these undeniable observations carry against the sceptic, we must now distinguish two importantly different claims:

94

Peter Bieri

(D)

The identification of beliefs depends on the ascription of a certain range of possible causal origins to these beliefs.

(E)

The identity of beliefs depends on the objective or true causal origins of these beliefs.

The difference between these two claims will be crucial when we now turn to Davidson's argument. 29 It starts at precisely the same point as Dennett's second, non-evolutionary argument does, namely by pointing out the role that the concept of truth or the notion of a true belief plays in the intentional or sen1antic interpretation of a system. The opening observation is that having a language and knowing a good deal about the world are inseparable aspects of a system. Making sense of a system's output is giving an intentional interpretation of the system by ascribing beliefs and meaning. There is a familiar interplay here: assuming that it believes certain things we conclude that it means certain things, and vice versa. So there are certain degrees of freedom in the process of interpretation: we can vary the content of a person's beliefs by varying their truth-value. Now, the principle to restrain these degrees of freedom is the principle of charity. It bases the ascription of meaning on the presumption of truth: ... I wou,ld extend the principle of charity to favor interpretations that as far as possible preserve truth: I think it makes for mutual understanding, and hence for better interpretation, to interpret what the speaker accepts as true as true when he can ... then most of the sentences a speaker holds to be true especially the ones he holds to most stubbornly, the ones most central to the system of his beliefs - most of these sentences are true, at least in the opinion of the interpreter. 30

So far, this is sin1ply the counterpart to Dennett's idea that in making sense of a system's behaviour we are conceptually forced to ascribe mainly true beliefs. Next, Davidson adds the crucial causal consideration which we also saw foreshadowed in Dennett: Nor, from the interpreter's point of view, is there any way he can discover the speaker to be largely wrong about the world. For he interprets sentences held true (which is not to be distinguished from attributing beliefs) according to the events and objects in the outside world that cause the sentence to be held true ... we can't in general first identify beliefs and meanings and then ask what caused them. The causality plays an indispensable role in determining the content of what we say and believe. This is a fact we can be led to recognize by taking up, as we have, the interpreter's point of view. 31

Davidson rejects here the core piece of the background doctrine we have attributed to the sceptic, namely the assumption that we can 'first identify beliefs and meanings and then ask what caused them'. If and only if that assumption were true, could the sceptic claim that knowledge of the contents of our notional world is compatible w~~~j~_~~~~!l_c_e__<2t _

Scepticism and Intentionality

95

error about its causal origins in the real world. And only then could he hold that we could still precisely know what we believe, even if we were in gross and radical error about the causes of our beliefs. If, however, that crucial assumption is false, as Davidson claims, knowledge or identification of one's own notional world is incompatible with considering other possible worlds doxically identical to the actual world. So the Cartesian inquirer is convicted of an incoherence because that is precisely what he is trying to do: he first identifies his beliefs, exploring his notional world, and then he goes on worrying about other doxically identical worlds. If Davidson is right, this is an en1pty and strictly incoherent worry: 'What stands in the way of global skepticism of the senses is, in my view, the fact that we must, in the plainest and methodologically most basic cases, take the objects of a belief to be the causes of that belief.'32 We cannot fix or determine what our beliefs are about unless we have fixed or determined what causes them. If, contrary to the sceptic, this is the ordo cognoscendi, we are entitled to reason according to the following principle: (F)

If we can identify the contents of our beliefs, then we can also identify their causes.

This is a principle which the Cartesian inquirer thinks is not available. But his grievance is unjustified according to Davidson because he fails to see that, in ascriptions of beliefs, the object or referent of a belief must be taken to be identical with its cause. Seeing this allows us, metaphorically speaking, to open the doors of our notional world and to step out into the real world which is the world of our beliefs' causes. Recognizing the truth of (F) makes us see that we, as intentional systems, could not possibly be monads. Neither is this the end of Davidson's argument, nor is the sceptic silenced by the previous reasoning. But before proceeding I want to pause briefly and review the argument up to here in the light of our requirements for a fully convincing argument. Like Dennett's argument, it is not verificationist because the truth of our beliefs is not said to be guaranteed by some (ideal) epistemic procedures but by the nature and logic of belief ascription generally.33 Our first requirement, therefore, is fulfilled. What about the third one? At first sight, principle (F) stands in a flat contradiction to our earlier claims (A) and (B) which we saw to be true on phenomenological grounds. But Davidson has a diagnosis which makes the contradiction vanish: What I take to be the important aspect of this approach is apt to be missed because the approach reverses our natural way of thinking of communication derived from situations in which understanding has already been secured. Once understanding has been secured we are able, often, to learn what a person believes quite independently of what caused him to believe it. This nlay lead

96

Peter Bieri

us to the crucial, indeed fatal, conclusion that we can in general fix what someone means independently of what he believes and independently of what caused the belief. 34

The apparent conflict disappears once we make two distinctions. (1) We n1ust not confuse the fact (a) that belief contents are, once we are fanziliar with them, neutral with respect to different causal origins, with the fact (b) that, as long as we are in the process of establishing these contents, they are not neutral in this way. (2) We must not confuse the fact (a) that beliefs may arise through different causal channels, e.g., through different sense modalities, with the fact (b) that they are different beliefs if they are prompted by different objects. Once we make these obvious distinctions, we can easily see in what sense (F) is compatible with both (A) and (B).35 It was because he wanted to show then1 to be compatible that Davidson reverted to the artificial situation of radical interpretation. In this sense, then, Davidson's argument fulfils our third condition. It seems, furthermore, that by establishing (F) Davidson has met our second and crucial requiren1ent as well. For has he not thereby refuted, once and for all, the sceptic's background doctrine about the independence of intentional contents from the causal or nomic structure of the world? I think Davidson has not succeeded yet, and my reason is that I see a coherent comeback for the sceptic. Basically, it consists in exploiting the difference between claim (D) and claim (E), i.e., the difference between identification and identity of beliefs. And the sceptical strategy will be to accept (F), but to accept it only internally, i.e., with respect to collective notional worlds, and not externally, i.e., with respect to the relation between notional worlds and the real world. Consider once again the hypothetical world of interlocked brains in a vat. We saw in Dennett's case that pointing out how indispensable the assumption of truth is in intentional interpretation does not help against this hypothesis. And now the sceptic claims that (F) does not help, either. For remember that a sceptical hypothesis is compatible with everything we do, either practically or cognitively. So it is also compatible with our practice of identifying beliefs described by Davison. If we were brains in a vat believing we were bodily persons living in the familiar world of tables, trees, and stars - how would we identify each other's beliefs? Well, in exactly the same way we do now. We would, just as (D) says, detern1ine the content of our beliefs by attributing to them a certain range of possible causal origins. Everything would be exactly the same, except that the cited causal origins would, as a matter of objective fact, not be the true origins of our beliefs. It would not be tables, trees, and stars which prompt our beliefs, but certain electrical stimulations of our brains designed to produce tables, trees, and stars

Scepticism and Intentionality

97

as (merely) notional objects. Accordingly, we would, in a scenario like this, use (F) as a guiding principle, and we would be justified in using it, given the way our experience is. But its application would, in every single case, lead to false identifications of our beliefs' provenance. This, then, is the sceptic's comeback. I said it was coherent. Is it? Davidson thinks it is not. He puts the essence of it like this: It is an artifact of the interpreter's correct interpretation of a person's speech and attitudes that there is a large degree of truth and consistency in the thought and speech of an agent. But this is truth and consistency by the interpreter's standards. Why couldn't it happen that speaker and interpreter understand each other on the basis of shared but erroneous beliefs ?36

If we add Davidson's causal considerations, this is exactly the sceptical question. Davidson answers: This can, and no doubt often does, happen. But it cannot be the rule. For imagine for a moment an interpreter who is omniscient about the world, and about what does and would cause a speaker to assent to any sentence in his (potentially unlinlited) repertoire. The omniscient interpreter, using the same method as the fallible interpreter, finds the fallible speaker largely consistent and correct. By his own standards, of course, but since these are objectively correct, the fallible speaker is seen to be largely correct and consistent by objective standards.... Once we agree to the general method of interpretation I have sketched, it becomes impossible correctly to hold that anyone could be mostly wrong about how things are. 37

And, implicitly addressing the Cartesian inquirer: In order to doubt or wonder about the provenance of his beliefs an agent must know what belief is. This brings with it the concept of objective truth, for the notion of a belief is the notion of a state that mayor may not jibe with reality. But beliefs are also identified, directly or indirectly, by their causes. What an omniscient interpreter knows a fallible interpreter gets right enough if he understands a speaker, and this is just the complicated causal truth that makes us the believers we are, and fixes the contents of our beliefs. The agent has only to reflect on what a belief is to appreciate that most of his basic beliefs are true.... The question, How do I know my beliefs are generally true? thus answers itself, sinlply because beliefs are by nature generally true. 38

The decisive step in this reply is the introduction of an omniscient interpreter, and the crucial claim is that he would necessarily find us, the possibly fallible speakers and interpreters, to be largely right about the world. If that could be proved, the sceptic's comeback sketched above would, indeed, be incoherent. But can it be proved? Suppose the omniscient interpreter enters the world of interlocked brains in a vat. Being omniscient, what is he going to say about our beliefs? How are his findings to be described? I see only two possibilities: (a)

He ascribes to us those belief contents which we ascribe to

98

Peter Bieri ourselves, i.e., he describes us as believing in tables, trees, and stars. If he starts like this, he must conclude that our beliefs are mostly false, since he knows in his omniscience that our beliefs are not prompted by objects of this kind.

(b)

He starts, not by using his knowledge about what belief contents we ascribe to ourselves, but by using his knowledge about our actual causal embedding in the world. In that case, he will, by using radical interpretation, construe our beliefs as largely true. But when he later compares the belief contents he ascribes to us with those we ascribe to ourselves, he will discover that we are mostly wrong in our self-ascriptions. We do not, as we think we do, believe in tables, trees, and stars; rather, we believe, as a n1atter of objective fact known to the omniscient interpreter, in whatever the actual causes of our beliefs are, e.g., in vats, liquids we are swimming in, electrical impulses, etc. 39

In the first case the omniscient interpreter moves from our notional world to the real world and finds us largely wrong. In the second case he moves in reverse direction and finds us also largely wrong, although in a different respect. So it is, as far as I can see, impossible for Davidson's omniscient interpreter entering this hypothetical world to find us largely correct. This is why I think that Davidson's argun1ent, as it stands, is not yet conclusive against the sceptic. Can it be made conclusive? Formally, Davidson has three options to react to our result. (1) He could say that his entire argun1ent is supposed to work only for non-sceptical worlds. Restricted in this way, the sceptic would consent to the argument, but it would have lost its anti-sceptical power. Presumably, Davidson would not wish to take this option. (2) He could opt for (a) above and admit that if his omniscient interpreter were to enter a sceptical world, he would find that n10st of our beliefs, as we take them to be, are false. But although this is formally an option, Davidson cannot take it because it would undermine his whole theory about belief, truth, and causation. (3) He can opt for (b) above and say that although not even an omniscient interpreter can detect anyone's beliefs to be, as a matter of objective fact, largely or totally· false, it could be that an intentional system is, quite generally, wrong about the contents of its beliefs - about what it is that they are about. I think Davidson will take this last option: if we were brains in a vat, our beliefs would not, as we would think, be beliefs about tables, trees, and stars; they would, rather, be beliefs about whatever would be their causes in that scenario. 40 We would, in other words, be radically wrong about our notional world's contents. Quite literally, we would be mistaken about what we believe and mean. But our beliefs would mostly be true and, since they would be coherent, they would constitute

Scepticism and Intentionality

99

knowledge about the world even if that world were, ex hypothesi, completely different fron1 the way we take it to be. Completed in this way, Davidson's argument is, I believe, conclusive against scepticism as defined by the thesis that we can never be sure we are tracking the world's facts. The argument proves that our beliefs are necessarily sensitive to the truth by proving that the intentional contents of our beliefs cannot, for conceptual reasons, be viewed as independent of the world's causal or nomic structure. The sceptic who played on the easiness in the transition from clain1 (B) to claim (C) has, by a kind of transcendental argument, been convicted of an incoherence. It is, however, important to reflect on how this was achieved. By identifying a belief's object with its cause Davidson had arrived at principle (F). The sceptic later tried to restrict this principle to a merely internal use by exploiting the difference between claim (D) and claim (E), i.e., the difference between identification and identity of beliefs which n1atches the difference between the causes we ascribe to our beliefs and our beliefs' objective or true causes. So Davidson had to close the gap between (D) and (E), and he achieved this by the device of the omniscient interpreter. This move could not fail because when an omniscient interpreter identifies a belief's cause, he, by definition, identifies its true cause, and when he then infers its intentional content, he cannot miss its true identity so that there is no longer a possible gap between identification and identity. But this strength in Davidson's argument is at the same time its weakness. For invoking the omniscient interpreter is equivalent to dropping the notion of interpretation. To say that our beliefs' identity depends on their true or objective causes as seen by the omniscient interpreter is simply to say that our beliefs' identity depends on their true or objective causes, period. It is just to affirm (E) which makes the identity of intentional contents depend on their objective causes no matter if there is any process of intentional interpretation going on or not. In my view this shows something in1portant both about Dennett's and Davidson's anti-sceptical arguments: as long as they are based either on the intentional strategy or the perspective of radical interpretation, they do not completely succeed against the sceptic. To make then1 fully successful, we need a perfectly objective principle like (E) which is not justified in ascriptional terms. And it seems fair to generalize this observation: a fully convincing transcendental argument against philosophical scepticism cannot be based on an ascriptional theory of intentionality. What such an argument presupposes is a perfectly objective theory of intentionality. Precisely such a theory is in the background of Fred Dretske's argument to which I now turn. Dretske's point of departure is his conviction that we need an account of how some of our internal states can have an intentional or semantic content. 41 His strategy in explaining

100

Peter Bieri

this is to exploit a basic notion of information. The notion he has in mind is basic in the sense that it applies both to natural and to intentional phenomena, and it is objective in the sense that, according to it, information is contained in nature long before systems with intentional states appear on stage. Dretske's project, then, is to explain how genuinely intentional states like beliefs can arise from naturally informational states possessed, e.g., by thermostats, voltmeters or tape recorders. The project, in other words, is to analyze in detail the difference between two types of information processing systen1s: the type that is capable of converting the information it receives into knowledge and the type that is not. 42 Dretske's story is long and complicated and has n10stly to do with different sorts of encoding information. It turns out that the essential step towards genuinely intentional states like beliefs involving meaning and concepts is the process of losing information (a process which Dretske calls digitalization). The details need not concern us here. What is essential in our context, however, is Dretske's account of a state's informational content. A certain state carries information about a certain source only in the case that this state and this source are connected by the conditional probability 1. 43 Thus, the informational content of a state is defined by the state's nomic relation to the world, and the paradigm case of such a relation is the case of a causal relation: the information a state carries is determined by this state's causes. 44 This holds for naturally informational states and carries over to genuinely intentional states. In both cases a state's inforn1ational content is directly dependent on the causal or nomic structure of the world, and from this it follows that there can, strictly speaking, be no such thing as misinformation about the world: the information a system gets about the world automatically reflects the true causes of its informational states. Now consider beliefs. Beliefs are informational states with semantic content involving concepts. I have already mentioned that building up such states involves a loss of information which is, roughly, equivalent to the process of abstraction involved in concept formation. The fact that genuine intentionality amounts to losing information does not, however, alter the point that intentional states are, as far as their remaining informational content is concerned, nomically or causally tied to the world, i.e., to the sources of information. It then follows that ... what concept we credit the subject with is a function of what information we believe was instrumental in the formation of the relevant internal structure (what semantic structure was actually developed) ... We need information to manufacture meaning (the concept) because information is required to crystallize a type of structure with the appropriate semantic content. 45

Scepticism and Intentionality

101

Now remember the intuition about knowledge described at the beginning of this essay and later exploited both by the sceptic and his opponents, particularly by Davidson: for our beliefs to constitute knowledge they must be lawfully or counterfactually tied to the world's facts. This intuition is picked up by Dretske in his definition of perceptual knowledge: K knows that s is F = K's belief that s is F is caused (or causally sustained) by the information that s is F. 46

Once we combine this idea (which is, in principle, accepted by the sceptic) with Dretske's account of intentional states, we quickly reach the conclusion that the sceptic's position epitomized by sceptical hypotheses is incoherent: This has a rather surprising epistemological consequence. If C is a primitive concept, one cannot believe that s is C unless one is (or was) equipped to know that things were C. For one cannot believe that s is C unless one has the concept C. One cannot acquire this concept unless one received, processed, and encoded information about the C-ness of things.... Since knowledge has been identified with information-produced belief, any organism capable of believing that something is C must have (or have had) the information-processing resources for knowing that things are (or were) C. Without this capability an organism could never have developed the concept C, could never (therefore) have beliefs to the effect that something was C. The classical formula (knowledge justified true belief) assures us that knowledge requires belief. It now seems, however, that some beliefs (those involving primitive concepts) require, if not knowledge, then the possibility of knowledge on the part of the system holding the beliefs. How damaging this consequence is to the traditional skeptical thesis will depend, of course, on just how \tvidespread are one's beliefs involving primitive concepts. But this much, surely, can be said: the view that nothing can be known is demonstrably false. Its demonstration requires (besides acceptance of the present view of belief and knowledge) only the premise that we have beliefs. As far as I know, n10st skeptics have not challenged this premise. 4 7

As Dretske says, his argument applies mainly to prin1itive concepts or beliefs - those acquired in perceptual situations through, e.g., training by ostensive definition. This is, however, by far enough for our discussion because it is precisely perceptual beliefs that are first attacked by sceptical hypotheses. The result of Dretske's argument, as should be clear, is exactly the same result we got by completing Davidson's argument: the sceptic's possible worlds cannot possibly be doxically identical to our world. Those possible worlds would, by conceptual necessity, contain beliefs totally different from the beliefs we attribute to ourselves. And the reason for this is in Dretske's case that the intentional states possessed by the inhabitants of sceptical worlds carry totally different information from the information our beliefs carry. If

102

Peter Bieri

we were brains in a vat, we could not fail to know about this strange world because our beliefs, as information-carrying states, would be true and because they would be caused or causally sustained by the information contained in that world. But our knowledge would be knowledge about things wildly different from the things we ordinarily take ourselves to know. So, once again, the sceptic is convicted of an incoherence because his fundamental and indispensable premise about the identity of notional worlds across possible worlds has been shown to be false. Dretske's argument, then, meets our second requirement for a convincing argument, and it does so by a perfectly objective account of intentionality not based, as in Dennett's and Davidson's case, on ascriptional considerations. For this very reason, it is not a verificationist argument and thus meets our first requirement as well. And froll1 my sparse allusions to the important role which the idea of informational loss plays in Dretske's approach we nlay guess that this approach is well equipped to account for the phenomenological fact that belief contents are neutral with respect to different causal origins. In fact, if it belongs to the nature of genuinely intentional states that they arise through loss of information (through digitalizing information), then it comes as no surprise that knowing a belief's content may be independent of knowing everything about its informational (causal) source including the causal channel through which it comes about. We saw that both Dennett and Davidson have an account of this phenomenological fact which is, however, relatively independent of their main anti-sceptical argument. It seems to nle a special virtue of Dretske's approach that it can meet all of our three requirenlents in one stroke. 48 Where does all of this leave us? Is the sceptic silenced forever? I think the debate with him is not played out yet, although I am not perfectly sure if the next and last stage of the game really makes sense. But in the interest of a deeper understanding of philosophical scepticism it ought to be at least sketched. Consider the following remark a sceptic might make at this point: 'I grant you that if it were true that the identity of beliefs is a function of their true causal origins, then I couldn't coherently uphold my claim that we can never be sure to have knowledge about the world. But how do you know it is true?' So the sceptic is pressing us for a justification of principle (E). We are ready for that. We may first say, echoing Dennett and Davidson: (G)

We have to tie beliefs to causes because that is the only way to identify them in intentional ascription.

As we saw, this will not do because of the sceptic's suggestion that the ascription of wrong causal origins may also suffice for the identification of beliefs. But Dretske gave us another card to play:

Scepticism and Intentionality

(H)

103

We have to tie the identity of beliefs to their true causes because that is the only way to understand what it is for a system to have beliefs.

In other words, we tell the sceptic that it is not enough to use the fact that we have beliefs. We need an explanation for this fact, and we tell him that in one way or another such an explanation will involve (E). The only way for the sceptic to dodge all the foregoing arguments would consist in severing the tie between the intentional contents of beliefs and their true causes. What we can tell him is that, for all we know, this move would n1ake it forever mysterious how systems which are, as a matter of fact, causally embedded in the world, could have such things as beliefs or intentional states generally. If he remains stubborn, we accuse the sceptic of holding the Mystery Theory of intentionality. Let us suppose, then, that the sceptic finally accepts that we do have knowledge about the world and that we can, furthermore, know that we do. Has he thereby given up completely? No, he has one move left. His last resort is the claim that even if we can know - and can know that we know - certain things about the world, we can never know what it is that we know. We can, in other words, know about the existence of our knowledge, but not about its content. We n1ay call this thesis second order scepticism. 49 How might it be justified? First, the sceptic will point out that the arguments so far have not proved more than the truth of the following conditional: (I) If we know what we believe, then we know the causal origins of our beliefs. (I) may also be expressed as a corollary of principle (F): (F~:')

If we can correctly identify the contents of our beliefs, then we can correctly identify their causes.

But, the sceptic points out, (F~:' ~:.)

(F~:')

has a counterpart:

If we have wrongly identified the causes of our beliefs, then we have wronghly identified their content.

And now remember that none of our arguments has ruled out that part of a sceptical hypothesis which claims that the origins of our beliefs might be totally different from the way we take them to be. All that was ruled out was the sceptic's further claim that in a hypothetical world like this our beliefs could still be the same. Showing that they could not blocks the sceptic's original reasoning which was: (K) Since the causal origins of our beliefs n1ight be different from

104

Peter Bieri

the way we take them to be, we might be wrong about the world. But blocking this reasoning is not yet blocking another one: (L) Since the causal origins of our beliefs might be different fronl the way we take them to be, we might be wrong about our beliefs. The point the sceptic is making in (L) is simply that it' cuts both ways if the identity of beliefs is so closely tied to their origins. If we start with knowledge of their identity, we may proceed to knowledge of their origins. But if we start with possible ignorance about their origins, then, by parity of reason, we end up with possible ignorance about their identity. And although there is a natural presumption in favour of the first procedure, the sceptic continues, we nlay very well be wrong in that presumption. For since, as we saw in the first part of this chapter, we necessarily lack a conlpletely objective understanding of the world in the sense that we cannot rule out alternative causal hypotheses about our beliefs, we also lack a completely objective understanding of the contents of our beliefs. For this reason we know that we get information about the world, but we can never be sure about what it is that we get because we can never be sure about what it is that we mean and believe. Given our arguments, against first order scepticism, the Cartesian inquirer is faced with a dilemma. Either he clainls to know exactly what it is that he means, believes and doubts; then, contrary to his assumption, he can - by principle (I) - very well know his beliefs' causal provenance. Or he doubts the ordinary causal stories about his beliefs; then he is forced to conclude that he cannot even be certain about what he means, believes and doubts - what propositions he is entertaining. 5 0 Second order scepticism arises when the Cartesian inquirer bites the bullet and opts for the second horn of this dilen1n1a. Taking this option means kicking away what was both our first and last foothold: our certainty about our notional world. Does this make sense, or it is just too weird to be intelligible? Frankly, I do not know what to say, and I want to indicate my reasons for this uncertainty by finally considering Hilary Putnam's argument to the effect that if we can consider whether it is true or false that we are brains in a vat, then it is false. Putnam's argument starts with a refutation of what he calls 'magical theories of reference'. The essence of such theories is the background assumption that representations - words, pictures or mental images - have an intrinsic power to represent something or to refer to something. This is to say that according to such theories the referents of representations are purely determined by their content, independently of their causal origins

Scepticism and Intentionality

105

and independently of the use made of them (in action) by the representing systen1. Representations, in other words, are by their inner nature tied to what they are representations of, independently of the causal setting surrounding them. You just look at a representation - either in the outer world or in your mind - you scrutinize its content, and then you know all there is to know about what the representation represents. Putnam's criticisn1 of this doctrine is identical neither to the ascriptional considerations we have encountered in Dennett and in Davidson, nor to Dretske's informational account of intentionality.51 But the upshot is the same . .. important conceptual truth that even a large and complex system of representations, both verbal and visual, still does not have an intrinsic, builtin, magical connection with what it represents - a connection independent of how it was caused and what the dispositions of the speaker or thinker are. And this is true whether the system of representations ... is physically realized - the words are written or spoken, and the pictures are physical pictures - or only realized in the mind. Thought words and mental pictures do not intrinsically represent what they are about. 52

Magical theories of reference are a variety of what I earlier called the Mystery Theory of intentionality. Any non-mysterious theory about intentional states and representations must acknowledge that the semantic content of an intentional state or a representation is detern1ined by its causal embedding in the world. 'Meanings just aren't in the head.'53 They are, rather, dependent on the causal interaction a system maintains with its environment. To explain meaning and intentionality we need, in other words, a principle like (E), and that, as we saw, leads us to the result that the content of beliefs or representations varies with variations in their causes. Suppose now that we are brains in a vat. Brains in this predicament live in a causal environment totally different from the one we take to be our actual environment (and would take to be the actual environment even if we were brains in a vat). It follows fron1 all we have said that the semantic content of their words or thoughts could not be identical or even similar tc? the content we ascribe to our words and thoughts under the assumption that we are not brains in a vat. Consider, for example, the thought 'There is a tree in front of me' which brains in a vat might entertain: The question we are interested in is this: do their verbalizations containing, say, the word 'tree' actually refer to trees? More generally: can they refer to external objects at all?54

As we might expect, Putnam answers in the negative, for

106

Peter Bieri

... there is no connection between the word 'tree' as used by these brains and actual trees ... In short, the brains in a vat are not thinking about real trees when they think 'there is a tree in front of me' because there is nothing by virtue of which their thought 'tree' represents actual trees ... when the brain in a vat (in the world where every sentient being is and always was a brain in a vat) thinks 'There is a tree in front of me', his thought does not refer to actual trees. 5 5

What, if not trees, are brains in a vat referring to when they use 'There is a tree in front of me' in outer speech (if there is any) or in inner monologue? Putnam's answer is as it should be, given our earlier discussion: the sentence (thought) refers to whatever are its causes. 56 He concludes - as Davidson's onlniscient interpreter might - that the brains in a vat are right in thinking 'There is a tree in front of me'. But in being right they are not thinking about what we take ourselves to be thinking about when we use this sentence. What they are thinking about may be described in either of two ways, depending on what we take to be the triggering cause for the occurrence in them of the thought 'There is a tree in front of me'. (a) They are referring to the mental image of a tree which is produced in them by the evil machinery. We will say this when we assume a linear causal chain leading from electrical impulses through the mental image to the thought. The final, triggering cause is here the mental image. (b) They are referring to the incoming electronic signals. This will be our description when we think about these signals as causing the nlental image and the thought independently of each other so that the mental inlage is epiphenomenal relative to the production of the thought. Given this result, Putnam lands his final blow on the sceptic: Although the people in that possible world can think and 'say' any words we can think and say, they cannot (I claim) refer to what we can refer to. In particular, they cannot think or say that they are brains in a vat (even by thinking 'we are brains in a vat') ... It follows that if their 'possible world' is really the actual one, and we are really brains in a vat, then what we now nlean by 'we are brains in a vat' is that we are brains in a vat in the image or something of that kind (if we mean anything at all). But part of the hypothesis that we are brains in a vat is that we aren't brains in a vat in the image (i.e. what we are 'hallucinating' isn't that we are brains in a vat). So, if we are brains in a vat, then the sentence 'We are brains in a vat' says something false (if it says anything). In short, if we are brains in a vat, then 'We are brains in a vat' is false. So it is (necessarily) false. 57

Once again we see an argument proposed which may be called a transcendental argument because it tries to convict the sceptic of an incoherence by probing into the preconditions for thinking about, representing and referring - the preconditions, in short, for intentional-

Scepticism and Intentionality

107

ity.58 I want to close this chapter by considering how a second order sceptic might react to it. First, a little rephrasing of Putnam's argument n1ay be helpful. It is clear by now that if we were brains in a vat, every possible thought we might entertain would refer to whatever it would be that prompted our thoughts in that possible world. Now, what holds for all possible thoughts holds for our hypothetical thought 'We might be brains in a vat'. The terms in this thought would not refer to what ordinary English speakers think they refer to. If we take the triggering causes of the brains' thoughts to be mental images, then the term 'vat', for example, would not refer to vats but to n1ental images of vats. So, as a matter of objective fact, we would not entertain the hypothesis that we are brains in a vat but, rather, the hypothesis that we are brains in mental images of vats. However weird this may sound, this would be the only thing we could mean by the sentence 'We are brains in a vat'. But the hypothesis that we are brains in n1ental images of vats is not the one with which we began. It is just false, measured against the original hypothesis. And it is not false just by accident in the sense that on other, better occasions we, as brains in a vat, might hit on the true thought 'We are brains in a vat' which would then be a thought not about mental images of vats but about vats. It would be impossible for us to hit on that true thought because our thinking would, as far as the tern1 'vat' is concerned, be entirely limited to thoughts about mental images of vats. Therefore, if we were brains in a vat, we would, every time we entertained this hypothesis, necessarily be thinking a false thought. The very fact that we entertained the thought would make it false because, whenever it would occur, it would be causally embedded in a way that would make it a thought about mental images of vats and therefore false. Thus the sceptical hypothesis is self-refuting: if we start out with its truth, we end up with its falsity. And this, we may add, holds for every sceptical hypothesis to the effect that our causal position in the world might be totally different from the way we take it to be. A sceptic may perhaps try to convict Putnam's argument of begging the question. He may point out that the argument lives on the distinction between what the original hypothesis says (that we might be brains in a vat) and what we would be thinking if we were indeed brains in a vat (that we might be brains in mental images of vats). But where does our knowledge about what the original hypothesis says come from?59 Must we not, in order to explain that knowledge, presuppose that we are not brains in a vat? How else can we describe ourselves as using 'vat' with the understanding that it does not refer to mental images of vats but to vats? The same point may be put differently: Putnam's proof presupposes that we can think the thought that we are brains in a vat

108

Peter Bieri

understood in the ordinary way. We need to understand it in the ordinary way in order to contrast it with the thought we then attribute to the brains in a vat. To have a point of view from which to see that the brains' thought is false we need to take up the position of contrasting what we mean by the thought with what they mean. But, ex hypothesi, only beings which are not brains in a vat can understand the thought 'We are brains in a vat' in the ordinary way. Thus Putnanl's argument, in order to work, nlust beg the question and assume that we are not brains in a vat. Put still differently: envisaging the possibility that we might be brains in a vat amounts to envisaging the possibility that we lnight be systematically deluded about what our thoughts refer to. But in order to inlagine that we might be so deluded we must be able to imagine the difference between appearance and reality in what we think. And how can we possibly inlagine what would only be our thoughts' appearance unless we are not brains in a vat while imagining this? So Putnam, in order to even understand his own argument (by understanding its original hypothesis), nlust presuppose that he is not a brain in a vat. And this is not shown by any reasoning external to his argument but is entailed by this very argument itself. But Putnam cannot of course, just assume that he is not a brain in a vat, for that would, firstly, make his whole argument superfluous, and, secondly, it might just be false. I think the sceptic may have a point here, but it is not the point he thinks he has. For his escape route is not an escape route from Putnam's argument. What the sceptic is trying to do is to put this argument as a whole into the scope of the sceptical hypothesis. This, I think, he can legitimately do. The point, however, is that Putnam's argument keeps working even within that scope. Suppose we were brains in a vat arguing that the hypothesis that we are brains in a vat cannot be coherently entertained. What would we be talking about? We would, as the sceptic has rightly pointed out, need a distinction between the original hypothesis supposed to be true and a description of the hypothetical brains' thought proved to be necessarily false. Now, let us grant the sceptic (as I think we must) that this needed distinction cannot be the distinction between the thought available to a being which is not a brain in a vat and the thought available to a being which is. It has to be a distinction between two thoughts both available to brains in a vat. What would it be? Well, both thoughts would have to be the thoughts not about vats but about mental images of vats. The thoughts, therefore, would have to differ in what kind of mental images they were about. Suppose the notional world of the brains in a vat contained just these two sorts of inlages: lively and faded. In the eyes of the omniscient interpreter our rehearsing of Putnam's argument would then go like this (it now gets definitely mind-boggling): 'If we were brains in lively nlental images of vats, then the only thing we could think by

Scepticism and Intentionality

109

"we are brains in lively mental in1ages of vats" would be that we are brains in faded n1ental images of vats. But measured against the original hypothesis that we are brains in lively mental images of vats, this thought would just be false and necessarily so. Therefore, we· can't coherently entertain the idea that we n1ight be brains in lively mental images of vats.' This argument is as conclusive as Putnam's argument, and putting Putnam's argument as a whole into the scope of a sceptical hypothesis will therefore not help the sceptic to escape it. If he cannot escape Putnam's argument, this must not necessarily mean that the sceptic is forced to give up completely. He will now concede this much: if we were brains in a vat, we could not coherently think we were. Sceptical hypotheses are, quite generally, not coherently entertainable. It does not follow from this that they could not be true. This would only follow if they contained a logical contradiction. But when we call sceptical hypotheses 'self-refuting' we are not saying that they are self-contradictory in the logical sense. We just say that they involve a pragmatic contradiction in the sense that the fact of their being entertained makes them false. So all Putnam has proved is that if we were brains in a vat we could not find out that we were. In the first part of this chapter I explained why the possible truth of a ,sceptical hypothesis is not en1pirically accessible: such hypotheses are built to neutralize all experiential evidence. Now it has turned out that such hypotheses are epistemically inaccessible even in the sense-that they cannot coherently be entertained. But, the sceptic insists, all of this does not positively prove that they could not be true and that we 'are not brains in a vat. The sceptic is right in this, I believe, and he has a plausible comment on his present position. 'What Putnam's argument shows', he will say, 'is simply that I can't express my scepticisn1 by hypotheses varying our causal position in the world. I, conclude, not that my scepticism is unjustified or false, but that we are even worse off than I thought. We lack the necessary concepts to express what may very well be true, and our causal circumstances make it in1possible for us to acquire them. 'This is', he will add, 'just an aspect of what I have been saying all along, expressing it clumsily by incoherent hypotheses. We can never reach a completely objective understanding of the world and our knowledge of it. '60 Putting Putnam's argument as a whole into the scope of a sceptical hypothesis was an exercise in second order scepticism because it amounted to assuming that we might be systematically wrong about the ordinary meaning of our words and the ordinary content of our beliefs and thoughts or, to put it somewhat exotically, that there n1ight be no ordinary meaning and ordinary belief. To complete this exercise, consider the following variant on Putnam's argument: 'Brains in a vat

110

Peter Bieri

could have only very pale thoughts about a very dreary environment. Our thoughts, on the contrary, are rich and sophisticated thoughts about a very colourful environment. Since brains in a vat couldn't possibly do our thinking, and since we know that we are doing our thinking, we can very well know that we are not brains in a vat.' This argument is conclusive - given either principle (I) or (p::-) - just in the case it is true that we do know our thinking. 61 Well, do we? The second order sceptic is prepared to doubt it. Can he thereby make sense? Should we dismiss his suggestion as weird fantasy and, therefore, as a reductio ad absurdum of scepticism? Or is it perhaps the truth? Well, in an obvious and trivial sense we do, of course, know our thinking. 62 We know, for example, what counts as thinking as opposed to, say, pure association. And we know what we are thinking about in the sense that we can con1ment and expand on our thought's topics. But this is, of course, not what the second order sceptic has in mind. He is asking us if we can ever be sure that we are not, as a matter of objective fact known only to the omniscient interpreter, thinking about radically different topics hidden to us forever. So, appealing to the familiar phenomenology of our thinking wlll not help. And neither will introspection help. We have learned from Putnam that just staring at our mind's contents will tell us nothing whatsoever about the true referents of our thoughts and beliefs. If the information we get from the world were totally different from the way we take it to be, all phenomenological and introspective facts would still be exactly the same. So, in asking ourselves if we find the second order sceptic's suggestion intelligible or not, we must not measure it against those facts. Is there any other way to arrive at a judgement? I don't know. One day I seem to understand the sceptical suggestion and the next one I don't. Would it make a difference? No, scepticisn1 never does.

NOTES 1

Concerning the first intuition about epistemic justification there exists meanwhile a vast literature. See, for example, Pappas and Swain, 1978 and Pappas, 1979. A good overview and analysis of the past decade's work is provided in Shope, 1983. Key texts about the second intuition are Goldman, 1967 and 1976, Dretske, 1971 and Nozick, 1981. See also Armstrong 1973. 'Tracking' is Robert Nozick's ternl in Nozick, 1981, p.

178. 2

This is, of course, Descartes' hypothesis in the First Meditation.

3 This hypothesis is discussed in Putnam, 1981, ch. 1. 4 Robert Nozick's variant in Nozick, 1981, ch. 3. 5 This is Fred Dretske's term in Dretske, 1981b, p. 368. 6 Here I am drawing on Bennett, 1979, p. 47.

Scepticism and Intentionality

111

7 See Bennett, 1979, pp. 48-9. 8 I have in n1ind Rorty, 1972 and Putnam, 1978, pp. 123-40. 9 Classical papers on this point are Dretske, 1970 and 1981 b; Goldman, 1976. See also Nozick, 1981, ch. 3. The idea is discussed in Stine, 1976. 10 Dretske's example in Dretske, 1981b, p. 375. 11 Dretske's definition in Dretske, 1981b, p. 367. 12 Cf. Barry Stroud's example of someone announcing that there are no physicians in the city of New York. It turns out later that what he means by 'physician' is a person who has a medical degree and can cure any conceivable illness in less than two minutes. Stroud, 1984b, p. 40. 13 This point is discussed at length in Stroud, 1984b, ch. 2. 14 In the following I am particularly indebted to Thomas Nagel's work. See Nagel, 1979, pp. 27, 196-213, and Nagel, 1986, ch. V,1. Furthermore I have learnt a great deal from Stroud, 1984b, chs 1, 2 and 7. Cf. Clarke, 1972 who, however, rejects the idea in the end. 15 This is W.V. Quine's objection in Quine, 1975 and 1981. 16 See on this point Stroud, 1984b, ch. 6. 17 In Nozick, 1981, p. 202. 18 One belief which could not be false is the belief 'I exist' - however the entity referred to by 'I' would have to be described. 19 In Dennett, 1982, p. 38. Actually, I am not sure that Dennett has coined the term, but he has, in any case, given it a prominent meaning. 20 In most of what follows I am much indebted to Fred Dretske's analyses in Dretske, 1981a, particularly Part III. Claim (A) is taken from p. 188 of his book. 21 See Dretske 1981a, p. 188. 'Plasticity' is Dretske's term. Compare Dretske, 1985. 22 See Dennett, 1978, pp. 3-22 and Dennett, 1981b. The difference between the two definitions I report reflects a deep and complicated difference between an earlier and a later phase in Dennett's theory. This difference need not, however, concern us here. I have tried to trace and elucidate it in Bieri, 1987b. 23 Dennett 1978, p. 17 (my italics). Con1pare Dennett, 1981b, p. 59: 'An implication of the intentional strategy ... is that true believers mainly believe truths.' 24 See, for example, Campbell, 1974 as well as the essays in Wuketits, 1984. 25 I defend this claim in greater detail in Bieri, 1987a. 26 The following is based on my analysis in Bieri, 1987b. 27 In Dennett 1981a, pp. 47-8. 28 Particularly in Dennett 1981a, pp. 68-71. The most poignant sentence is: 'The completion of the semantic interpretation of your beliefs, fixing the referents of your beliefs, requires . . . facts about your actual embedding in the world' (p. 71). The reader may notice that there is a certain tension between this claim and the idea that beliefs are abstract states. I do not at present know how to relieve it. Should it remain unrelieved, we might say about Dennett's anti-sceptical argument that it can only fulfil either the second or the third condition, but not both. 29 In Davidson, 1983. Cf. Davidson, 1984, essays 9 and 13.

112 30 31 32 33

34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41

42 43

44

45 46 47 48

Peter Bieri Davidson, 1983, p. 434. Davidson, 1983, pp. 434-5 (my italics). Davidson, 1983, p. 436 (my italics). This is true despite the fact that Davidson defends a coherence theory of truth and knowledge. 'Coherence' is, of course, an epistemic notion, and it may, therefore, seem as if Davidson's argument were patently verificationist. The point of his approach, however, is that coherence is a guide to truth because beliefs are, by their nature, veridical. It is not that they are true because they cohere. Rather, their coherence makes for knowledge because they can be shown to be true on independent, nonepistemic grounds. Davidson, 1983, p. 435 (my italics). This is a slight overstatement because Davidson's whole approach assumes that we can clearly distinguish between objects and causal channels. Well, can we? Why are our beliefs beliefs about tables and doorbells and not about the members of the causal chains that make us see and hear them, although all of these are equally causes of our beliefs? The only answer I know of is not Davidson's but Dretske's in Dretske, 1981a, pp. 155-68. Davidson, 1983, p. 435. Ibid. (my italics). Ibid., p. 437 (my italics). In deciding what to say here we would, once more, need the distinction between objects and causal channels. See note 35. In fact, I have heard Davidson say this in a discussion of his argument. In this conviction Dretske stands in sharp contrast to Dennett who, as we saw (p. 92), conceives of intentional states as abstract states and not as concrete inner states. Dretske, 1981a, p. 172. Dretske, 1981a, p. 65. I neglect Dretske's account of the role played by what the receiver of information already knows about the possibilities that exist at the source. Dretske is careful to distinguish between the informational relation itself and the causal relations on which it depends in most (but not all) cases: Dretske, 1981a, pp. 26-39. I shall neglect this difference for brevity's sake. The anti-sceptical thrust of Dretske's account is not thereby affected. Dretske, 1981a, pp. 195, 194. Ibid., p. 86. Ibid., p. 229 (next-to-last italics mine). In all my praise of Dretske's approach I ought not to conceal its crucial difficulty in explaining how false belief is possible. How can there be misinterpretation of the world if there is no misinformation about the world? This is a complicated issue which I cannot treat here. Jerry Fodor has forcefully brought out the difficulty in Fodor, 1984; Dretske's most recent reaction is Dretske, 1985. Viewed in our context, there seems, at first sight, to exist a bad dilemma for Dretske. Either he succeeds against scepticism; then he cannot explain false belief. Or he allows for intentional content without information (in his sense); then the doors to scepticism seem to be wide open again. I do not think this dilemma must remain.

Scepticism and Intentionality

49

50 51 52 53 54

55

56 57 58

59

60 61 62

113

The problem is common to all causal theories of intentionality. It can, I think, be overcome by taking out a limited loan on functionalism. This term is sometimes used for the claim that, although we may have knowledge, we can never know that we do. According to my usage, this would still be first order scepticism. Nothing, of course, hinges upon this terminological point. There is a similar reflection in Dennett, 1982, p. 18. It is, rather, a criticism which owes a lot to Ryle and Wittgenstein. Putnam, 1981, p. 5. Ibid., p. 19. Compare Putnam, 1975, pp. 219-26. Ibid., p. 12. I quote the last sentence because, although it is redundant, it raises (in its bracketed qualification) the question of what to say about a brain in a vat which was formerly implanted in a human body. Would this brain be capable of doing what the brains Putnam is discussing are not capable of doing, namely referring to actual trees? It would depend, I think, on how much (if anything) in terms of meaning or representational content can be stored or upheld in a brain once it is disconnected from its former causal input. I have learned here from discussions with Ralf Stoecker. Putnam, 1981, p. 14. Ibid., pp. 8, 15. '... my procedure has a close relation to what Kant called a "transcendental" investigation; for it is an investigation ... of the preconditions of reference and hence of thought - preconditions built in to the nature of our minds themselves, though not (as Kant hoped) wholly independent of empirical assumptions.' Putnam, 1981, p. 16. Putnam (in the bracketed remark of the last quotation) seems to think it stems from the fact that if we were hallucinating, the content of our hallucination would not be that we are brains in a vat. I am puzzled by his remark because neither would the fact that we would be hallucinating, not about brains and vats, but about tables and trees, give us what we need to understand the original hypothesis, nor would our hallucination, even if it were about our being brains in a vat, prevent us from having the thought that we are - although in that case it would, of course, be no longer a sceptical thought. Thomas Nagel argues in this way in Nagel, 1968, ch. V,l. I suppose Barry Stroud would agree. See n. 14. Actually, I think that in the last analysis this argument has more antisceptical power than Putnam's own argument. I had some help here from Fred Dretske (in conversation).

Part III

Geometry and Idealism

6

Kant on the Modalities of Space Terry Greenwood

Our ordinary empirical judgements include the judgements we make about the size, shape, and location of objects - judgements we ordinarily hold to be true or false in virtue of facts about objects in space which are independent of facts about minds and their perceptual and intellectual capacities. According to Kant, however, if we consider not the empirical grounds on which any knowledge claim is made, but the conditions of our making such claims at all, we find that one such condition is this: 'The representation of space cannot . . . be empirically obtained from the relations of outer appearance. On the contrary, this outer experience is itself possible at all only through this representation' (B38) 1. A minimal claim that Kant seems to be making here is that we can represent something as an object (something in 'outer experience') only if it is represented as being in space. Alternatively, whenever son1ething is represented as an object, it is necessarily represented as being in space. I shall call this the Spatiality Condition (SC). SC has seemed to a nun1ber of philosophers the most plausible of Kant's theses about space. Interpreted linguistically, or quasi-linguistically, as a thesis about our grasp of the n1eaning of 'sortals' or 'count nouns' in the category of material objects, or as a thesis about the associated concepts, it may be held to embody an important truth about the essential role that spatial notions play, specifically, the notion of place or location in the identification and re-identification of objects. That is, given that our grasp of what an x is, in the category of material objects, involves a grasp both of conditions of identification ('which x?') and of identity ('same x?'), SC has been taken to affirm that spatial notions are (together of course with temporal notions) fundamental to the satisfaction of both sorts of condition. The ground for this claim would be this. Our concepts of material objects are sortal concepts of things distinct from ourselves and our states of consciousness. If to think of objects in this way is to think of them as 'object!Y~~~h~n_~_

118

Terry Greenwood

condition of our applying such concepts in experience is that the criteria of their application should n1ake reference to spatial notions, for it is only by the employment of such notions, specifically the notion of location, that anything encountered in experience can be registered as objective. We necessarily represent the objects we encounter spatially, because only in that way can we represent them as objects, given to outer sense and independent of anyone person's experience of them. We should distinguish SC, so construed, from a claim which is not in fact germane to the Transcendental Aesthetic, namely, that it is necessary that our representations should be of something objective. That prominent theme of the Transcendental Analytic is not discussed here. (Those who say the purpose of transcendental arguments is to refute certain~forms of scepticism are obviously thinking of the Analytic, if they are thinking of Kant at all. They perhaps overlook the fact that scepticism is not an issue in the Aesthetic where transcendental arguments first appear.) The claim we are now considering is rather that, assuming our representations are of something objective, of objects given to outer sense, SC states a truth about what must hold of these representations if they are to be of son1ething objective. The Spatiality Condition gets little support from the arguments, such as they are, of points 1 and 2 of the Metaphysical Exposition of the Concept of Space. Point 1 of that Exposition concludes from the truth of SC, grounded in the way indicated, that the representation of space cannot be empirically obtained fron1 the representation of objects, a claim I shall call the A Priority Thesis (APT). Kant clearly thinks that APT is an obvious consequence of SC, or perhaps even just another way of affirn1ing SC: if the having of a representation of space is a necessary condition of the possibility of experiencing objects, then the representation of space cannot be empirically derived from that experience of objects in space. But on any normal construal of empiricist claims about concept acquisition, it is not at all obvious. Given the truth of SC, it might be thought an extremely plausible contention that we do acquire the concept of space, or spatial concepts, empirically. The fact that in any possible world hun1an representation of objects is spatial representation, is perfectly compatible with the claim that in the actual world, humans acquire the concept of space, or spatial concepts, by observing objects in spatial relations to each other. This is not called in question by the ground on which SC is held to be true: that is, that our sortal concepts in the category of material objects are such that we could not apply them unless a condition of their application was that objects to which they applied were spatial objects - their being such being what gives content to the notion of an (independent) object. A logical condition on the applicability of certain concepts must not be confused with a thesis about how these concepts are acquired. Suppose,

Kant on the Modalities of Space

119

for example, what seems possible, that an infant has to learn to see things three-dimensionally, and also that it is part of our ordinary concept of space that being three-dimensional is an essential property of it. The truth of SC is perfectly compatible with that empirical truth about babies. Kant's point, as we have so far construed it, would have the consequence that unless or until the infant acquires that ability it will not have a full conception of an independent world of material objects. Suppose, now, we reformulated APT as claiming that the representation of space cannot be acquired from the representation of objects. That reforn1ulation is ambiguous. It could be construed not as making a point against en1piricist abstractionism, but as affirming an antireductionist thesis about the concept of space - that it cannot be 'reduced' to one of co-existing objects standing in certain (contingent) relations to one another. This Anti-Reductionist Thesis (ART) is clearly present as an ingredient in Kant's arguments, for example, in point 2 of the Metaphysical Exposition. Point 2 seems to argue for the truth of SC and APT on the grounds of ART. ART is, of course, at the centre of disputes between absolutists and relationists on the nature of space. The absolutist typically maintains, and the relationist typically denies, that space is in some sense independent of objects; the problem is to clarify the relevant notion of independence. On any acceptable view of space, we have to be able to draw a distinction between places (locations) and their occupants, for we must allow the san1e places to be occupiable at different times by different objects. The relationist, if his view is to be at all credible, must recognize that degree of independence. The differences between the absolutist and the relationist arise over what this general distinction may be taken to imply. Suppose we say this: the relationist holds, and the absolutist denies, that no sense can be made of the notion of location or place except in terms of a frame of reference supplied by the occupants of (some of) these locations. If space is then thought of as the sum of these point-locations, then the relationist is affirming and the absolutist denying the conceptual or logical dependence of the concept of space on that of material objects. This claim of conceptual dependence must, if the relationist is to observe the general distinction between place and its occupants, allow for the ontological independence of space at least in this sense: talk of empty places (or a void) must be construed in tern1S of the possibility of placing objects relative to some frame of reference of objects. This is, indeed, how Leibniz seems to allow for the possibility if not the actuality of empty space. At the extreme, the notion of a complete void would have to be construed in terms of some merely hypothetical framework of objects. Kant clearly rejects such an account as incoherent. In point 2 the fact

120

Terry Greenwood

that we can think of space as empty of objects seems to be offered as a crucial point against the relationist view of space. The relationist, Kant seems to be implying, cannot consistently meet the general requirement of any plausible view of space and its relation to objects, given the relationist's view of the conceptual dependency of the concept of space on the concept of objects. It is at least questionable whether Kant is right on this point, but waiving arguments on either side, this much at least seems clear. To maintain SC, which implies the dependency of our concepts of objects on the concept of space, Kant must refute the relationist's claim that the reverse dependency holds, since that view is incompatible with SC as I have been construing it. That view seems clearly incompatible with the view that the concept of spatial location is derivative from that of a framework of objects standing in certain (contingent) relations. The refutation consists in pointing out that the relationship cannot consistently make sense of the notion of the void, or empty space - at least, it does so on one charitable reading of Kant's assertion that 'we can never represent to ourselves the absence of space [in thinking of objects]' (B38-9). Even if Kant is right, and the relationist wrong, on this, nothing follows from it about the truth of APT. That is, even if SC implies the falsity of ART, APT may still be false. The most ART could establish is the direction of determination between locations in space and its occupants - the relative priority, as Kant insists, of locations to the spatial ordering of objects, rather than the converse, as the relationists maintain. But that argument no more establishes the a priori, nonempirical nature of the representation of space than the rejection of an operational definition of heat establishes the a priori nature of its representation. The only sense in which the representation of space may be said to be a priori (if Kant is right) is that in which it may be said to be an a priori condition on the representation of objects, that is, the sense in which SC states a necessary truth. It is not excluded that in some Pickwickian sense of empirical a distinction might be drawn between spatial concepts and others involved in our concept of objects. Such would be the distinction of a priori from empirical in which the representations of 'extension and figure' are designated a priori and 'what belongs to sensation, impenetrability, hardness, colour etc.' are designated 'enlpirical' (B35). In so far as this is not an obscure restatement of SC itself, distinguishing a special role for space in our experience as contrasted with these other notions, this use of the terms 'a priori' and 'empirical' (or 'a posteriori') is sustained neither by SC and its grounding, nor by ART. In context it seems to be associated rather with an attempted diagnosis of the source of necessities such as SC, about which I say more later. All that we so far have is SC - an

Kant on the Modalities of Space

121

interesting claim as yet unsupported by any argument in the Transcendental Aesthetic. SC was introduced as a claim about our experience of objects of the kind about which we make ordinary empirical knowledge claims. What it says about those objects is that our representation of them is subject to a certain condition - that we should represent them as being in space. But though SC, if true, brings about a change in how we must think about at least SOill_e spatial properties of objects (those involved in criteria of identity and identification) as contrasted with other properties of objects such as colour and smell, it does not call in question the correctness of attributing spatial properties to these objects at all. On the contrary, the plausibility of SC rested precisely on construing it as affirming that such attributions to objects were partly constitutive of their character as objects of 'outer sense'. Moreover, it seems to be perfectly compatible with SC that objects may have spatial properties irrespective of our attribution of such properties to them. SC seems neither to sustain nor to be sustained by, any characteristically idealist thesis about the dependence of objects on human cognition. It may however be objected that this is to ignore the restriction in scope of SC to a specifically human kind of experience or sensibility. That is to say, whether or not Strawson is correct in hypothesizing a recognizably hun1an kind of experience (a purely auditory one whose objects are sound particulars) for which SC does not hold, Kant certainly recognizes the possibility of a non-hun1an kind of experience for which SC would be false. In such a kind of experience, not merely would space not play the special role it has in our experience, it would play no role at all: the representations in that kind of experience would be non-spatial. It is difficult to determine from Kant's scattered remarks what significance is to be attached to this possibility. Kant emphasizes that we can have no conception of what it would be like to have a non-spatial mode of intuition - it remains a bare logical possibility. It appears to be excluded that in some possible world we, with our special type of intuition should be more like that other kind (or those kinds) of beings than we are. The necessity of SC is de re: of all humans, h, and objects, 0, given to their outer sense, it is necessarily true that ifh represents 0, then h represents 0 spatially. And this is presumably true of all possible humans and objects of their cognition. There remains the embarrassing question what, in any possible world, would license a particular substitution for 'h': it is by no means clear that Kant can, or would even want to, avoid the answer that the things in the range of 'h', in any possible world, are just those sorts of creature of whom SC and similar necessities are true, an instance of a peculiarly Kantian difficulty that affects all his statements about the necessary conditions

122

Terry Greenwood

of experience. It may be worth noting, however, that on this reading of Kant, it is a mistake to cite, as is sometin1es done, the possibility of non-human types of cognition (or, as we might also and more generally say, types of cognition possessed by non-synthesizers) as a reason for saying that necessities like SC are not logical necessities. At least, it is if 'necessity' is construed as 'truth in all possible worlds'. The possible existence of non-synthesizers is irrelevant to the necessity of SC, if, as I assume is the case, Kant wishes to deny that in some possible world we would be more like non-synthesizers than we are in the actual world. Our problen1 now is to determine what role, if any, the claim that what is a necessity for hun1an cognition may not be for other types of cognition plays in the idealist twist Kant gives to his argument. Kant clearly wants to maintain not merely SC but what I shall call the Representation Thesis (RT): spatial properties can be ascribed to objects only qua represented by us (synthesizers). One possibility here is that Kant sees RT as following from the fact that SC is restricted in scope to synthesizers by a kind of crude relativistic argument of a familiar kind. If preference cannot be given to one possible mode of representing reality over another, since there are no grounds for thinking one better represents that reality than another, then neither can be said to represent that reality. In particular, we cannot attribute spatial properties to objects as they really are. On this suggestion, the necessity of SC is independent of the idealist elen1ent: that element plays no role in the explanation of SC and similar necessities. Rather, the idealist element results from the relativistic argument to which not the necessity of SC but the restriction in its scope is alone relevant. Closer to Kant's intention is a more interesting possibility: the grounding of the necessity of SC is such as to require the truth of RT, and hence such as to demand that we allow for the possibility of nonspatial modes of cognition of objects (or reality). On that view, SC is only a necessity because it is restricted to a human type of cognition, to synthesizers - the necessity must be grounded in the nature of a specifically human mode of experiencing. Since the grounding cannot rest in any merely biological or physical facts about human n10des of cognition, we must appeal, presumably, to other necessities which, in the Critique of Pure Reason, are treated separately from the theses of the Transcendental Aesthetic - principally, Kant's theses about the unity of apperception and what is required for the conceptualization of experience (the unity of experience and the experience of unity). Notoriously, this element of buck-passing in Kant's arguments about the necessities of experience raises the question whether we are dealing with categorical or conditional necessities: does p besides being a condition on the possibility of q, itself state a necessary truth? Is the possibility of p itself dependent on a further r about which a similar

Kant on the Modalities of Space

123

question arises? And so on. If the buck stops in some proposition or set of propositions, are those propositions simply necessary, for example, the thesis of the transcendental unity of apperception? These questions are beyond the scope of this discussion. More immediately relevant is this: even if we were clear what was meant by saying that the necessity of SC was to be accounted for in terms of the involvement of some specifically human mode of cognition (it is only we, as synthesizers with a serial mode of organizing experience in time, who have to represent things in this way) it is still not clear why our having to represent things in a certain way is incompatible with that being the way things are. This issue is clearly crucial to the question whether or not such (alleged) necessities as SC rest on transcendental idealist claims. Kant's Copernican Revolution is generally thought to consist in the affirmation that necessities like SC can only be explained on the assumption that 'objects must conform to knowledge'. That is, if the nature of what is known were not, at least in certain very general respects, dependent on our mode of knowing it, there could be no necessary truths like SC. Recently Allison has expressed the general view in this way: Whatever is necessary for the representation or experience of something as an object, that is, whatever is required for the recognition or picking out of what is 'objective' in our experience, must reflect the cognitive structure of the mind (its manner of representing) rather than the nature of the object as it is in itself. 2

On this view, we must see the implication of RT by SC as merely an application of this general principle which I shall call the Principle of Transcendental Idealism (PTI). Of this principle Allison remarks that it is 'implicit in the Critique as a whole, but is nowhere made fully explicit' - a somewhat baffling remark about a work largely devoted to establishing the doctrine of Transcendental Idealism. But then, on Allison's view, PTI is rather obviously true, given that there are necessities like SC: the denial of PTI involves a straightforward contradiction. No one can consistently hold that there are conditions such as SC, without embracing whatever idealism is involved in embracing RT. Indeed, Allison sometimes writes as though the doctrine that there are conditions such as SC just is the doctrine of Transcendental Idealism. 3 That, of course, will seem paradoxical to philosophers who, perhaps like Strawson, hold that knowledge is subject to such conditions as SC but emphatically reject the doctrine of Transcendental Idealism. The paradox is resolved by noting that it is PTI, the allegedly never explicitly stated principle, which embodies the transcendental idealist claim, the one Strawson, for example, rejects, and the denial of which

124

Terry Greenwood

is said to involve a contradiction. The argument for the contradiction is that if PTI is denied then it must be assumed that 'the mind can sonlehow have access to an object (through sensible or intellectual intuition) independently of the very elements that have been stipulated to be the condition of the possibility of doing this in the first place.'4 As applied to the implication of RT by SC, the reductio argunlent would then be this. Assunle SC and the denial of RT. Then, if an object 0 is represented as spatial, as it must be by SC, spatiality would still be representable as a property 0 has apart from any representation of 0, that is, as 0 is in itself. But to be able to represent a property of 0 as it is in itself is to be able to represent a property of 0 apart from any conditions on representing 0, and this is impossible, given that there are such conditions (SC for one). So we must reject the denial of RT, given the truth of SC, and PTI stands, at least as applied to the implication of RT by SC. The argument is fallacious. To be able to represent a property of 0 is, or as it is in itself is to be able to represent a property of 0 as would be, apart from such a representation, and hence, of course, as it is apart from any conditions on such a representation. But this is not at all the same thing as to represent that property apart from any condition on representing 0, which, given there are such conditions, is obviously impossible. Nothing, however, follows from that impossibility about the first thing: the representability or non-representability of properties of 0 as it is in itself. To assume that it does is to presuppose the very principle, PTI, which the reductio argument was supposed to establish. It may be objected that this is to misinterpret the nature of the problem, as Kant must see it, for the (transcendental) realist. The reason why, in representing objects as spatial, we cannot be representing them as they really are in thenlselves is just that if we were, the nature of our representations would, in that respect at least, be empirically determined by the nature of the object and its properties, and that is incompatible with the a priori status of SC as a necessary truth.

°

There is a contradiction involved in the assun1ption that the representation of something that is supposed to function as a condition of the possibility of the experience of objects can have its source in the experience of those objects ... [I]t entails that experience be possible apart from son1ething that is stipulated to be a condition of its possibility.5

In so far as this does not commit the fallacy just pointed out, the point must be the one just made: it is incompatible with spatiality being a condition on the representability of objects that that representation should be empirically derived from the experience of those objects. Earlier, I suggested that this is not so: the a priori status of SC is

Kant on the Modalities of Space

125

compatible with our acquiring notions of space from experience of objects in space. The contrary supposition seems to rest either on son1e confusion of the a priori necessity of a principle (SC) with the a priori (non-empirically derived) status of concepts with which it deals; or, perhaps, on son1e misleading picture of the a priori as in some sense literally prior to sensing, a picture which gets no support from the nature of the claim made by SC as I have construed it, and as it is now generally construed (even by Allison). Allison, however, does not think that the reductio argument is the 'real' argun1ent for transcendental idealism, obviously true though he believes what I am calling PTI to be. The real argument, or at least a crucial step in it, is from the result of the Metaphysical Exposition, that the representation of space is an a priori intuition, to the conclusion that space itself is a form of sensibility, where to say that space is a form of sensibility means something like: space is a 'form or formal feature of objects of intuition (the intuited) that pertains to these objects only in virtue of the constitution of the n1ind (its form of intuiting).'6 That conclusion is supposed to be established by eliminating the only possible rivals to it - the relationist and absolutist views of space - as being inconsistent with the result of the Metaphysical Exposition. The relationist vievv is (mistakenly) taken to be disposed of by the argument of that Exposition itself. That leaves the absolutist view: is this actually inconsistent with the clain1 that the representation of space is an a priori intuition, or, alternatively, and minimally, with the representation of space being an 'epistemic condition'? Allison thinks it is, but his argument appeals directly to the alleged inconsistency involved in the denial of PTI. 7 That is, the absolutist view is con1n1itted to holding the realist view that the representation of space is 'derived from our experience of things as they are in themselves' and such a derivation is then held to be inconsistent with viewing the representation of space as an epistemic condition. I have claimed that it is not. The rejection of the absolutist view, then, is based on acceptance of PTI, and cannot therefore make th~ transcendental idealist conclusion more likely rather it presupposes its truth. We have so far found no reason to accept PTI, that is, Kant's clain1 that acceptance of SC requires that we embrace his version of idealism. In so far as SC retains its plausibility even when RT is rejected, there is no reason to think that argun1ents about the 'necessary presuppositions of experience' depend on idealist assumptions, at least so far as the role of spatial attributions in experience is concerned. Finding no reason to accept RT as a necessary consequence of SC, there is no compulsion in speaking about the necessary presuppositions of experience of objects to embrace a distinction between objects as appearances and objects as things in themselves. The claim of SC to state a necessary truth does

126

Terry Greenwood

not rest on any Copernican base. We can, indeed, fall back on the relativistic argument as a reason for reinstating the distinction, but that argument clearly yields no account of the necessity of SC, only its restriction to a synthesizing mode of experiencing. A transcendental condition on our having knowledge (experience) of a certain sort is a condition such that, unless it obtained, knowledge (experience) of that sort would not be possible for us. Kant has a more restricted use of the term 'transcendental' than this: the knowledge for which he is seeking such conditions is characterized as synthetic a priori. SC is a transcendental condition in both senses: it lays down a condition both on our possessing knowledge of objects (Metaphysical Exposition), and on our possessing knowledge of synthetic a priori truths in geometry (Transcendental Exposition). I have been claiming that it is possible to accept SC as a transcendental condition in the less restrictive sense without accepting RT (and, of course, PTI). That is, we can affirm the existence of at least one transcendental condition without affirming the truth of idealism. There are grounds for thinking that we must, if we are at all interested in laying down transcendental conditions on knowledge. Consider first this transition from, a non-modal to a modal statement about the role of spatial properties or relations in our experience - a move, as we n1ight characterize it, from a general observation that we represent empirical objects 'as outside us and all without exception in space' (B37) to the claim that 'outer experience is itself possible at all only through that representation [of space]' (B38). More schematically, the n10ve is from the unstartling claim 'for all hand 0, if h represents o then h represents 0 spatially', to 'for all possible hand 0, necessarily if h represents 0, then h represents 0 spatially' - a statement, as we said, of de re necessity. The range of 'h' in the modal statement is, we know, humans (or synthesizers) in any possible world, but what is the range of 'a'? The answer seems both obvious and irresistible: it is the ordinary objects of empirical knowledge - objects, in any possible world, of the type of which the non-modal statement makes mention. After all, what the introduction of modalities brings about is a change in our conception of the role of spatial predicates (relations) in general in our experience of objects, not a change in our conception of what those objects are of which those predicates (relations) are predicated. Those ohjects are, in the non-modal staten1ent, the ordinary objects of empirical knowledge. So we must construe SC as saying about all possible such objects that they are (necessarily) represented by us as being in space. Indeed the grounds offered for SC suggest that their actually being in space is partly constitutive of our notion of them as empirical objects: being spatial, we might say, belongs to their essence. If that is so, then how we must represent these o~l~~~_~~~~i~g_tp~~~

Kant on the Modalities of Space

127

reflect precisely how they must be to be 'they' at all. If, now, we accept RT on the basis of PTI, this smooth account of how things stand becomes untenable. From the truth of PTI, we are supposed to conclude that precisely because objects are necessarily represented by us as being in space, they cannot be in space. This, at least, must be the conclusion if we insist, as we surely must, on retaining the same range for '0' in both the modal and the non-modal statements: what possible reason could there be for supposing a radical duplication of objects in modal and non-modal discourse? Since the conclusion is intolerable, having regard to the grounds on which SC was held, we rnust revise our first thought about the range of '0' in both statements if we wish to affirm PTI. But in making this revision, of course, we threaten the coherence of RT, which says, in effect, that 0 can be spatial only if it is represented as such. That is, by imposing a uniform range for '0' we necessarily falsify the antecedent of this conditional. But then the coherence even of such harmless non-modal generalizations as that all objects are spatial is equally at stake. PTI introduces intolerable tensions into transcendental argument. These tensions cannot be resolved by appealing to a distinction between different ways of 'considering' objects: one, when they are thought of as being subject to transcendental conditions on our experience of thenl, another when those same objects are thought of independently of such conditions (whatever that might mean). We do not understand this distinction unless we understand the import of those modal statements which introduced the transcendental conditions like SC in the first place, and it is our understanding of those conditions that talk about different modes of considering objects was supposed to illuminate. For the same reason, the distinction between appearances and things in themselves has no power to illuminate if our grasp on this distinction already presupposes we have a firnl grip on the meaning of such claims as SC, since to speak of objects as appearances just is to speak of them as being subject to conditions like SC. And, once again, it is our grasp of SC which seems to be undermined by the introduction of the idealist theses. Similarly, we need assurances that introducing a distinction between the empirically real and the transcendentally ideal does more than label the tension introduced by those idealist theses into talk about transcendental conditions, for our understanding of that distinction also again requires that we already have a firm grasp of the significance of such claims as SC, precisely what is brought into question by the introduction of those theses. What sustains the contrast between appearances and things in themselves is the implication, if it holds, of RT by SC. RT has the effect of making spatial properties or relations intrinsically intuitional as we might put it. It is RT that makes the attribution of spatial properties

128

Terry Greenwood

and relations relative to a human type of intuition. But if we accep that inlplication, we can no longer think of the objects mentioned in SC in the way that Kant first thought of them as the ordinary objects of empirical acquaintance. Indeed, the notion of such an object will now assume the mantle of 'appearance' in the sense noted just now: objects of empirical acquaintance will be those objects (sense not yet specified) whose representations are subject to conditions like SC. But what sense of 'object' is that? Kant does not say. No provision has been made for a sense of 'object' which is not, in part at least, constituted by the holding of condition SC on the grounds on which that is held. This is not, of course, a verificationist point: what is problematic is not the notion of an object which RT and sin1ilar idealist theses make inaccessible to knowledge claims. Rather the difficulty is that no sense of 'object' has been introduced by which an object acquires the title of being an empirical object only by the holding of conditions like SC on the human representation of it. The notion of an object was initially given sense, as 'something outside me', only by the holding of conditions like SC. RT has the effect of replacing that notion by another for which SC lays down no constitutive property. RT then has the effect of cancelling the constitutive role of SC, if SC is thought of as laying down a condition on the representation of objects in the now problematic sense. The raison d'etre of SC is thus undermined. (Notice that this problem is not evaded by pointing out that spatiality is only one possible way of giving content to the notion of something independent of ourselves and our cognitive and sensitive natures. For that supposes that we already have a notion of independence which is not ours, nor even akin to ours, as would be that of a being with a purely auditory experience. Do we have such a notion?) We have found no reason to accept PTI on the basis of what Kant has argued in the Metaphysical Exposition of the concept of Space. There remains the Transcendental Exposition of that concept. Whether or not it is true that Kant intended his brand of idealism to be a consequence of the Metaphysical Exposition alone, the argument in the Transcendental Exposition from the nature of geometry to the nature of space seems prima facie to be the one place in the Aesthetic where PTI is called upon to play an indispensable role. It is there argued that the possibility of synthetic a priori truths in geometry can be accounted for only on the assumption that the nature of space is as the Metaphysical Exposition says it is - an a priori form of intuition. But the argument, obscure as it is, seems unintelligible unless the notion of an a priori intuition carries idealist implications: only on the assumption of idealist premises about the representation of space could the possibility of synthetic a priori truths be established, if that possibility can be established at all. PTI is established, on this view of how things stand,

Kant on the Modalities of Space

129

by showing that it is presupposed by Kant's explanation of how synthetic a priori propositions in geometry are possible. That news, of course, will be received with equanimity by philosophers who hold no brief for the synthetic a priori status of geometry anyway. Indeed it might provide an additional reason for denying that status to geometrical truths. But there is reason nevertheless to be interested in Kant's attempt to explain the necessity that attaches to the truths of geometry, if only because that explanation requires such radical epistemological and metaphysical underpinning. Putting it another way, if we hold that the truths of geometry are necessary but non-analytic, are we thereby committed to transcendental idealism? If we are not, it seems worthwhile to establish \tvhy we are not. To what, on Kant's view, is the synthetic character of the necessary truths of geometry attributable? The answer lies in his account of the definitions of geometrical objects. Though these are arbitrary in the sense that we can introduce what objects we please without our definitions having to conform to pre-theoretical notions, there are two constraints to be satisfied. Most obviously, the definitions n1ust be consistent - the objects introduced must be logically possible objects. More importantly, for Kant, the concepts of such objects must be constructible. From that second requirement flow the characteristic theses of Kant's philosophy of geometry. Notoriously, the notion of constructibility is one of the most obscure in the first Critique, the chief difficulty being that Kant offers no clear criterion for when a concept is constructible. It is clear enough that to construct a concept is to exhibit it in an intuition: the problem is to determine what that involves. Hintikka has argued, in a number of papers, 8 that 'intuition' has two senses in Kant's writings, an austere and a more opulent sense. In the austere sense, 'intuition' means son1ething like 'singular representation', the representation of an object such as a triangle, where this must be taken to imply nothing more than is involved, in proof generally, in the making of existence assumptions about objects of various kinds. In this austere sense, to construct a geometrical concept is to produce 'a particular object to stand for a nun1ber of objects with some common characteristic',9 a procedure strictly analogous to that used in proofs involving existential quantifier elimination for example. It is recourse to intuition in this austere sense which accounts for the synthetic character of geometrical propositions: that is, the making of existence assumptions about objects with various geometrical properties. In the Transcendental Aesthetic, Hintikka suggests, this austere sense of 'intuition' gives way, under pressure from the move towards transcendental idealism, to a more opulent sense which contains a reference to something immediately given to human sensibility, and given, therefore, in a spatial intuition. To construct a concept in intuition in this more

130

Terry Greenwood

opulent sense is to produce an actual instance of an object falling under the concept, an image or mental picture perhaps. Kant's explanation of the possibility of geometrical propositions consists in assimilating the austere sense of intuition to a 'naive psychological meaning of "intuition'" .10 It could succeed as such an explanation, of course, only if the appeal to intuition in the more opulent sense somehow also was consistent with the character of geometrical statements as necessary truths. For anyone syn1pathetic to a broadly Kantian view of mathematics, but hostile to Kant's attempt to read idealist implications into such a view, Hintikka's interpretation has obvious attractions. The austere sense of 'intuition' is readily assimilated to familiar and accepted notions in modern proof theory. Eliminate the misguided opulent sense and what remains might serve as a respectable defence of the synthetic a priori character of geometry. Unfortunately, if we accept this interpretation we must attribute to Kant a grasp of a distinction which he almost certainly did not have, and which he certainly had no use for, between an interpreted and an uninterpreted calculus or theory of geometry. The problem concerns the way the two constraints on the viability of concepts of geometrical objects operate in Kant's account - the constraints of logical consistency and constructibility. On the austere sense of 'intuition', Kant obviously cannot exclude as legitimate the existence of (austere) intuitions of logically consistent non-Euclidean objects, that is, the viability of existence assumptions about such objects. Such exclusion must come, if at all, only at the stage where the more opulent sense of 'intuition' is introduced: what rules out some existence assumptions is just that they necessarily fail to hold in the space of our opulent intuitions. This, admittedly, would accord with Kant's concession that non-Euclidean geometrical objects are possible. Refusal to grant their constructibility is then simply a refusal to grant that they can be given in an opulent intuition - a refusal, on this reading, perhaps based on the alleged psychological impossibility of in1agining non-Euclidean objects. We could then say that Kant's insight into the logical possibility of nonEuclidean geometries was obscured by his disastrous conviction that only idealist assumptions could account for the a priori character of the synthetic propositions of geometry, a conviction leading directly to the irrelevant quasi-psychological theses associated with the more opulent sense of 'intuition'. Compelling though such an account is, it founders on the presupposition that Kant had grasped and had a use for a distinction between a pure geometry or uninterpreted theory thought of in the austere way in its intuitional aspect, and an interpreted geometry construed as dealing with the spatial properties of objects, a conception first introduced with the more opulent sense of 'intuition'. Such a distinction seems quite foreign to Kant's conception of geometry,

Kant on the Modalities of Space

131

which was for hinl, ab initio and in essence, the science dealing with the spatial properties of objects. Kant held that though non-Euclidean geometrical objects are logically possible, only Euclidean objects are possible in the space of our opulent intuitions. But the specification of these non-Euclidean objects would have to be in terms of those elements of points, lines, and planes which also figure in Euclidean geometry and figure as spatial elements. In other words, non-Euclidean objects are non-constructible tout court. It is unnecessary to add 'in an opulent intuition': as spatial objects there is no other kind "of intuition for them to be constructible in. We still have the criterial problem raised earlier: on what grounds are some objects excluded as non-constructible? This question may appear misconceived: there are no criteria, it may be said, and it is of the essence of Kant's intuitionism that there are not. The nature of space itself determines what objects may be given in a pure a priori intuition. It is left to us simply to register in spatial intuitions which objects are possible, and, by default, which are not. It may indeed be that Kant's thinking on what constraints are operating here got no further than this. But a defence of the notion of the geometrical synthetic a priori must take it further: in the absence of criteria of constructibility, it is difficult to see how Kant can avoid the collapse of his position either into some form of conventionalism or into a kind of empiricism. The problem, of course, is a familiar one. Kant assumes that the truths of geometry are necessary, but his insistence that they should be about, or concern, constructible objects, threatens to undermine that assumption, for that requirement might be understood in such a way as to render the truths of geonletry merely contingently true empirical propositions. After all, what can the criterion of non-constructibility amount to, if not to the claim that what spatial properties an object may possess is discoverable only empirically, by ascertaining that objects with such properties exist, or can be imagined to exist, where what can be imagined is an enlpirical question also? The standard argument of the logical empiricists was that this must be so: according to them, amongst the logical possibilities canvassed by pure geometries - the uninterpreted systems - which if any are true of the world is a question to be decided empirically by determining which, after suitable interpretation, yield true empirical statements. Since Kant's claim is that it is the interpreted statements which are, if true, necessarily true, he must be able to show at least that what spatial properties objects could have depends on what the truths of (interpreted) geometry are. This at least, would be consistent with the truths of geometry being necessary - indeed, our thinking of them as necessary might be taken to involve just this sort of position. But to argue that would not be sufficient to establish Kant's view, for so far all this is cOlllpatible with adopting a

132

Terry Greenwood

conventionalist stance with respect to the truths of geometry. The peculiarity of Kant's view is that true geometrical propositions can concern only constructible objects, so the necessity of these propositions has to be accounted for otherwise than in terms of their conventional truth. Though it may be a matter of convention what properties we ascribe through the concept of a geometrical object to an object, it is not a matter of convention which of these concepts are constructible. Hence conventionalism is not an option for Kant. Neither, of course, is empiricism. The empirical judgement 'the earth is a sphere' (say) certainly entails 'possibly, something is a sphere', but Kant has to establish the truth of the modal judgement, if true at all, a priori independently of our knowledge of any particular judgement of the non-modal kind (B70). Moreover, it would not be enough to establish it to show that the predicate 'x is a sphere' is logically consistent. What is intelligible as not violating logical laws is not coextensive, so Kant claims, with what is possible. So the truth of the n10dal proposition must be established a priori independently of the truth of such judgements as 'the earth is a sphere'. That conventionalism is not an option for Kant is son1etimes overlooked by those who think Kant's claim concerning the privileged position of Euclidean geometry with respect to our spatial intuitions can be upheld at least with respect to the visual geometry of 'phenomenal' space. The considerations which motivate this phenomenal interpretation are no doubt diverse, but one of them is just the desire to reflect at least something of Kant's claim for the specifically a priori nature of the intuition of geometrical objects - triangles and the like. Exactly how it does so is obscure. Strawson, for example, wishes to distinguish between a physical arrangement of lines which looks triangular and their 'triangular look' which he calls the 'phenomenal triangle', something independent of what looks triangular. It is the phenomenal triangle which is supposed to be the object of pure intuition - pure (a priori) because, apparently, 'in a sense', our attribution of properties to such objects is 'independent of empirical intuition' .11 Quite apart from familiar dubieties associated with the hypostatization of 'looks', the sense of 'empirical' (or 'non-empirical') involved here can only be marginal to Kant's central concerns, even if it is a sense to which Kant sometimes resorts. That is to say, there may be a sense in which relationships between properties of visually imagined objects are ascertainable independently of the actual presentation of any sensegiven object, and thus, in that special sense of empirical, they may be designated 'non-empirical intuitions'. But what is actually imagined in this way does not prescribe limits to what is imaginable, and it is Kant's a priori prescription of those limits for which we are seeking some account, that is, his insistence that only Euclidean objects are i~~~~n3_bJ~__

Kant on the Modalities of Space

133

Now the way that phenomenal geon1etry is supposed to show that involves the conventionalist twist mentioned earlier, but in doing so, it also shows the irrelevance of the appeal to a specifically phenomenal geometry. Two sorts of distinguishable criteria may be seen to be in force in our use of such geometrical predicates as 'straight' and 'curved'. On the first sort of criteria, our application of these predicates is based directly on the appearances that lines present to us, usually but not exclusively visual. The use of predicates according to these perceptual criteria may be thought of as basic or primitive in this sense: that our understanding of them is acquired through ostension, the presentation of visual samples. This I take to be the sort of thing Strawson has in mind when he speaks of 'visual' or 'picturable' meanings. 12 But it makes no difference to the kind of use we make of these predicates employing these criteria whether we think of them as applying directly to objects or to what is visually imagined. The other sort of criteria, measure criteria, are differently applied: whether, for exan1ple, a line joining points x and y is straight or not depends, by these criteria, on whether it is the shortest distance between x and y, as determined by some standard procedure of measurement. On one interpretation of Kant's claim about the status of the assertion 'the shortest distance between two points is a straight line', it amounts to the claim that we can know a priori that the perceptual and measure criteria coincide, but it is not analytic that they do. Prima facie, the clain1 that it is not analytic seems correct: it seems conceivable that a line which is curved by the perceptual criterion should be discovered to be straight by the measure criterion. But it may be argued that this could not be a matter of discovery. The application of the measure criterion is such as to introduce an element of convention into the situation. That is, in applying the measure criterion we make assumptions about the rigidity of measuring rods, for example, which may be rejected: there are other possibilities. Thus, it is a matter ultimately of decision that only those lines will be deemed straight by the measure criterion which are straight by the perceptual criterion, apparent discrepancies being explained in terms say of the non-rigidity of measuring rods. Kant's statement would then be true 'by convention'. This then would be the basis of Strawson's claim that 'we cannot, either in imagination or on paper, give ourselves a picture such that we are prepared to say of it both that it shows two distinct straight lines and that it shows both these lines as drawn through the same two points.'13 That follows, if it follows at all, from the way the measure criterion has been made subservient to the perceptual criterion. But that does not provide support for an intrinsically Euclidean view of 'phenomenal geometry'. Indeed, the appeal to a special phenomenal interpretation of geometry is irrelevant to that issue, since, presumably,

134

Terry Greenwood

the only possible conflict that could arise between a judgement about the visual look of a line and its actual geometric properties is that which might arise from a conflict between the application of perceptual and measure criteria, a conflict which is resolved by a decision. A different decision with respect to the rigidity of rods would allow for a nonEuclidean interpretation in which the measure criterion was allowed to override the more 'primitive' application of the perceptual criterion. In either case, it would be a decision about the application of measure criteria which would determine the nature of the geometry, not just the 'visual' or 'picturable meanings' of the terms 'straight' and 'curved'. If the choice of a metric depends on the choice of a physical theory, the choice of a geometry may depend ultimately on empirical considerations. But given the metric, decisions about the nature of the geometry have already been taken. I conclude that the pursuit of a phenomenal geometry is of no assistance in establishing the a priori synthetic character of Euclidean geometry as the geometry of space, even if we ignore the point that the space of 'looks' or visual imaginings hardly fits the space whose a priori status is affirmed in such theses as SC and RT, theses about the space in which objects are given to outer sense. The reasons which would count against construing Kant's claims for the necessarily Euclidean character of the space even of our phenomenal perception tell also against ascribing that character to space generally. Alternatively, the kinds of reasons which would count for such a construal, would count also for non-Euclidean geometry. And there is no line of retreat for Kant to a more restricted claim that whatever the geometry of space may be, it will be necessarily true of that space, where this claim does not merge ultimately with the conventionalist line I have just sketched. This extended excursion into Kant's views on geometry was undertaken, it may be remembered, in order to shed light on the nature of the a priori intuition that is required for the construction of geometrical concepts. From that point of view, the results are meagre to say the least. The notion seems to dissolve under pressure either from the conventionalist or the empiricist. Yet without a firm grasp on the notion of an a priori construction in intuition, we could hardly hope to make anything of Kant's explanation of how the transcendental conditions on our representation of something given to outer sense can account, and account uniquely, for the necessary synthetic character of geometry - the programme of the Transcendental Exposition. It was the necessity for an intuition which was supposed to underpin the synthetic nature of geometrical propositions, and the a priori nature of the intuition which was to underpin the necessity of these propositions. Although the appeal to an a priori intuition was supposed to authenticate in this way the synthetic a priori status of geometry, it was also, of course,

Kant on the Modalities of Space

135

supposed to authenticate one particular geometry - Euclid's - for the appeal to intuition is an appeal to particular intuitions which tell us which geometry is in force in the space of our intuitions. The appeal to intuition does not, I suggested, do that, but the reason why it does not is, as we have seen, bound up with the reason why it does not authenticate the synthetic a priori nature of geometry either. The twin magnets of conventionalism and empiricism pull the notion of an a priori intuition apart. That seems to leave Kant without a progran1n1e in the Transcendental Exposition. It was, after all, the peculiar nature of the procedure that authenticated geon1etrical concepts that was supposed to demand a special explanation of the necessity attaching to the truths of geon1etry. Kant, of course, sees things differently: since there has to be an appeal to intuition to confirm the truths of geometry, and since that intuition has to be an a priori one, all that remains to be done is to show what alone makes an a priori intuition possible. Kant seen1S to think that task almost unproblematic. Geometrical constructions exhibit the properties of space which is itself an a priori form of things given in outer sense. It is the nature of space itself as an a priori intuition which, apparently, first gives content to the notion of an a priori geometrical construction: that is a priori because space itself is. To establish that a geon1etrical concept is a bona fide one by exhibiting it in a construction just is to establish its possibility a priori. It is not that there is some special sort of construction whose nature is such as to render it an a priori construction because, for example, of the way that it is made. It is, rather, that simply as something we construct in space it is thereby given a priori. It seems to be in son1ething like this way that the nature of space as an a priori form of intuition is supposed to explain, and uniquely, the a priori status of those constructions which underpin the synthetic a priori status of geometry. But how exactly does it do that? That is, quite how does Kant suppose that the transcendental conditions on our representation of something as objective could uniquely explain why it is necessary that objects in space should obey the laws of geometry? There is for us no urgency about this question, of course, since the special explanation was only demanded by the suspect analysis of geometrical truth: there would be no force in the argument that even if we abandon Kant's attempt to defend the necessarily Euclidean character of geometry, there might still be left a Kantian type of explanation of the necessity of some geometry, whatever that turned out to be. Nevertheless, the question is worth considering if only to determine just how strong the idealist assumptions must be that Kant needs for his explanation to work, if, indeed, it can be made to work at all. We are looking for a modal argument, employing amongst its pren1ises

136

Terry Greenwood

the theses supposedly established by the Metaphysical Exposition, SC and (a sine qua non in Kant's view) RT, and having as its conclusion the claim that objects in space necessarily obey the laws of geometry. How might the argument go? The claim that objects necessarily obey the laws of geometry, it perhaps needs to be pointed out, is ambiguous as between 'there necessarily is son1e set G of laws of geometry that spatial objects obey', and 'each member of G expresses (not merely the truth but) a necessary truth about spatial objects'. Presumably Kant believed the first to be true but he does not attempt to prove it, and, on Kant's view of geometry, it is not true beyond question: if it is, in a sense, out of our hands what the truths of geometry are, since it is the nature of space that determines this, then that there are such truths at all must be vulnerable to scepticism. Kant, in any case, assumes that there is such a set of truths, and seeks to explain why spatial objects must obey them, that is, why each of these truths is necessary. Suppose we said, to begin with, that we can represent an object only if it is in space and (hence) conforms to the laws of space as laid down in the truths of geometry. That is already to go beyond what SC strictly warrants. On the other hand, as we saw, such force as SC commands seems to derive from holding that it is a constitutive part of our notion of an object - something objective to be n1et with in outer sense - that it is in space. It would then be a necessary truth for Kant that we can represent in outer sense only what is in space and (hence) obeys the laws of geometry. The attribution of that claim to Kant is not contradicted by Kant's concession that there may be a type of intuition, for example, a purely intellectual one, for which it would not be true. The necessity is one that holds of our (synthesizing) type of intuition, not of intuition generally: of all possible humans and objects of their intuition, it is necessarily true that what they can represent in outer sense is in space and conforms to the laws of geometry. Once again, the principle of idealism, PTI, casts its shadow over the phrase 'what they can represent', but let us, for the time being, ignore those idealist implications. There remains a question, however, whether the necessity just introduced itself has idealist in1plications. Borrowing a very useful analogy from John Watling,14 someone might claim the following. The essential nature of a fish imposes a necessary constraint on what it can encounter: it can encounter only things that are in water. Somewhat analogously, the nature of humans as synthesizers imposes a necessary constraint on what they can represent or intuit: they can intuit only what is in space and (hence) conforms to the truths of geometry. But just as a fish can encounter what is not necessarily (essentially) aquatic, e.g., a deep-sea diver, so the things that human synthesizers can intuit n1ay not be essentially spatial. It is just that we

Kant on the Modalities of Space

137

can intuit them only when they are spatial. Naturally, in the case both of fishes and of humans, what they encounter is independent of (what passes for) their minds. This position is doubtfully intelligible, as Kant would be anxious to point out. What can it mean to speak of an object which is sometimes in space and sometimes not, except that at certain times the object exists and at other times it does not? What may seem to make the view intelligible is the idea that this is just another way of saying that 'being spatial' may be a mind-dependent property, analogous to (on some accounts) secondary qualities like colour. But reference to the fish analogy shows that no such view is actually licensed by the necessity we are considering: being aquatic is certainly not a property which objects have in virtue of being encountered by a fish. At best, it allows for the possibility of an idealist view of space but it does not demand it. On the other hand, that necessity does not give us what we want. We are looking for a proof of the fact that objects are necessarily in space and necessarily conform to the laws of geometry. But it is clear that we cannot deduce that conclusion from the truth of: necessarily we can intuit only what is in space and conforms to the truth of geometry, even if we are given the innocuous truth that we can intuit objects. We may be tempted at this point to assume that Kant thought the conclusion did follow because he committed that ubiquitous fallacy which consists in inferring from the necessity of a hypothetical the necessity of its consequent. But the attribution of that fallacy to Kant would be quite gratuitous. As Watling has pointed out, the desired conclusion can be made to follow if we adopt a further premise: what we can intuit is necessarily intuitable by us. Or, as Watling also puts it, 'it is true of the things we can intuit that to be is to be intuitable by us'. 15 That formulation could mislead the unwary. Watling attributes the extra premise to Kant on the basis of Kant's reductio argument at B64-6 against the transcendental realist (in effect a restatement of the argument of the Transcendental Exposition). In the course of that argument Kant asks rhetorically: 'if the object (the triangle) were something in itself, apart from any relation to you, the subject, how could you say that what necessarily exist in you as subjective conditions for the construction of a triangle, must of necessity belong to the triangle itself?' The subjective condition is space, which belongs to the triangle of necessity, but only if the triangle is not something in itself apart from any relation to a human perceiver. That certainly seems to introduce an idealist element to the argument, but for that very reason it makes a stronger claim than is warranted by Watling's extra premise. In fact that extra premise looks uncommonly like a substitution instance

138

Terry Greenwood

of the 'characteristic axiom' of the modal system 55: if possibly p, then necessarily possibly p - an odd place to find idealism lurking. In the passage cited what Kant wanted to claim, I believe, was not merely that the esse of spatial objects was to be intuitable, but to be actually intuited. That stronger claim is not, of course, made by the extra premIse. That, indeed, is the difficulty. What, if we accept the additional premise, do we now have? We have a more or less plausible argument, based on 5C and its justification, for the claim that objects of intuition are necessarily in space and necessarily obey the laws of geometry. But even if we jettison Kant's more ambitious aim of explaining the necessity of Euclidean geometry, the explanation delivers far less than Kant wanted. At most it gives us some reason, of the transcendental sort, for believing that space has the role in our experience that 5C claims it has. It gives us no reason at all for embracing the Principle of Transcendental Idealism and its attendant theses concerning 'subjectivity'. We may believe that all this is as it should be. If, as I suggested earlier (p. 127), the introduction of PTI and RT introduces an unavoidable instability into the claims of the transcendental epistemologist, idealism of the Kantian sort had far better be eschewed if we hope for anything substantive to emerge from transcendental reasoning.

NOTES

1

References to the Critique of Pure Reason, in the Kemp Smith translation, are to the second (B) edition, and in the usual style. I have resorted, from time to time, to abbreviating certain theses I attribute to Kant. I list these here for convenience, in order of appearance: SC: Spatiality Condition (p. 117) APT: A Priority Thesis (p. 118) ART: Anti-Reductionist Thesis (p. 119) RT: Representation Thesis (p. 122) PTI: Principle of Transcendental Idealism (p. 123) 2 Allison, 1983, p. 27. 3 Ibid., pp. 9-10. 4 Ibid., p.27. 5 Ibid., p. 110. 6 Ibid., p. 107. 7 Ibid., p. 110. 8 See Hintikka, 1969a, b. 9 Hintikka, 1969b, p. 50. 10 Ibid., p. 51. 11 Strawson, 1966, p.282.

Kant on the Modalities of Space 12 13 14 15

Ibid., p. 283. Ibid., p. 283. Watling, 1972, vol. 5. Ibid., p. 138.

139

7

The Rehabilitation of Transcendental Idealism? Paul Guyer

1

EPISTEMOLOGICAL MODESTY AND IMMODESTY

For many years Kant's transcendental idealism was dismissed with contempt. Thus Peter Strawson's ironic understatement: 'The doctrines of transcendental idealisnl, and the associated picture of the receiving and ordering apparatus of the mind producing Nature as we know it out of the unknowable reality of things as they are in themselves, are undoubtedly the chief obstacles to a sympathetic understanding of the Critique. 1 But fashion changes, and more recently transcendental idealism has been receiving better press as a becoming form of epistemological modesty. On this account, Kant's posit of things in themselves beyond the mundane appearances of ordinary experience is not seen as an inexplicable residue of nletaphysics in an otherwise enlightened epistemology; it is only a colourful expression of the limited significance we should ascribe to our particular way of representing reality. In the words of Grahanl Bird, 'To assert the existence of ... objects beyond our capacities is to underline the modesty with which we should view our own frameworks of belief'; transcendental idealism 'indicates a kind of subjectivity which is not, however, that of an individual's private sensory experience but is rather that of a certain relativism associated with a system of belief.'2 The interpretation of transcendental idealism as epistemological modesty can be elaborated with varying degrees of subtlety. In its simpler form, Kant's position is just seen as an expression of the view that our success in arriving at a workable theory of the world given the basic conceptions and principles of science that we seenl destined to employ cannot be seen as any guarantee of the uniqueness and thus the veridicality of that theory. In other words, transcendental idealism

The Rehabilitation of Transcendental Idealism?

141

is little more than pragmatism, or, slightly deeper, a reason for pragmatism. Thus Ralph Walker writes: ... the conclusions most transcendental arguments can be expected to establish are about ourselves and our beliefs, not about the world. To see this as a reason for distress at our alienation from reality would of course be absurd, and it is an absurdity Kant is anxious to expose. For when he contrasts the world of appearances - the world as we believe it to be on the basis of our canons of scientific procedure and theory-construction - with the world of things as they are in themselves, it is to make the point that speculation about things-in-themselves is empty and without purpose. What we can determine empirically about the world belongs to the world of appearances, for the world of appearances is just the world as we take it to be when we make the best use of our scientific principles. And for all ordinary·purposes this is good enough. Our theory works; the fact that with different principles different theories could be constructed which would work equally well, like the theory that objects spring into being at the approach. of an observer, need not disturb us. 3

On this sort of interpretation, the gap between appearances and thingsin-themselves is taken to imply the underdetermination or nonuniqueness of our scientific theory of the world, our limitation to a theory which is to be sure workable but which must be understood to be merely one among a range of - to us perhaps unimaginable alternatives. The assumption is that if, per impossibile, we were acquainted with things in themselves, then this problen1 would not arise and the uniqueness of our scientific representation of them would somehow be guaranteed. Another conception of epistemological modesty interprets Kant's commitment to things-in-themselves as a ren1inder of the incompleteness rather than underdetermination of our knowledge. Thus, Gordon Nagel has recently likened appearances to the relatively 'restrictive' domain of 'knowledge and experience' where 'we can expect to find rules and principles that provide determinateness' and things-in-then1selves to objects of interpretations going beyond the lin1ited sphere of the definite to a more complete representation. In this realm 'some interpretative constructions [may be] more reasonable and others less so,' but there cannot be a definite distinction between the known and the unknown. On this picture, the gap between appearance and thing-in-itself is that between what is certain and what cannot be made so determinate because completeness in knowledge would exceed our capacities for determinateness: 'If an interpretation were to take up every detail, and give each point equal weight, it would be admirably grounded in fact, but utterly useless - the thing itself already confronts us with all its detail.' Indeed, this is why Nagel associates the idea of a thing-in-itself with the unobtainable ideal of a complete interpretation, and then takes the existence of things-in-themselves to imply the necessary

142

Paul Guyer

indeterminateness of much of our belief. Then it follows that 'To lump things-in-then1selves in with other objects of experience might be to blur the line between what we actually know and what, despite our confidence in our own interpretation, we cannot know.'4 This ren1arkable interpretation could lead to at least one correct conclusion: if space and time were assigned to the realm of appearances rather than of things-in-themselves because they are an10ng the properties of things which we can know about with a high degree of determinacy, Nagel's view would correctly capture what we shall shortly see is a vital premise of Kant's own foremost argument for transcendental idealism. But Nagel does not in fact draw this conclusion, and to equate any sort of quantitative limit on the scope of our certainty with the distinction between appearances and things-in-themselves - sobering as a reminder of such a limit may be - is surely to make what Kant considers a fundan1ental epistemological and, in fact, ontological difference into a mere psychological accident, a difference of degree of precisely the kind with which Kant refuses to associate any of his own vital distinctions (see A44-5/B61-2).5 Modesty about the certainty of our mere interpretations as opposed to our definite knowledge can hardly be what Kant intends to express by his transcendental idealism. A much more sophisticated argument for cognitive modesty has recently been advocated by Hilary Putnanl and associated by him with Kant's transcendental idealism. Doctrines of the kind so far considered recommend modesty about our choice of and degree of commitment to quotidian and scientific beliefs: Bird and Walker remind us that whatever scientific theory we adopt, however workable, will in- principle have alternatives, and Nagel reminds us of the difference between the limited domains in which we can expect certainty and the more uncertain areas of our belief, to which we are nevertheless led in attempting a complete interpretation of objects. But Putnam has been arguing that there is room for modesty about our conceptual framework even if we suppose that our scientific theory is unique, complete, and equally certain or well established throughout, because of a difficulty about the semantic significance - the intended reference - of any theory or body of propositions no matter how well established. This is Putnam's argun1ent about 'Models and Reality', as one of his presentations of it is named. This argument turns, not on the underdetern1ination of confirmation, but on the indeterminacy of reference, or on the fact that for any theory held to be true even under the 'operational and theoretical constraints ... rational enquirers would accept in some sort of ideal lin1it of enquiry', 6 there is a plethora of models available for the assignment of the references of the terms of the theory so accepted, and nothing which can "fix" a unique "intended interpretation" .'7 So, in the non-technical statement of Putnam's conclusion,

The Rehabilitation of Transcendental Idealism?

143

... even if we have constraints of whatever nature which determine the truthvalue of every sentence in a language in every possible world, still the reference of individual terms remains indeterminate. In fact, it is possible to interpret the entire language in violently different ways, each of them compatible with the requirement that the truth-value of each sentence in each possible world be the one specified. In short, no view which only fixes the truth-value of whole sentences can fix reference ... 8

Thus, even if there were no grounds for epistemological nlodesty, that is, even if our scientific theory could be imagined to be complete, everywhere determinate, and unique, there would still be room for semantical and therefore ontological modesty: no conceivable degree of confirmation or other epistemic virtue in a theory can fix a unique model for the reference of its terms, and thus determine what objects or what sorts of objects it 'really' represents. 9 Thus, inference from our enlpirical theory to a unique picture of how things are in themselves is barred. In his earlier expositions of his argument, Putnam seemed inclined to resolve this difficulty by combining 'internal realism' with respect to scientific theory itself10 with a '''non-realist'' semantics' which undermines the reality of models and therefore attacks the existence of the unintended ones which make ontological relativity inescapable. Thus he says, 'Models are not lost noumenal waifs looking for someone to name them; they are constructions within our theory itself ...'11 If the models of theories are themselves products of them, then we exercise sonle control over them and are not threatened by the existence of hordes of unintended ones. More recently, however, Putnam seems to let the unintended models exist while declaring questions about them undecidable and only for that reason unintelligible. 12 And in adopting this position, Putnam explicitly invokes Kant's transcendental idealism. He interprets Kant as denying that we can determine unique intended references for the terms in any scientific theory because fixing reference would require a comparison between our theory and possible models (things in themselves) for it, but the very idea of any comparison of our representations with ontological reality is incoherent; we can only compare representations with other representations. 13 In Putnam's words, 'Kant already taught us that the whole idea of comparing our conceptual system with a world of things-in-themselves (which Kant did accept, as a sort of postulate of reason) to see if the conceptual system "copies" the unconceptualized reality is incoherent.'14 There is, in fact, one prominent presentation of the clainl that representations can only be compared to other representations in the Critique of Pure Reason: We have stated above that appearances are then1selves nothing but sensible representations, which in themselves, in the very same manner, must not be regarded as objects (outside our power of representation). What, then, is one

144

Paul Guyer

to understand when one speaks of an object corresponding to, and consequently also distinct from, our knowledge? It is easy to see that this object must be thought only as something in general = X, since outside our knowledge we yet have nothing which we could set over against this knowledge as corresponding to it (A104).

It should be noted, however, that this passage does not derive transcendental idealism from the incoherence of the project of comparing a representation to something which is not a representation; on the contrary, it derives the impossibility of conceiving of our cognitive episodes as providing direct acquaintance with objects from the reduction of appearances to mere inner states which Kant takes himself to have accomplished in the 'Transcendental Aesthetic' prior to this point in the first-edition transcendental deduction of the categories. In other words, Kant does not argue for transcendental idealism on the ground that Putnam ascribes to him, namely that a correspondence theory of truth is epistemologically incoherent because providing a warrant for any truth understood as a correspondence between a representation and an object which is not a representation would require a comparison which it is impossible for us to make. Instead, Kant concludes that it is impossible for us to make this sort of comparison from a limitation on the significance of our representations, a reduction of them or separation of them from their objects, which he has already made on other grounds. That the in1possibility of the comparison which the correspondence theory of truth seems to require derives from a prior separation of representation and object is also suggested by one of the very few passages in which Kant repeats the charge of AI04: If for truth we require something more than the thoroughgoing harnl0ny of intuitions according to laws of the understanding, what would this be, if it were not at the same time the representation of a determinate object[?J Should it be in addition to this a further agreement with something else, which does not lie in our representations, how could we compare our representations with it[?J All objects (crossed out: are only determined by representations in me; what they may in addition be in themselves is unknown to nle) are simultaneously in us; an object outside us is transcendent, i.e. entirely unknown to us and useless as a criterion of truth. (R5642 [early 1780sJ, 18:281)

The question of whether Kant can be enlisted in the cause of Putnam's ontological n10desty then becomes, what is Kant's actual ground for the interpretation of cognitive episodes, states potentially warranting our judgements, as mere representations, on which his attack on the correspondence theory of truth actually turns? The answer to this is a far cry fronl what Putnam or the less subtle commentators earlier mentioned imagine. In fact, Kant's transcendental idealism, which does not reflect insight into the episten1010gical difficulty

The Rehabilitation of Transcendental Idealism?

145

of the semantics of a correspondence theory of truth though it may produce that difficulty, is not a reflection of epistemological modesty at all. Kant's transcendental idealism is the outright denial that things as they really are can even possibly be spatial and temporal, and it turns on nothing less than an unwavering commitment to the uniqueness and necessity of space and time as our forms of intuition and thus the most fundamental features of our representational, and thus conceptual, framework. And this is to say that it is precisely from an extreme immodesty about the status of space and time within our experience of the world - or within 'total science', to return to a phrase of Putnam's - that Kant deduces that things as they are in themselves cannot actually be spatial and temporal, and that therefore there can be no comparison between our representations and the real objects which should ultimately model our true beliefs. Putnam in fact touches upon a reflection of this fundamental fact about Kant's argument, namely his refusal to assimilate the 'transcendental ideality' of space and time to the acknowledged subjectivity of secondary qualities. But Putnam does not fully appreciate the significance of the point. Putnam says that 'as a first approximation' Kant's denial of spatiality and temporality to the ultimate constituents of reality may be understood as a generalization of Locke's treatment of secondary qualities. Locke's position on secondary qualities, which Putnam correctly distinguishes from Berkeley's misinterpretation of it, is not that secondary qualities have no existence without (outside) the mind, but rather that '(as properties of the physical object) we can only conceive them as Powers, as properties - nature unspecified - which enable the object to affect us in a certain way.' So for Kant to say that 'what Locke said about secondary qualities is true of all qualities' is for him to say that 'everything we say about an object is of the form: it is such as to affect us in such-and-such a way.'15 On this account, Kant, like Locke but unlike Berkeley, asserts ontological realism but denies epistemological realism. That is, he holds that there are objects which exist independently of us but that we have no reason to believe that our method of representing such objects is anything more than that - our method of representing them. So he would have no reason to accept any model as the uniquely intended model of our scientific theory except reasons internal and relative to that theory. There is some support for this interpretation; Putnam adduces the passage in the Prolegomena where Kant somewhat touchily defends himself by complaining that if the modern view of secondary qualities is 'granted without detriment to the actual existence of external objects'16 then, just because he goes 'farther and, for weighty reasons, rank[s] as mere appearances the remaining qualities of body also, which are called primary - such as extension, place, and in general space, with all that

146

Paul Guyer

which belongs to it ... no one in the least can adduce the reason of its being inadmissible.'17 Further, Putnam also explains that this account is only a first approximation. The necessary refinement is that once our spatial and temporal framework of representation has been relativized to us, we have lost our customary principium individuationis, so we cannot treat the powers which Kant's account posits as powers of objects as customarily individuated, as Locke still could, but only as powers of 'the whole noumenal world', 18 that is, powers of the completely unindividuated objective realm as a whole. However, Putnam does not consider the reason why Kant explicitly abjures the comparison of the transcendental ideality of space and time to the status of secondary qualities in the Critique of Pure Reason. On Putnam's version of Kant's view, Kant begins by 'accepting Berkeley's point that the argument from the relativity of perception applies as n1uch to the so-called "prin1ary" qualities as to the secondary ones',19 and then goes on both to generalize the argument fron1 perceptual relativity to primary qualities and also to deny that this requires the rejection of independent existence. But in the Critique Kant expressly denies that the status of space 20 can be understood by comparison to that of colours, tastes, and the like: Beside space, however, there is no other subjective representation related to something outer which could be called a priori objective. This subjective condition of all outer appearances cannot, therefore, be compared to any other. The good taste of a wine does not belong to the objective determinations of the wine, thus of an object considered even as appearance, but to the special constitution of sense in the subject who enjoys it. Colours are not properties of the bodies to the intuition of which they are attached, but are also only modifications of the sense of sight, which is affected in a certain manner by light. Space, on the contrary, as condition of outer objects, necessarily belongs to their appearance or intuition. Tastes and colours are not necessary conditions under which alone objects can become objects of the senses for us. They are connected with the appearance only as accidentally added effects of the particular organization [of the senses]. Accordingly, they are not a priori representations ... but space concerns only the pure form of intuition, and therefore includes no sensation whatever (nothing en1pirical), and all kinds and detern1inations of space can and even must be represented a priori if concepts of forms as well as relations are to arise ... (A28-9)

Kant allows that our perception of things like tastes and colours is indeed affected by peculiarities of our sense organs. This both explains and is evidenced by relativity, between species and even within our own, in the perception of these qualities: 'for instance, a rose ... in respect of its colour, can appear differently to every observer' (A29-30/ B45). But there is not even a hint of perceptual relativity with respect to space. Quite the contrary, the ideality of space is connected with the

The Rehabilitation of Transcendental Idealism?

147

fact that space is a unique condition for the representation of objects distinct from ourselves, a condition which is necessarily satisfied by such objects, and thus something the properties or determinations of which can be known a priori. So even if there is some con1parison to be made between the ontological status of colours and tastes on the one hand and space on the other, the grounds for the assignment of this status are entirely different. The status of colours and tastes may be linked with perceptual relativity, and thus serve as an expression of n10desty with respect to the imposition of our method of representation on the nature of reality. . But Kant's conclusion about the transcendental ideality of space is no expression of modesty at all, but a consequence of his extreme immodesty in asserting that objects of experience must be spatial, that is, are necessarily spatial, and indeed, although this is certainly a point that has been controverted, are necessarily characterized by a unique kind of spatiality (i.e. geometry). In sum, it is not fron1 any modesty about either the choice or the interpretation of scientific theories, not from any view that either the selection of one scientific theory from among its competitors or the assignn1ent of an ontological interpretation to it is underdetermined, that Kant deduces the transcendental ideality of space and the impern1issibility of treating space as an aspect of things as they really are rather than of our way of representing them. His conclusion is deduced from nothing less than the premise that space is a uniquely necessary condition of our representations and thus of all our theories. Anyone interested in rehabilitating Kant's doctrine of transcendental idealism should first recognize that it rests on such an in1modest premise. But here one should be flabbergasted. Why on earth should an assumption of certainty about the spatiality of the objects we represent lead to a denial that those objects are really spatial at all? Kant's answer to this question will be the main concern of this paper. As an introduction to Kant's own argument for transcendental idealism, however, one last point about the mistaken identification of this doctrine with any form of modesty may be n1ade. All who interpret transcendental idealism as an expression of a modest refusal to ascribe too much significance to our way of representing reality are invariably puzzled about Kant's apparently inconsistent claim that things-in-themselves not merely may not be spatial and ten1poral, but actually are not spatial and temporal. If Kant's 'official position is that we can know nothing at all about things-in-themselves, because they lie beyond the limits of possible experience,' then we should not be able to know even a negative statement about them to be true, such as that they are not spatial and temporal. Rather, it is objected, Kant's position should be only that 'the world of appearances represents the best guess that can be made,

148

Paul Guyer

using the resources of the human mind, as to the nature of the real world, [and] though we have no guarantee that it is an accurate guess we certainly have no reason to suppose that it is not.'2l Old as this charge is, it is completely misguided. 22 It reflects a complete misunderstanding of Kant's own derivation of transcendental idealism. If Kant began by for some reason introducing a concept of things which we cannot know and then went on to make some definite assertion about them, he would certainly be inconsistent. But Kant does not begin with a simple plea for modesty about our way of representing things. Rather, Kant is thoroughly immodest about the status of space and time and uses this immodesty to ground the outright denial that things-in-themselves are spatial and temporal. The more loosely put claim that things-in-themselves cannot be known is then derived as a consequence of the claim that they are not spatial and temporal. It must thus be understood in a way consistent with this prior denial. Transcendental idealism is not inconsistent with the denial that thingsas-they-really-are are spatial and temporal; for Kant, it is that denial, and that is what the general idea of things-in-themselves must be taken to express. What I will argue, then, is that Kant does not derive the transcendental ideality of space from any modesty about the choice of empirical theories or their referential models. Instead, his most prominent argument for transcendental idealism is to be found in his epistemological theory that only transcendental idealism explains how 'we can derive a priori synthetic propositions' (B44).23 In other words, it is from nothing less than the immodest supposition that we know certain propositions to be necessarily true of space and objects in it, rather than from the modest supposition that what we know is possibly false, that Kant derives his idealism. But why should such an immodest assertion lead to a denial rather than affirmation of the ultimate reality of space? The answer to this question lies in the particular interpretation of the necessary truth of what we know about space which Kant adopts - an interpretation which no contemporary defender of transcendental idealism will be likely to adopt once it is clearly stated. The centrality of Kant's assumption of necessary truth in his argunlent for transcendental idealism will become apparent when we recognize that he does not argue, as nlany have supposed, that space and time cannot be properties of things in themselves because they are subjective forms of representation. 24 Instead, Kant actually argues precisely the opposite of this: namely, that space and time can only be mere forms of representation because they cannot be properties of things in themselves. Kant does not assume that anything shown to be a necessary condition for representations is thereby autonlatically shown to reflect the structure of the mind rather than of the object represented. He

The Rehabilitation of Transcendental Idealism?

149

thinks rather that an argument is needed to show that what is a necessary form of representation, and which for that reason may have to be at least a structure or subjective condition of the mind, is at most such a condition or is a merely subjective condition of representation. And what this further argun1ent turns on, we shall see, is nothing other than Kant's interpretation of the necessity which he takes to be implied by our a priori knowledge of space and time. Yet this conception of necessary truth, we will see, has little to offer the contemporary rehabilitation of transcendental idealism.

2

TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM AND NECESSARY TRUTH

I have claimed that Kant's most fundamental argument for transcendental idealism is to be found in his epistemologically immodest understanding of the conditions of possibility of a priori knowledge. As Kant interprets the necessary truth of what is known a priori, the objects of such knowledge cannot actually be things-as-they-are in themselves or properties they have independently of their relation to us, and it is precisely because space and time cannot be properties of things in themselves that they must be mere forms of representation, not vice versa. In order to sustain this claim, two steps are required. First, I n1ust show that Kant's key inference is from the nonspatiality of things in themselves to the merely subjective status of space as a form of representation, and not vice versa. Second, I n1ust explicate Kant's inference from the necessary truth of the contents of our knowledge about space to the nonspatiality of things in themselves. 25 In the end, we shall see that this assumption about necessary truth on which Kant's argument ultimately depends is not merely intrinsically controversial, but also could not possibly be grounded by Kant's own transcendental method. Kant's own argument for transcendental idealism will thus offer cold comfort for contemporary supporters of this doctrine.

From nonspatiality to subjectivity First, that Kant's inference is froin the nonspatiality of things-inthemselves to the subjectivity of the necessary forms of representation, rather than vice versa, is evident from prominent passages in Kant's published work as well as from several key passages in his unpublished rernalns. The passage in which Kant draws his conclusions from the 'Metaphysical' and 'Transcendental Expositions' of the 'concept of space' should itself be sufficient to establish the outline of Kant's argument, since it is the very first place where Kant introduces the concept of the thing-

150

Paul Guyer

in-itself into the body of the Critique. This passage begins with the outright assertion that things-in-themselves are not spatial, not with any suggestion that their nature is undecidable or that we are ignorant of it. This certainly suggests that it is precisely the nonspatiality of thingsin-themselves which is the fundamental content of Kant's transcendental idealism, not some abstract conception of a totally unknowable order of things, the nonspatiality of which would therefore also be unknowable. Further, the passage concisely displays the order of Kant's inference, from the nonspatiality of things-in-themselves to the merely subjective nature of space, as well as the claim about knowledge of necessity on which the premise of this inference itself depends. Thus: (a) Space does not represent any property of things-in-themselves, nor does it represent then1 in their relation to one another. That is to say, space does not represent any determination that attaches to the objects themselves, and which remains even when abstraction has been made of all the subjective conditions of intuition. For no determinations, \vhether absolute or relative, can be intuited prior to the existence of the things to which they belong, and none, therefore, can be intuited a priori.

Kant denies that things-in-themselves are spatial - or more precisely, that they are spatial in any of the ways permitted by metaphysics: that space itself is a substance has already been held to be absurd (A39/ B56), so it is now more to the point to deny that it can be either a property or relation of substances as they really are. This assertion is itself derived from the alleged incompatibility of such a supposition with the apriority of our knowledge of space - and though Kant hardly explicates this assumption here, this is where his interpretation of the necessary truth of our knowledge of space will ultimately play its fatal role. Only then does Kant draw, from what is therefore the intermediate premise (a) that space is not a feature of things-in-themselves, the conclusion that it can only be a subjective form of representation: (b) Space is nothing but the form of all appearances of outer sense. It is the subjective condition of sensibility, under which alone outer intuition is possible for us. (A26/B42)

Thus, the premise that as a necessary condition for the representation of objects space must reflect the nature of the knowing subject rather than of the object known, which many have identified as the fundamental assumption of Kant's argument, is not the 'fundamental' premise of Kant's most prominent argument for the nonspatiality of things-inthemselves. It is clearly the conclusion of Kant's argument. The chief task, then, is to explain the final sentence of premise (a), that is, the assertion that a priori knowledge entails the nonspatiality of things-in-themselves. First, however, we will examine further evidence for the assertion that the nonspatiality of things-in-themselves is the

The Rehabilitation of Transcendental Idealism?

151

basis for Kant's introduction of the concept of things-in-themselves, rather than a consequence of the latter. Another clear piece of evidence for this interpretation can be found in the prize essay, What is the Real

Progress which Metaphysics Has Made in Germany since the Time of Leibniz and Wolff?, a late and incomplete work which nevertheless reveals a number of features of Kant's mature thought in their most elemental form. Here again Kant first derives the nonspatiality of thingsin-then1selves fron1 the requirements of a priori knowledge and only then draws the additional inference that space is therefore merely a feature of the 'natural constitution of the subject': But it is not the form of the object as it is constituted in itself, but rather that of the subject, namely what manner of representation its sense is capable of, which makes possible a priori intuition. For if this form were to be taken from the object, then this would first have to be perceived, and we could be conscious of its constitution only in this perception. But that would then be an empirical a priori intuition. We can quickly be convinced whether such a thing could exist or not when we consider whether the judgment which attributes this form to the object is accompanied with necessity or not, for [only] in the latter case is it merely en1pirical. The form of the object, as it can be represented in an a priori intuition alone, is therefore grounded not on the constitution of this object in itself, but rather on the natural constitution of the subject which is capable of an intuitive representation of the object, and this subjective [element] in the formal constitution of sense, as the receptivity for the intuition of an object, is alone that which makes possible a priori, that is, preceding all perception, intuition

a priori . .. (20:266-7)

This passage is even clearer than the passage from the Critique, since it makes explicit that the real premise of the argument is not just a general claim about the conditions for a priori knowledge but a specific claim about the conditions under which judgments of necessity can be known. It again confirn1s that Kant first argues for the impossibility of things being spatial in themselves and only then asserts the alternative that space must be a merely subjective form of representation. Kant's overall argument clearly takes the form of an argument by exclusion: space might be either a property of things-in-themselves or of the constitution of the subject, or both, but it cannot be a property of things-in-themselves, because of the problem (yet to be explicated) about necessity; therefore it can be only a feature of the constitution of the subject. The same pattern of inference appears in a number of Kant's notes. One note is from the same period in which Kant was preparing the essay on the progress of metaphysics. Like the passages we have considered so far, this passage makes it clear that it is a claim about the possibility of a priori knowledge which leads to the denial that

152

Paul Guyer

space is a property of things-in-themselves, although, unlike those considered so far, this passage specifically mentions the propositions of mathen1atics, thus suggesting that the necessary truth of mathematics is, or is connected with, the ultin1ate premise of Kant's transcendental idealism. I shall return to this point later; for now I want to emphasize only that this passage too makes clear that the key to Kant's overall argument is the denial that space and time can be properties of thingsin-themselves, and that it is this which implies that our a priori knowledge can be explained only by the theory that space is a merely subjective form of representation: That synthetic a priori propositions are real, therefore that they are also possible, is proved by mathematics. But that these [propositions] are not possible by means of the perception of objects as things-in-themselves is clear from the fact that they would otherwise be empirical and would contain no necessity, which is characteristic only of a priori cognitions. That they therefore express only the subjective constitution of our sensibility, which yields the form of intuition before everything empirical, (therefore) a priori . .. (R6349, 18:674).

In other words, the first thing that must be done to explain the a priori knowledge of mathematics is to reject the reality of space; then it can be inferred that space is merely a form of representation, such a form, of course, being a sufficient condition for explaining a priori knowledge. Perhaps even blunter is a passage from a set of student lecture notes from the winter semester of 1783-4, that period of intellectual ferment in which Kant was trying to clarify so much about the Critique in the face of the hostile reviews which its first edition had finally received after a year of silence: Space and time give us a priori cognitions prior to all experience; therefore they cannot be derived from experience - We recognize a priori propositions by their necessity; we have such propositions in geon1etry, e.g. two tin1es cannot be simultaneous. [Space and time] therefore cannot be properties of things in themselves. Since [space and time] are not determinations of objects, therefore they must be determinations of the subject - therefore the forms of our sensibility. - Space is the form in which we perceive external things, time the form in which we perceive ourselves. What we cognize through inner and outer sense is mere appearance, not things in themselves. (Metaphysik Mrongovius, 29:832)

Again, Kant's argument takes the form of a choice between two alternatives. Space may be either a property of things in themselves or else just a merely subjective condition and feature of our representations of things other than ourselves. But if it is the former, then a priori knowledge of it - again, knowledge which is exemplified by our knowledge of mathematical propositions - is impossible. Therefore, it must be the latter.

The Rehabilitation of Transcendental Idealism?

153

A few further reflections put Kant's subscription to this form of argument beyond doubt. First, Since the conditions of space and time, which lie at the ground of all representations of experience, are accompanied with necessity, thus lie a priori in the faculty of representations of the senses, this cannot occur except insofar as they lie in the subject and its sensible form of intuition; for this alone is given prior to experience. If it were assumed that we know the objects of the senses as they are in themselves when we are immediately conscious of them, then this would not be a priori knowledge, but mere perception, which is not accompanied with any necessity, but would only reveal that it is so and not that it must necessarily be so. (R6346, 18-671)

And, That synthetic a priori propositions are possible only through the subjective form of sensibility, consequently that their objects can be represented only as appearances, is to be recognized from the fact that they are accompanied with necessity, but not from concepts by means of analysis. - For if it were assumed that we could perceive things in themselves, then necessity and universality would be missing from such propositions. But if [the objects] are mere appearances, then we can know a priori how they must appear to us, for [we] can have no other intuitions than those permitted by the subjective constitution of our senses. - But this has nothing to do with the fact that in the case of colours everyone may have his own manner of sensing. For that is sensation, therefore not objective, rather only subjective and carries with it no universality and necessity. (R6355, 18:681)

Far from reflecting uncertainty about the objective validity of the most basic elements of our conceptual framework, Kant's idealism derives precisely from his assurance that we have a priori knowledge of the necessity of space and time as the unique conditions of the representation of objects. It must now be clear that his argument has the following forn1. That we have access to a feature of our representations which is known a priori by means of access to something which lies within us or which is a feature of the 'natural constitution of the subject' is a necessary condition for a priori knowledge; thus it is at least part of the explanation of how we could have knowledge of objects independently of experience of them. But this is not sufficient to prove that such a feature is merely a subjective form of representation. For here there are two alternatives: that in addition to somehow lying in the natural constitution of the subject, the feature concerned is also a genuine property of objects, or else that is only an aspect of the natural constitution of the subject. Thus, for the second alterative to be established, it must be established that the feature is not a property of things as they are in themselves in addition to being a property of our representation of things. This first alternative is, however, excluded by the fact that we

154

Paul Guyer

have a priori knowledge of the feature, for this involves necessity - and properties that attach to things-in-themselves could at best be known to do so contingently but not necessarily. So to return to the case at hand, space certainly does reflect the structure of our form of representation, but, more important, it cannot represent the structure of things as they are in themselves, given that our knowledge of it is a priori. Therefore it is merely a subjective form of representation.

Space and geometry Our fundamental question then becomes: what kind of necessity underlies Kant's inference from apriority to subjectivity? But before we turn to that, we must briefly consider the issue of exactly what body of (allegedly) a priori knowledge about space it is on which Kant's argument is intended to turn. As we have seen, some of Kant's expositions of his argument make only the general assertion that 'the conditions of space and time ... are accompanied with necessity, thus lie a priori in the faculty of representations of the senses' (R6346), while others refer specifically to the synthetic a priori propositions of mathen1atics (R6349) or geometry (Metaphysik Mrongovius). Indeed, the latter passage not only refers specifically to the a priori propositions of geometry, it also uses the example that between two points only one straight line is possible; that is, it specifically assumes the truth of Euclidean geometry. This naturally raises the question, is Kant's entire epistemological argument for transcendental idealism predicated on the necessary truth of Euclidean geometry, and does it thus fall immediately to the objection that Euclidean geometry is contingently true, if indeed true at all (or true of more than a small region of space, etc.)? Or is Kant's argument dependent only upon some more general claims about space, such as that space, whatever exactly its particular form may turn out to be, is the necessary condition for our representation of ontologically distinct objects, or that individual spaces can be recognized only by the introduction of boundaries into an otherwise continuous and unique space, again whatever its precise geometrical form turns out to be? In spite of the fact that he may have known of the logical possibility of consistent alternatives to Euclidean geometry,26 it seems clear that Kant assumed the necessary truth of Euclidean geon1etry and only Euclidean geometry. Kant's commitment to this assumption is sometimes questioned on the basis of his remark that 'there is no contradiction in the concept of a figure which is enclosed within two straight lines, since the concepts of two straight lines and of their coming together contain no negation of a figure' (B268). This is supposed to reflect his recognition of the possibility of alternatives to a fundamental theorem of Euclidean geometry. However, as Gordon Brittan has suggested,27 this sentence

The Rehabilitation of Transcendental Idealism?

155

is meant to illustrate only the syntheticity of geometrical propositions, not their contingency: Kant tends to equate mathematical truth with the valid application of a proposition of formal n1athen1atics to an object which may be presented in intuition, and what he is arguing here is clearly that this theorem can neither be derived from the definitions of the terms included in it nor be proved to have such objective validity by logical analysis of definitions alone, not that there may actually be alternatives to it. Kant not only assumed that mathematical proof requires intuitions as well as definitions and logic (a view to which he may have been reasonably inclined by the fact that there was no logic available to him adequate for axiomatizing truths about a continuous space 28 ) but also adopted a theory of mathematical truth which would not in any case count even consistent but merely logical possibilities as any form of truth. 29 For a proposition to be known to be a truth (a fortiori a necessary truth), Kant always supposed that it n1ust describe an object. Thus, The possibility of experience is, then, what gives objective reality to all our a priori cognitions ... Although we know a priori in synthetic judgements a great deal regarding space in general and the figures which productive in1agination 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 appearances which constitute the material for outer experience. (A157/B196; see also A239-40/ B298-9)

Without an object, on Kant's view, there is no knowledge of n1athematical truth at all, yet when space, as the object of pure and empirical intuition alike, is presented, it clearly confirms only Euclidean geometry. Indeed, much of Kant's battle with rationalism can be understood as the result of his attempt to distinguish between logical and real relations, and it is clearly his view that in mathematics as well as physics the merely logical consistency of a system of concepts does not suffice to establish its objective reality. Intuitions are needed for that, and our intuitions, he obviously supposes, confirm the truth of Euclidean geometry alone. Nevertheless, some defenders of transcendental idealism have tried to drive a wedge between Kant's commitment to a priori knowledge of spatiality in general and his commitment to a priori knowledge and thus the necessary truth of Euclidean geometry in particular. 30 Thus, Henry Allison has asserted that 'the argun1ent from geometry only moves to ideality by way of an appeal to the a priori and intuitive character of the representation of space,' which is provided in the n1etaphysical exposition of space without reference to the synthetic a priori propositions of geometry, and has concluded 'therefore, that the argument for ideality can bypass completely ... any considerations

156

Paul Guyer

about the nature of geometry.'31 However, this is misleading. For one thing, it overlooks the fact that Kant clearly felt that the necessary truth of Euclidean geometry was more evident and more persuasive than the necessary truth of the more general synthetic a priori propositions about space demonstrated in the metaphysical exposition, and could thus be used in the popular presentation of his theory by the 'regressive' method in the Prolegol1tena. But (and this is much more important) the supposition that general truths such as that space is a necessary condition of representation, that it is unique and does not consist of parts, and so on, could be known to be necessarily true without any specific geometry which describes the structure of this space also being known to be so seriously misrepresents that conception of necessity which underlies Kant's inference from necessary truth to transcendental idealism - an absolute necessity which must be imposed on reality rather than a conditional necessity which reality may happen to satisfy. That is, if it were merely I<'ant's view that, for some reason having to do with our 'natural constitution', it is a subjective condition for any successful perception that we can perceive objects only if they are in space or are spatial, then we could imagine that we might be able to perceive objects with any of a variety of particular spatial forms, that is, satisfying any of a variety of geometries. For instance, certain topological constraints might be indispensable if space is to serve its role of enabling us to represent the distinctness of objects from each other and ourselves by their spatial separation, but a large amount of metrical variation might be compatible with such a function. But it is not Kant's view that we know merely the conditional necessity that if we are to perceive things external to ourselves they must be spatial. Rather, it is Kant's view that what we perceive is necessarily spatial in an absolute sense, and that the existence of this absolute necessity can be explained only by the supposition that we actually impose spatial form on objects. But it is difficult to conceive how we could impose spatial form on objects without imposing some particular spatial form on them - for the simple reason that although we can state a requirement on our cognition (or anything else) without being fully determinate about the properties of any object that will satisfy it, we cannot actually make an object (to satisfy such a requirement) without making it determinate. Conditions are like concepts, thus not fully determinate, but objects are always fully determinate. Or, in his own terms, precisely because Kant conceives of space as an intuition not a concept, a particular rather than something general, he nlust also suppose that even as a purely subjective form of intuition it must be fully determinate. But that means that if we impose spatial form at all we must impose sonle particular spatial form, and if it is necessarily true that we impose some spatial form, rather than just necessarily true that if we are to

The Rehabilitation of Transcendental Idealism?

157

perceive things they had better be spatial, then it must be necessarily true that we impose some particular spatial form on things. But this means that the necessary truth of Euclidean geon1etry - or, if Kant is wrong about the facts, then the necessary truth of some other particular geometry instead32 - is not an eliminable feature of his transcendental idealism. Rather, it is an obvious reflection of Kant's basic assumption about the necessary truth of a priori propositions, which leads to his denial that things-in-themselves can be characterized by such truths and his conclusion that the conditions necessary for the truth of such propositions must instead be in1posed on our representations of things. Thus, the issue of the role of the a priori knowledge of geometry in Kant's argument for transcendental idealism brings us to its heart, Kant's interpretation of the necessity of a priori knowledge and the reason for his inference from the very necessity of spatiality to the nonspatiality of things-in-themselves. So we may now return to that inference.

From necessity to nonspatiality As we saw before the last digression, the crucial premise of Kant's argument for transcendental idealism is that whatever is known a priori cannot be a property of things-in-themselves. The basis for this, in turn, is his supposition that properties of things-in-themselves could not be known a priori because they could not be known to be necessary. Kant's subscription to this premise is at the heart of his Copernican revolution: If intuition nlust conform to the constitution of the objects, I do not see how we could know anything of the latter a priori; but if the object (as object of the senses) must conform to the constitution of our faculty of intuition, I have no difficulty in conceiving such a possibility as this. (Bxvii)

And the san1e assumption is the explicit premise for the unambiguous conclusion that 'space does not represent any property of things in themselves' ; ... Space does not represent any determination that attaches to the objects themselves and that remains even when abstraction has been made of all the subjective conditions of intuition. For no determinations, whether absolute or relative, can be intuited prior to the existence of the things to which they belong, and, none, therefore, can be intuited a priori. (A26/B42)

To have a priori knowledge of a property of objects is to know that it attaches to objects (in some class) universally and necessarily. But to know that it attaches to objects (in that class) universally and necessarily is to know that it attaches to any particular object (in the class) independently of experience of that object, thus even prior to experience of it. But, Kant assumes, it is not possible to know independently of

158

Paul Guyer

experience of it that an object genuinely has, on its own, a certain property. Therefore, space and time, which are known a priori, cannot be genuine properties of objects, and can only be features of our representations of them. That Kant's argument turns on this premise, thus on the inference from necessity to idealism, is obvious in the end, and it is difficult to see why anyone should suppose that an argument which does not employ the premise that the a priori knowledge of a determination is incompatible with its independent existence could represent Kant's thought. But why does Kant assume this pren1ise, when it is not in fact self-evidently impossible to know an object must have a certain property prior to experience of it? On the contrary, it seems at least possible to imagine that we could know, because of certain constraints on our ability to perceive, that any object we perceive must have a certain property: we can perceive only objects that do, and so we can know that whatever objects we perceive will. But then it would seem natural to explain our actual perception of any particular object as due to the very fact that it does have the property in question. In contemporary terms, it would be a de dicto necessity of any object described as experienced by us that it satisfy the necessary conditions of the possibility of our experience, but it would not be a de re necessity that any particular object satisfy such conditions. Why does Kant assume precisely the opposite? To put this question in the traditional terms going back to the nineteenth-century debate between Adolf Trendelenburg and Kuno Fischer,33 Kant assumes that space and time must be features either of our representations or of objects, but not both, rather than that space and time may be either properties of objects or both necessary constraints on our perception of objects and genuine features of the objects we do succeed in perceiving. However, contrary to what Trendelenburg supposed, Kant hardly overlooked this last alternative. Obviously he meant to exclude it on the ground that it is incompatible with our a priori knowledge of space and time, particularly with the necessity of this knowledge. Again, 'no determinations ... can be intuited prior to the existence of the things to which they belong.' But why does he think that this alternative is excluded by the necessity of spatiality? Why does he suppose that the genuine spatiality of things-in-themselves is incompatible with our a priori knowledge of spatiality rather than being our best explanation of it, given our a priori knowledge that spatiality is a necessary condition on our perception of objects? As I have suggested, the answer to this question lies in Kant's interpretation of the necessity inherent in our knowledge of space. My formulation of the alternative to the assumption that independent existence is incompatible with a priori knowledge depends on expressing

The Rehabilitation of Transcendental Idealism?

159

the conclusion of Kant's argument that spatiality is a necessary condition on our perception of objects as a conditional necessity. That is, this formulation supposes that Kant's argument is intended to yield a result of the form, 'It is necessary that if an object is perceived by us it must be perceived in space' (or even in Euclidean space). It is indeed natural to explain perception of an object understood as satisfaction of this conditional necessity by the assumption that any object actually perceived is spatial (and Euclidean) independently of our perception of it. But this is not how Kant interprets the necessity implicated in our a priori knowledge of spatiality and Euclidean geometry. Kant interprets this necessity as absolute necessity and believes that knowledge of absolute necessity is incompatible with the independent existence of the object in question. That is, Kant assumes that what we know a priori is not this proposition: (1) Necessarily, if we are to perceive an object then it is spatial and Euclidean,

but rather this proposition: (2) If we perceive an object, it is necessarily spatial and Euclidean.

He then assumes, reasonably enough, that this cannot be known of objects that are spatial independently of us, for of such objects we could at best know that they are spatial, but only contingently rather than necessarily so. So instead he concludes that we can know any object to be necessarily spatial only if it is, in the end, an object of our own creation: 'We can know things ... a priori only so far as we make them ourselves' (R6342, 18:667). That is on the alleged incompatibility of the necessity of a priori knowledge and the independent existence of the properties known a priori that Kant's fundamental argun1ent for transcendental idealism depends is, as we have seen, evident in many passages. But the exact assumption about necessity which Kant must be making in order to be led to this argument is not revealed as often. Indeed, sometimes Kant even writes as if he did assume a n1erely conditional necessity: Since we cannot make the special conditions of sensibility into conditions of the possibility of objects, but only of their appearances, we may well say that space comprehends all things which may appear to us externally, but not all things in themselves, whether they are intuited or not ... (A27/B43).

However, such a cautious statement simply fails to explain the inference which Kant draws from it, which is not that agreement with the special conditions of our sensibility is a contingent property of the objects that possess it, but that it is an ideal property - that is, 'nothing as soon as we leave out the condition of the possibility of all experience, and assume it is something which pertains to the things in themselves' (A281 B44). But Kant does reveal his interpretation of the necessity of spatiality,

160

Paul Guyer

indeed of Euclidean geometry, and thus does explain this otherwise inexplicable conclusion, in one central passage in the 'Transcendental Aesthetic'. This is the first of his 'General Conclusions', in which, 'to avoid all misapprehension', he proposes to 'explain as clearly as possible, what our view is regarding the fundamental constitution of sensible knowledge in general' (A42/B59). Given this introduction, it seems reasonable to assume that what follows is indeed a precise statement of Kant's argument. Kant insists that what will lend the argun1ent of the 'Aesthetic' that certainty and freedom from doubt which is required of any theory that is to serve as an organon' (A46/B63) is his explanation of the fact that in regard to both space and time 'there is a large number of a priori apodictic and synthetic propositions', such as the 'propositions of geometry', which are incompatible with the supposition that 'space and time are then1selves objective' (A46/B64). Kant adduces as examples of the propositions he has in mind the propositions that 'two straight lines cannot enclose a space, and with them alone no figure is possible' and 'given three straight lines, a figure is possible' (A47/B65). He then rehearses his explanation that because these propositions are synthetic - that is, cannot be derived from the concepts of the objects mentioned - their confirmation requires intuition. The nature of Kant's assumption about the exact nature of geometrical propositions is revealed, however, in his further argument that this intuition must be a priori, and that this requires that space be a merely subjective condition of sensible intuition: But of what kind is this intuition? Is it a pure a priori intuition or an empirical intuition? Were it the latter, no universally valid proposition could ever arise out of it - still less an apodictic proposition - for experience can never yield such. You must therefore give yourself an object a priori in intuition and ground upon this your synthetic proposition. If there did not exist in you a power of a priori intuition, and if that subjective condition were not also at the same time, as regards its form, the universal a priori condition under which alone the object of this outer intuition is itself possible; if the object (the triangle) were something in itself, apart from any relation to you, how could you say that what necessarily exist in you as subjective conditions for the construction of the triangle must of necessity belong to the triangle itself? You could not then add anything new (the figure) to your concepts (of three lines) as something which must necessarily be met with in the object, since [on the rejected hypothesis] his object is given antecedently to your knowledge, and not by means of it. If, therefore, space (and the same is true of time) were not merely a form of your intuition, containing conditions a priori, under which alone things can be outer objects to you, and without which subjective conditions outer objects are in themselves nothing, you could not in regard to outer objects determine anything whatsoever in an a priori manner. It is therefore, not merely possible or probable, but indubitably certain~_~~a!_~E~~~_~!!si_!ilD~,-jl~_jb~

_

The Rehabilitation of Transcendental Idealism?

161

necessary conditions of all outer and inner experience, are merely subjective conditions of all our intuition ... (A48-9/B65-6)

The final sentence of this extract n1akes it indeed 'indubitably certain' that Kant does not think that something's being an ineluctable constraint on our perception and its reflecting merely a subjective condition of our own constitution instead of a property of the objects represented are analytically equivalent. Instead, that a necessary condition of our intuition is merely a subjective condition is precisely what has to be demonstrated. That is, Kant does intend to exclude Trendelenburg's n1issing alternative, but not as a logical consequence of the mere concept of a condition necessary for our perception. Instead, Kant's exclusion, thus his argun1ent for transcendental idealism, depends on the assumption that spatiality, indeed the specific features of Euclidean geometry alluded to, are not merely necessary if we are to perceive objects, but must be necessarily true of whatever objects they are supposed to be true of. This is why Kant introduces two references to necessity, or asserts that 'what necessarily exist in you as subjective conditions for the construction of a triangle' must also 'of necessity belong to the triangle itself' or 'must necessarily be met with in the object.' It is not enough for him that our representations of objects are necessarily spatial - which will be true as long as space is at least a necessary form of intuition - but he also requires that the objects which we represent as spatial are necessarily spatial - which they will be only if we make them so, or if they are reduced to our necessarily spatial representations. Thus, although 'subjective conditions for the construction' of a figure could be understood as conditional necessities which must be satisfied if you are to succeed in perceiving figures of that sort, Kant's argument depends precisely on the assumption that his claims about space and geometry do not just reveal necessary conditions which objects must satisfy if we are to perceive them. Conditions of this sort could be satisfied even if the objects were contingently spatial and Euclidean, but Kant explicitly asserts that if we perceive objects at all then it is necessarily true of them - de re - that they are spatial and Euclidean. Only this last assumption requires that the form of the object be 'nothing at all' apart from its relation to us, that our subjective condition of intuition also be the condition under which the form of the object is itself possible, or even that we must make the objects of a priori knowledge. So, to formalize slightly our previous contrast, we can now see that Kant's argument indeed depends, not on the assumption (1) Necessarily (if x is an object and we perceive x, then x is spatial [and Euclidean], for this could easily be explained on the assumption that since we can perceive only Euclidean spatial objects, whatever objects we happen to

162

Paul Guyer

perceive happen to satisfy these conditions. Instead, Kant's argument depends on the assumption that (2) If (x is an object and we perceive x), then necessarily (x is spatial [and Euclidean]),

for only this requires not just that we have some evidence for the truth of, for example, the statenlent 'Two straight lines cannot be perceived by us to enclose a space' but rather an explanation of the de re necessity that two straight lines cannot enclose a space. And this explanation is precisely what Kant offers by denying that spatiality is a property of things as they are in themselves and is instead only a feature of our constructive representations of them. Only the assumption of the absolute necessity expressed by (2) instead of the merely conditional necessity expressed by (1) gives rise to an argument for transcendental idealism by excluding Trendelenburg's missing alternative. Or, as Kant's argument suggests, on the excluded alternative the synthetic propositions at stake would be necessarily true of our representations of them but only contingently true of the objects themselves; but given the coextensionality of universality and necessity (B4), this would undermine the necessity and thus the apriority of these propositions. On Kant's conception, spatiality cannot be necessarily true of sonle objects (representations) and contingently true of some others (things in themselves), for then it is not necessarily true of any objects at all; if it is to be necessarily true of any objects at all, it must be necessarily true of all objects of which it is true. Since we cannot assert that spatiality is necessarily true of things-in-themselves - but can assert that it is necessarily true of some objects - it thus follows that it is not true of things-in-themselves at all. Now, of course, the question must arise whether Kant was entitled to an assumption of the form of (2), to his assumption that, for instance, Euclidean properties 'of necessity belong to the triangle itself' and not just to our representations of triangles. For if he were entitled to it, then his argument for transcendental idealism, though far from an anodyne conceptual necessity, nlight still be defended; but if he were not, then the denial of spatiality to things in themselves seems groundless. To this question the immediate answer must be that assumption (2) is not a logically valid consequence of assumption (1), and thus the absolute necessity of the truths of geometry or the more general truths about spatiality hardly follows from the conditional necessity that objects must conform to the requirenlents of our geometry if we are to succeed in perceiving them. 34 Yet a conditional necessity of the form of assumption (1) would seem to be the only kind of necessity that we could ever arrive at by any investigation construed, in Lockean fashion, as an exploration of the limits of our own cognitive faculties - which

The Rehabilitation of Transcendental Idealism?

163

is to say, by a Copernican revolution as Kant apparently intended that to be understood. Discovering by sonle sort of examination of it that our cognitive constitution linlits us to perception of objects satisfying some constraint C can surely reveal to us only that whatever objects we do perceive must satisfy C, not that there is some stronger sense in which they necessarily satisfy C. So nothing understood as an investigation of the conditions of our perception alone could yield the result that any property 'must of necessity belong to the triangle itself'. Thus the argument for transcendental idealism could only proceed by means of an independent assumption of the necessary truth of geometry - as indeed is suggested by Kant's 'regressive' argument in the Prolegomena, also reflected in the additions to the preface of the second edition of the Critique and the separate title for its 'Transcendental Exposition' of space. Kant's own transcendental method cannot ground the unconditionally necessary truth of propositions about objects in space, so this necessary truth must be an independent axiom of Kant's argument if transcendental idealism is to follow. Far fronl being a mere popularization, the regressive style of argument in the Prolegomena represents the only form of argument from which transcendental idealism actually follows - an argument fronl the outright assumption of the necessary truth of geometry and the more general propositions about spatiality. Kant's argument for transcendental idealism depends on a claim to knowledge of necessary truth. But of course this is shaky ground to stand on. There would seenl to be one alternative to this conclusion. As Ross Harrison points out,35 an absolute necessity of the form 'Necessarily (p)' may validly be derived from a conditional necessity of the form 'Necessarily (if j then p)' if the other premise of the argument is not in fact just 'j' but rather 'Necessarily (j).' Thus, the necessary truth of unconditional propositions about objects in space might follow from the conditional necessity that we can perceive objects only in space if there were an additional necessity involved. But to exploit this possibility would mean that Kant would have to begin with an assumption like 'Necessarily we perceive objects;' yet it is hard to see how Kant could successfully defend this proposition if it is itself understood as an absolute necessity, or what could possibly explain this, other than an initial assumption to the effect that we make the objects in question. But this would just be an initial assumption of idealism, and would make the argument for transcendental idealism from the a priori knowledge of geometry circular. Kant's assumption of absolute rather than conditional necessity in the argument of the 'Transcendental Aesthetic' is not an isolated occurrence. Such an assumption that there is an absolute rather than conditional necessity that we experience external objects underlies one

164

Paul Guyer

of Kant's chief arguments for transcendental idealism from the theory of judgement rather than from the forms of intuition. This is why Kant offers his own explicit rejection of the missing alternative objection as a concluding comment on the transcendental deduction of the categories: A middle course may be proposed between the two above mentioned, namely that the categories are neither self-thought first principles a priori of our knowledge nor derived from experience but subjective dispositions of thought ... so ordered by our Creator that their employment is in complete harmony with the laws of nature ... - a kind of preformation-system of pure reason ... There is this decisive objection against the suggested middle course, that the necessity of the categories, which belongs to their very conception, would then have to be sacrificed. The concept of cause, for instance, which expresses the necessity of an event under a presupposed condition, would be false if it rested only on an arbitrary subjective necessity, implanted in us, of connectng certain empirical representations according to the rule of causal connection. I would not then be able to say that the effect is connected with the cause in the object but only that I am so constituted that I cannot think this representation otherwise than as thus connected. This is exactly what the sceptic most desires. (B167-8)

The difference between 'self-thought first principles' of knowledge and subjective necessities 'implanted in us' can only be the difference between rules of thought which we are capable of imposing upon objects - and which are thus 'self-thought - and requirements of thought which objects must satisfy if we are to successfully represent them but which we cannot impose upon them merely by our own thought. But Kant simply has no basis for claiming that the a priori forms of intuition as well as conceptualization are such 'self-thought first principles' instead of mere subjective necessities unless he makes the additional assumption of the absolute rather than conditional necessity of the premises of his argument. Without such an assumption, Kant has no ground on which to exclude a 'preformation-system' of either pure reason (that is, understanding) or pure intuition, or, in other words, to reject an argument of the form that since we can perceive external objects only if they are spatial and Euclidean, the best explanation of our perception of any given object is just that it happens to be spatial and Euclidean, and nothing more. That it is something more - namely necessarily so - is the additional assumption required to generate transcendental idealism, but, as we saw, one for which Kant has no sound basis. If this is what it takes to refute scepticism - a proof that any suspect predicate of an object is unconditionally necessarily true of it - then Kant would hand the sceptic an easy victory indeed. Thus, Kant's argument for transcendental idealism from his theory of the forms of intuition does not express epistemological modesty, but

The Rehabilitation of Transcendental Idealism?

165

is rather the consequence of an exceedingly imn10dest interpretation of the necessity of synthetic a priori propositions. This suggests that those who associate transcendental idealism with modesty about our conceptual frameworks misunderstand the nature of Kant's argun1ent, and those who actually want to rehabilitate Kant's own argument for transcendental idealism are, in spite of their disclain1ers, committed to an assumption about the nature of necessary truth which it will be difficult indeed to sustain.

NOTES The provenance of this paper requires some explanation. It was originally composed for presentation at the Pacific Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in March, 1985, and then offered for the present volume. As written, it consisted of three main sections, the latter two of which were delivered on that occasion. Those two sections have since been incorporated into n1Y book (Guyer, 1987) which it could not then be anticipated would be published prior to the present collection. To reduce repetition, the first of those two sections (the second section of the original paper) has been omitted here; the n1aterial originally included in it may be found at pp. 336-42 of Guyer 1987. In the paper published here, then, section 1 is previously unpublished and section 2 essentially reproduces pp.354-69 of Guyer 1987. To readers already familiar with that book, I apologize for the repetition and hope that section 1 may be of interest; those who have not read Guyer 1987 may be assured that the present material is intelligible on its own. 1 Strawson, 1966, p. 22. 2 Bird, 1982, pp. 91,90. 3 Walker, 1978, pp. 125-6. 4 Nagel, G., 1983, pp. 24-5. 5 Citations to the Critique of Pure Reason will be given by the customary n1ethod referring to the pagination of the first (A) and second (B) editions. The text followed is that of Raymund Schmidt (Hamburg, Felix Meiner Verlag, 1930). Translations are my own, although naturally influenced by the version by Norman Kemp Smith (Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, 2nd edn, London, Macmillan & Co., 1933). Citations from others of Kant's writings are located by volume and page number in the Akademie edition (Kants gesammelte Schriften, 29 vols, Berlin, Walter de Gruyter & Co. [and predecessors], 1900-). 6 Putnam, 1981, p. 33. 7 Putnam, 1983, p. 4. 8 Putnam, 1981, p.33. For the formal argument for Putnam's VIew, see pp. 216-17, and Putnam, 1983, esp. pp.4-8. 9 Putnam indeed characterizes his result as an extension of Quine's 'ontological relativity'. 10 Internal realism is presum~bly the view that if, e.g., our scientific theory tells us that there are such things as electrons, it makes perfectly good

166

11 12

13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22

23

24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Paul Guyer sense to say that they are real, not just theoretical entities or abbreviated ways of referring to observations or useful fictions for making predictions, etc. Putnam, 1983, p. 25. For the denial that there is any way in which our intentions can fix reference, see Putnam, 1981, pp.40-2; for the denial that there are any decidable questions about extra-theoretical reference, see pp. 49-54. As of course Berkeley already claiined. 'Convention: A Theme in Philosophy', Putnam, 1983, p. 177. Putnam, 1981, pp.60-1. Note that Kant too adopts the Lockean rather than Berkeleian interpretation of the doctrine. Putnam, 1981; Prolegomena, 4:289. The comparison with secondary qualities to defend the epistemological validity of a judgement in spite of the ontological reduction of the property it concerns is actually a standard move in eighteenth-century philosophy; conlpare Hunle's defence of aesthetic judgements by their comparison to judgements about secondary qualities. See Hume, 1875, pp. 218-19. Putnanl, 1981, p. 63. Ibid., p. 60. A sinlilar argument is made about time but is complicated by the fact that Kant understands time as the form of inner sense only. Walker, 1978, p. 130. This charge has also been rejected by Henry Allison (1976, 1983, esp. chs 1, 2 and 5). My critique of Allison's defense of transcendental idealism, which was originally included at this point, may be found in Guyer, 1987, pp.336-42. For a discussion of the full range of Kant's arguments for transcendental idealism, which involves metaphysical and even theological considerations in addition to the epistemological argument to be examined here, the reader should consult Guyer, 1987, Part V, esp. pp. 343-4, 345-54 and 371-412. This is the view advanced by Allison, e.g. 1983, p. 7. As usual, similar considerations are supposed to apply to time as well. But since Kant's most crucial illustrations of the epistemological argument do not even go through the motions of making a separate case for the transcendental ideality of time, I will refer to space alone in the remainder of this paper. See Martin, 1969, §2, pp. 18-24. Brittan, 1978, p. 70. See Friedman, 1985, pp. 455-506. See also Parsons, 1969, pp. 568-94. See Nagel, G., 1983, ch. 2, esp. p. 31. Allison, 1983, p. 99. It is of course possible that Kant correctly supposes that the true geometry is necessarily true but incorrectly identifies what the true geometry is; it is equally obvious that a mistake of this sort would cast significant doubt

The Rehabilitation of Transcendental Idealism?

33 34 35

167

upon the justification for his claim that the true geometry is necessarily true. Chronicled at great length in Vaihinger, 1892, vol. 2, pp.290-326; reported on more briefly in Kemp Smith, 1923, pp. 113-14. Compare the sinlilar statement by Ross Harrison (1982, p. 215). Ibid.

8

Transcendental Idealism and the Representation of Space Rolf Peter Horstmann Kant's transcendental idealism, has always been a matter of concern and the source of controversial discussion. Since Kant's day, however, the reasons for these critical examinations of transcendental idealism have changed considerably. Kant's contemporaries - philosophers like Jacobi, Maimon, Reinhold, Fichte, and Schelling - were very much convinced of the attractiveness of what they took to be the major claim of transcendental idealism: that there is nothing in the world which is not ultimately an expression of some mental or spiritual activity. What they thought to be the problem with Kant's version of transcendental idealisn1, however, was the connection of this doctrine with two other claims, the first being (1) the idea of a realm of noumenal beings called things-in-themselves, and the second (2) that space and time are only subjective forms of our intuition. These two clain1s they thought to be puzzling because they seemed to imply an unjustified n10desty concerning our ability to know things as they really are. Consequently, for then1 the whole debate about transcendental idealism turned around the question: How is it possible to preserve the fundamental idea of transcendental idealism, while avoiding the assumptions of unknowable things-in-themselves and subjective forms of intuition as lin1iting conditions of that idea. The more interesting attempts to answer this question are known as German idealistic philosophy. It is a fundamental conviction of this philosophical movement that one cannot develop a correct, and that means a bold, version of transcendental idealism while maintaining Kantian things-in-themselves and forms of intuition. This conviction led to very unKantian results. Nowadays things are different and this because almost nobody is convinced any more that there is something attractive about the idea that in dealing with objects we are ultimately dealing with products of our own or of somebody else's mental activity. Consequently the problem with Kant's transcendental idealism no longer consists in

Transcendental Idealism and Space

169

avoiding things-in-themselves and forms of intuition in order to make room for some bold knowledge claims concerning that which is ultimately real. Rather, the problem now consists in finding an interpretation of the Kantian doctrine of things-in-themselves and of space and time which implies a modest reading of transcendental idealism, i.e. a reading which permits Kant's position to be presented as at least compatible with some version or other of empiricism or scientific realism. At first sight this modern situation seems to be an improvement visa-vis the original situation because it partly justifies the impression that the modern approach takes Kant's own intentions much more seriously than they were taken by his late contemporaries. After all, it was Kant himself who insisted that transcendental idealism and empirical realism have deep affinities and who took transcendental idealism to be the unavoidable basis for empiricism or at least for a certain version of it. But a closer look reveals that the conviction that there must be a modest reading of transcendental idealisll1 if one wants to account for Kant's own intentions makes things difficult for Kant. For there seems to be some evidence that there is no way to come to agreement on a modest reading of Kantian transcendental idealism which can integrate thingsin-themselves and subjective forms of representation. The result is that the majority of modern interpreters of Kant's transcendental idealism would consent to the very same thesis with which the German Idealists agreed, i.e. the thesis that things-in-themselves and Kantian forms of intuition are severe obstacles for transcendental idealism. This thesis, however, has a very different nleaning for modern interpreters and German Idealists. For German Idealists it meant that things-in-themselves and subjective forms of representation are an impedinlent to a bold reading of transcendental idealism but not for a modest one. For many modern interpreters, however, it means the opposite, i.e. that things-inthemselves and subjective forms of representation do not allow for a modest reading of transcendental idealism but, on the contrary, require a bold one. This state of affairs mayor may not be remarkable for its own sake. At any rate it shows that Kant did not succeed in giving an unambiguous version of what his teachings concerning things-in-themselves and forms of representation amount to. It is, however, far from obvious that those ambiguities legitimate every criticism of Kant's theoretical philosophy. This seems to be worth mentioning in view of an interpretation of Kant's central statements with respect to things-in-themselves and forms of intuition, presented by P. Guyer in his paper "The Rehabilitation of T'ranscendental Idealism?" (pp. 140~167). This paper, though directed mainly against Henry Allison's book Kant's Transcendental Idealism (1983) contains a detailed criticism of Kant's transcendental Aesthetics

170

Rolf Peter Horstmann

which, I shall argue, has no real basis in Kant's theory and which, I suspect, is. a result of a gross misunderstanding of the systematic intentions or of what might be called the 'spirit' of Kant's theoretical philosophy, as well as of the text of the Critique of Pure Reason, i.e. the 'letter' of his philosophy. The following remarks are designed to substantiate these claims. There is no serious doubt that Kant's transcendental idealisn1 is in part a consequence of his conception of the ontological and epistemological status of space and time. The problen1, rather, is to agree upon Kant's arguments for drawing this consequence. A well-known suggestion is based on the assun1ption that for Kant, to put it in Guyer's words, 'space and time cannot be properties of things-in-themselves because they are subjective forms of representation'. 1 This assumption means that if we agree upon the subjective origin of space and time as forms of our intuition, then we have no good reason to think of objects as spatially and temporally detern1ined entities, considered independently of our way of experiencing them. Given this understanding it is easy to see why the results of Kants transcendental Aesthetics imply at least a problen1atic version of transcendental idealism, i.e. the thesis that we do not know how objects really,2 or independently from us, are. This suggestion as to how a theory of space and time following Kantian lines is connected with considerations concerning the transcendental ideality of objects of experience both has a sufficient basis in Kant's writings and succeeds in giving a rather harmless meaning to transcendental idealism. Nevertheless this interpretation is not uncontroversial and has its opponents, among them Guyer. The reason is that Kant sometimes tells us that things-in-then1selves are not in space and time and because Kant thinks of geon1etrical propositions as a priori and synthetic propositions. These two points are supposed to indicate that there is no good reason for the aforementioned suggestion but that Kant has to and actually does argue for transcendental idealism precisely the other way round, i.e. 'that space and time can only be mere forms of intuition because they cannot be properties of things-inthemselves' (p. 148). It is easy to see that if this description of Kant's strategy for establishing his version of transcendental idealism is correct, then there is no longer anything harmless in claiming the transcendental ideality of objects of experience. For this claim now is derived from assumptions which presuppose our knowledge of things-in-themselves, i.e. our knowledge of how things really are. The obvious question then to be asked is whether this description of Kant's argument for transcendental idealism is acceptable. Is it really the case that Kant has to and does argue 'that space and time can only be mere forms of representation because they cannot be properties of things in themselves'? Following Guyer's example and referring to his

Transcendental Idealism and Space

171

arguments in favour of this description I would like to discuss this question in two steps. First, I want to deal with Guyer's claitll that Kant actually does make use of such an assumption, and secondly I want to examine the reasons Guyer puts forward for holding that Kant has to subscribe to such an assumption. 'That Kant's inference is fron1 the nonspatiality of things-in-themselves to the subjectivity of the necessary forms of representation' (p. 149) so runs another formulation of Guyer's of the point under discussion - is without doubt a claim which can be settled only by textual evidence. Consequently Guyer refers to what he calls 'prominent passages in Kant's published work as well as ... several key passages in his unpublished remains' (p. 149). Restricting ourselves to those passages which can be found in Kant's published work there seems to be mainly (and only) one on which Guyer relies to establish his claim. This is the passage entitled 'Conclusions fron1 the above concepts' which follows §3 of edition B of the Critique of Pure Reason. This passage as Guyer correctly notes 'begins with the outright assertion that things-inthen1selves are not spatial' (p. 150). Kant then proceeds to state his reason for this assertion which turns on a consideration of the incompatibility of the apriority of an intuition with its being an independent or real determination of an object. Now, this is all that can be found in this 'prominent passage'. Does it give support to Guyer's assertion that Kant infers from the nonspatiality of things-in-themselves that space (and time) are merely subjective forms of representation? I do not think so, rather, I believe that Guyer takes insufficient account of two things. The first is that Kant declares this passage to be a conclusion from some other considerations. They are the ones expressed in the 'Metaphysical' and 'Transcendental Expositions' of the representation of space. Here the main result is that space is an a priori intuition. From this result Kant infers that things-in-themselves are not spatial. So all one can gain from this passage which refers to things-in-themselves is an inference from the apriority of the representation of space to the nonspatiality of things-in-themselves. Obviously under this interpretation the nonspatiality of things-in-themselves cannot be taken to be a premise. This leads to the second point which Guyer fails to notice. The passage considered so far only tells us how Kant detern1ines in this context the relation between apriority and nonspatiality. Until now the subjectivity of the representation of space has not even been mentioned. That space is a subjective condition of sensibility con1es into play in the context of the second conclusion which Kant draws from the apriority of the intuition of space. In this second conclusion Kant combines the result of his expositions of the concept of space with a frequently criticized (e.g. by the early Russell 3 and by Vaihinger4 )

172

Rolf Peter Horstmann

argun1ent according to which the pure form of sensible intuitions has to be an a priori intuition (B34f). Kant implies in this conclusion that because space is an a priori intuition it therefore is a pure form of sensible intuitions - and now I quote from Kant - 'i.e. the subjective condition of sensibility' (B42). Here the subjective status of the representation of space clearly is a consequence of the apriority of space. Far from being a conclusion which follows fro111 some assumption or other about things-in-themselves, as Guyer wants us to believe, the subjectivity claim just as before the claim concerning the nonspatiality of things-in-themselves are both supposed to be conclusions from the apriority of the intuition of space. Guyer's interpretation of the first two paragraphs of the 'Conclusions from the above concepts' lacks not only immanent plausibility, but makes no sense from a philological point of view as well. If one looks at Guyer's claim, his whole argument, as far as it is based on the passage considered so far, depends on whether the first two paragraphs of the 'Conclusions from the above concepts' can be read as an inference, where the first paragraph states one or more premises and the second contains a conclusion drawn from these premises. Though Guyer is committed to this reading as the remarks above indicate, there is no textual evidence whatsoever to support this reading. On the contrary, there are several reasons which make it rather unconvincing. The first is that Guyer fails to notice the place and the title of this section. This section follows §2 ('Metaphysical Exposition of this Concept', i.e. the concept of space) and §3 ('Transcendental Exposition of the Concept of Space') of the Transcendental Aesthetic and has the function of hinting at the n1ain points which Kant takes to be the results of his demonstration of the ontological and epistemological status of the representation of space. This is shown clearly by the title of this discussion which announces no further arguments in favour or against a particular conception of space but promises 'Conclusions' from what has been reached so far in §§2 and 3. The second point which Guyer overlooks is that Kant puts in front of the first two paragraphs of the section here under scrutiny an (a) and a (b) respectively. Given the aforementioned context in which the whole section is situated, the most plausible interpretation of this peculiarity is that Kant wants to distinguish conclusions drawn from his conception of space with respect to the question whether space is a property of things-in-themselves from conclusions concerning a quite different question, i.e. whether and in what sense space is a condition of experience. The third philological point against Guyer is that there is not the slightest stylistical, grammatical or syntactical evidence that Kant considered the second paragraph of that little chapter as stating conclusions drawn from the first paragraph. Though it is true that philology is not philosophy, this

Transcendental Idealism and Space

173

truism should not prevent an interpreter of a given philosophical text from finding and comnlunicating textual support for his interpretation. This should suffice to show that there nlight be not as much evidence as Guyer thinks for the assertion that Kant actually uses an argument for the merely subjective status of the representations of space and time which starts from the assumption that things-in-themselves are not in space and time. At least it seems to be possible to give an alternative interpretation of the 'most prominent passage' to which Guyer refers in support of his claim. This result, however, is not very remarkable if considered in connection with Guyer's stronger assertion that Kant has . to assume that space (and time) cannot be deternlinations of things-inthenlselves in order to establish that they are merely subjective forms of representation. This stronger assertion, if true, would then be fatal for any modest interpretation of transcendental idealism even if one rejects the claim that Kant actually uses sonle assumption about the nonspatiality of things-in-themselves. This is the case because it is obvious that if Kant subscribes to this stronger assertion then he would contradict the very basis of his transcendental idealism, i.e. the claim that we do not know what objects really, or independently of us, are. In .order to understand why Guyer insists on his stronger claim let me first recapitulate what I take to be the nlain points of his argument. Guyer's initial assumption is that Kant has to insist on the subjective status of space (and time) as forms of representation because otherwise he could not account for the apriority of the propositions of geometry and arithmetic. For a priori propositions are necessary propositions, and this does not allow us to think of space or some spatial determination as a property of things considered independent from our way of experiencing them. To this consideration so far nobody would object, and even the most tender-minded Kantian would agree with Guyer that it is difficult to see how anyone who does not accept sonle such consideration could represent Kant's thought. However, in pursuing this line of reasoning Guyer becomes very critical of the conception of necessity involved in this consideration. He maintains that what Kant presupposes in claiming the incompatibility of a priori knowledge of something with its independent existence is a conception of absolute necessity without having an argument for the exclusion of the much more plausible idea of a conditional necessity. This means, to put it in Guyer's terms, that 'Kant assumes that what we know a priori is not this proposition: (1) Necessarily, if we are to perceive an object then it must be spatial ..., but rather this proposition: (2) 'If we perceive an object, it is necessarily spatial ... ' (p. 25). Guyer then proceeds to argue that all that Kant can claim legitimately is (1), that what he in fact assumes is (2), that (2) is not a logically valid consequence of (1) and that therefore a transcendental idealisnl which presupposes (2) has

174

Rolf Peter Horstmann

no argumentative basis in Kant's own systematic outline. It is obvious that the plausibility of this reasoning depends upon the plausibility of the first step in Guyer's argument. It depends upon the plausibility of the claim that a priori knowledge is compatible with conditional necessity which in turn does not exclude the independent existence of spatiality which is known a priori. The question to be asked with respect to this claim has t\VO aspects: one concerns Guyer's proposal of how to construe the conlpatibility, the other concerns the reasons for the rejection of this proposal by Kant. I start with the first aspect. For Guyer, a priori knowledge of something is compatible with its independent, non-subjective existence because 'it seems at least possible to imagine that we could know, because of certain constraints on our ability to perceive, that any object we perceive must have a certain property' (p. 24). This may very well be the case. But what does it show with respect to the possibility of a priori knowledge especially of spatial determinations? All it shows is the following: if the apriority of our knowledge of spatial properties of things is due to the fact that our knowledge is submitted to some subjective factors, that necessity which characterizes a priori knowledge is subjective necessity. This subjective necessity, however, is not sufficient to guarantee the objective validity of a priori judgements concerning spatial determinations and there is no way to get this guarantee from subjective necessity alone. .Given only subjective necessity the objective validity can only be secured in one of two ways: either one has to refer to objects as empirically given things-in-themselves, then our knowledge of spatial determinations is in the end empirical knowledge and its correspondence with our only subjectively necessary geometrical knowledge would be entirely contingent. Or else one has to endorse a position like Kant's according to which spatial determinations are not properties of independent objects. Guyer's proposal concerning the compatibility of a priori knowledge and independent existence thus turns out to be insufficient if by a priori knowledge is meant a priori knowledge of objects. This leads to the second aspect of the question mentioned before. That Kant rejects any such consideration which is based on subjective necessity alone seems to me to be as obvious as it is to Guyer. Less obvious is whether Kant has any reasonable basis for claiming what Guyer takes to be the unreasonable alternative to conditional necessity, i.e. absolute necessity. Now, Guyer clearly 'and convincingly shows that if Kant rests his plea for absolute necessity solely on the assumption of the necessary truth of geometrical propositions his position would be extremely difficult to defend. But there are reasons to suppose that Kant was very well aware of this difficulty and consequently tried to avoid the impression that the apriority of the intuition of space is a result or a consequence of his theory of geometry. In fact one might be tempted

Transcendental Idealism and Space

175

to describe Kant's reasons for introducing within the Transcendental Aesthetics of edition B the distinction between a Metaphysical and a Transcendental Exposition as being n10tivated by the attempt to show, more clearly than he did in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, that his arguments concerning the apriority of space are totally independent from his theory of geometry. In the first edition (A23-35) those considerations within Kant's discussion of space which concern geon1etry are mixed together with those arguments which are designed to demonstrate that space is an a priori intuition. This might have led to the impression that Kant actually relies on the necessity of geometrical propositions in his attempt to prove the apriority of space. In the second edition (B38-41) however, by ll1eans of separating his arguments concerning space from considerations concerning geometry, he clearly points out that for him the necessity of geometrical propositions is a consequence of the apriority of the representation of space and not vice versa. Therefore he first proves, in the Metaphysical Exposition, that space is an a priori intuition. For this proof is designed to show that space cannot be conceived as something objective in the sense of something independently existing. Kant then proceeds, in the Transcendental Exposition, to argue that given his conception of space one can explain why we are justified in claiming for geometrical propositions the status of a priori propositions. 5 Evidently, then, for Kant nothing depends upon the assumption of the necessary truth of geometrical propositions in the attempt to demonstrate the transcendental ideality of space which in turn is supposed to be the basis for transcendental idealism. It thus appears that neither of Guyer's two claims is quite convincing: it rather seems to be the case that Kant does not and need not establish his transcendental idealism by presupposing the nonspatiality of things in themselves and the necessary truth of geometrical propositions. This result, if acceptable at all, shows that in order to find the weak point in Kant's position as far as it is based on the results of the Transcendental Aesthetics either one has to give n1uch more attention to Kant's text than Guyer does or one should search in contexts other than those which refer to things-in-themselves and the modal status of propositions of geometry. This implies that my remarks against Guyer's criticism of transcendental idealism should not be taken as possible elements of a defence of Kant's theory. If, however, as Kant n1aintains in R4860, the useful intention (nutzliche Absicht) of philosophical history consists in modelling good paradigms and in exhibiting instructive mistakes then there may be some sense in quarrelling over how to read Kant. It is, after all, in nobody's interest to defend Kant with respect to claims he never made or to criticize his position because of mistakes which he was careful enough to avoid.

176

Rolf Peter Horstmann

NOTES 1

2

3 4 5

Guyer's paper is quoted from this volume. With the exception of the Critique of Pure Reason which is cited in the standard way according to the pagination of the first (A) and the second (B) edition, all other references to Kantian texts are to Kants Gesalnmelte Schriften (Berlin, 1900-). It should be noted that the term 'really' is used n1etaphorically in this formulation. In using this term in this context I do not mean to imply that the Kantian category 'reality' can be applied to things-in-then1selves. As is well known, for Kant the application of his categories to anything else than appearances makes no sense at all. Russell, 1956, pp. 180-1. Vaihinger, 1892, pp. 71-5. For a more detailed examination of Kant's VIews concerning space and geometry, see Horstn1ann, 1976, pp. 17-30.

Part IV

Judgement and Individuals

9

Analytic/Dialectic Reinhard Brandt

The 'Critique of Aesthetic Judgement' is. divided into analytic and dialectic according to Kant's ,scheme of general and transcendental logic, the analytic divided according to his own references (V 266, 277, 278) 1 into the exposition and deduction of the concept of the beautiful and the judgement of taste respectively. The actual deduction is carried out in three sentences in §38 to which Kant remarked, 'This deduction is so easy because it does not need to justify the objective reality of a concept' - in contrast to the difficult deduction of the concepts of understanding in the Critique of Pure Reason which proves the objective reality of these concepts, i.e. the categories. The justification which the deduction of the 'Critique of Aesthetic Judgement' bears out, refers only to the fact 'that we are justified in assuming the same subjective conditions of judgement to be present in everyone generally which we discover in ourselves.' (V 290) The deduction is unsatisfactory for two reasons. Firstly, it merely repeats what the reader already knows from the exposition of the judgement of taste (esp. §9-§ 12). Secondly, although the necessity of the agreement of all, which Kant ascribes to the pure judgement of taste, may follow from the universality of the subjective conditions of the faculty of judgement, this necessity following from the subjective generality is not identical with that necessity which we demand when we say that everyone should agree with our feeling and judgement. 'The judgement of taste demands the agreement of everyone; and whoever declares something to be beautiful wants that everyone ought to applaud the object considered and also declare it to be beautiful.' (V 237) The necessity following from the generality of the subjective conditions of judgement implies nothing more than the tautological fact that given identical originating conditions, aesthetic judgements are identical. But Kant always means something different when he speaks of the necessity of the agreement of everyone else. It is not the identity of judgement following from the universality of the

180

Reinhard Brandt

conditions of knowledge in all judging subjects (which factually occurs when the conditions are realized in their pure form) but rather a practical necessity: everyone should agree with my judgement; my opinion involves a demand: judge as I do! The one judging is interested in a 'common sense' (Gemeinsinn) in which aesthetic judgements are communicable and a consensus can be reached. Staying within the deduction in the analytic, we can remain fully indifferent to the harmony of aesthetic feeling and judgements; the drawing up of the pre-conditions of a pure judgement of taste and its expression is a private matter for each individual and does not interest me. The agreement may be expected, but it cannot be demanded. Why should one person not follow his inclination to judge aesthetic phenomena under the headings of perfection and the good, while another bases it on appeal and emotion (Reiz und Rithrung)? Instead of insisting on monotonous consonance in pure judgements of taste, one might delight in a variety of divergent judgements whose principles one has understood. If necessity is to be derived from universality, the deduction has not achieved the goal of justifying the practical necessity of everyone else agreeing with my feeling and judgen1ent of taste which Kant has asserted. Now a deduction can be found in the 'Dialectic of Aesthetic judgement' which Kant clearly views as difficult: 'But if one concedes, at least, that our deduction has proceeded correctly even if it has not yet been made sufficiently clear in all its details, ... ' (V 346). Kant's formulation is open with regard to what 'our deduction' refers to and to the question of which concept or idea is proved to be real in it. It would be natural to think of the addition of '(our deduction) of the transcendental idea(s) of the supersensible' (comp. V346, line 7). If that is correct, then the deduction of these ideas was executed by showing it to be the only means of resolving the antinomy of taste (§57). In any case, the con1plex meant by 'our deduction' is not identical with the deduction in the 'Analytic' but rather refers to the proof in the context of the resolution of the antinomy of taste. Now Kant speaks, as is known, of a deduction in the 'Dialectic' of The Critique of Pure Reason too (e.g., A662-70), but with a strange inversion of the problem situation. If the deduction of the categories in the 'Analytic' of the Critique of Pure Reason was difficult, in the 'Critique of Aesthetic judgement' it is the deduction in the 'Dialectic' which is difficult; otherwise he would not have hoped that it proceeded correctly. In the first Critique Kant says about the ideas: 'An objective deduction, such as we were able to present in the case of the categories, is actually not possible with regard to these transcendental ideas. For they have, in fact, no relation to any object which could be congruent to them ... ' (A336). The same holds true for the deduction of the concept of taste in the 'Analytic' in the 'Critique of Aesthetic judgen1ent';

Analytic/Dialectic

181

it is so easy 'because it does not need to justify the objective reality of a concept.' The different function which the transcendental idea has on the one hand for the cognitive judgement and on the other for the judgement of taste corresponds to the inverse weighting given to the respective deductions with regard to their degrees of difficulty and their objective reference. While the idea in the Critique of Pure Reason denotes an object which is beyond the reach of human knowledge, the judgement of taste with its demand for necessary approval refers positively to the transcendental idea of the supersensible.The idea is called 'the only key to the deciphering' of the faculty of aesthetic judgement (V 341). It is only as a representation of an idea of reason that the beautiful pleases 'with that claim to general agreement whereby the soul (Gemuth) is simultaneously conscious of a certain ennoblement and elevation over and above the pure receptivity of pleasure through sense impressions and also estimates the value of others according to a similar maxim of their faculty of judgement. This is the intelligible which ... their taste looks up to ... ' (V353). So the second deduction has a constitutive function for the pure judgen1ent of taste! This fact corresponds to a reference by Kant in the 'Analytic' which is decisive for the structure of the proof in the 'Critique of Aesthetic Judgement'. In the final section of the last paragraph (§22) within the discussion of the fourth 'moment' of the judgement of taste, that is, of the necessity of general agreement, Kant writes that perhaps taste is only the idea of an artificial faculty yet to be acquired, so that the judgement of taste with its expectation of general approval is in fact a demand of reason to produce such a harmony of sense (Sinnesart), and the 'ought', that is, the objective necessity of the congruence of the feeling of everyone with each other, signifies only the possibility of agreement, and the judgement of taste presents only an exanlple of the application of this principle: we do not want to nor can we yet investigate this here, but now our task is to resolve the faculty of judgement into its elements and finally unify them in the idea of a common sense. (V 240)

The unification which concludes the proof of the 'Analytic', which incorporates the elements of judgement of taste exposed before into the idea of a common sense, is plainly found in §40. The demand of reason, on the other hand, which is present in the judgement of taste with its postulate of general agreement, 'cannot be investigated here' - here in the 'Analytic'. This is the topic of the 'Dialectic'. The 'Analytic' concedes that it is not complete with respect to the justification of the judgement of taste or the deduction of the concept of the beautiful. In the following I want to maintain the thesis that in fact the concept of the beautiful and with it the pure judgement of taste is only completely deduced in the 'Dialectic'. The claim which the judgement of taste

182

Reinhard Brandt

makes for general approval cannot be upheld without recourse to the idea of the supersensible which is first available to the pure judgement of taste in the 'Dialectic'. Is this thesis correct, and if so, how can the dialectic, the logic of illusion, have the positive function by which it becomes in a certain sense the sphere of truth and not of deception and of illusion? We shall sketch the elements of Kant's concept of dialectic and briefly follow the development of this concept through the Critique of Pure Reason to the Critique of Practical Reason and only then return to the 'Critique of Aesthetic Judgement'. What does Kant mean by dialectic? In the reference book of Kant's lectures on logic, Meier (1752), dialectic is the logic of probability in contrast to the logic of certainty. In §6 it says: The doctrine of reason treats either of a wholly certain scientific knowledge and presentation of same, or of probable scientific knowledge and presentation of same. The former is the rational doctrine of totally certain scientific knowledge (analytica) and the latter the rational doctrine of probable scientific knowledge (dialectica, logica probabilium). We shall treat of the first doctrine of reason.

In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant explicitly dismisses this concept of dialectic: 'Above we have called dialectic in general a logic of illusion. That does not mean that it is a doctrine of probability ... ' (A293). But in the lectures on logic Kant follows G.F. Meier's conception until the late 1770s and accordingly the difference between analytic and dialectic is only marginal, for Kant was never interested in a separate logic of probability. The logic lectures of about 1780 (which either have not been published or have been misdated) show a fundamental innovation in their prolegomena which was then incorporated into the introduction of the transcendental logic of the Critique of Pure Reason (A57-62). Logic is divided into a logic of truth, the analytic, and a logic of illusion, the dialectic. A common feature of both forms of logic, the general and the transcendental, is that analytic becomes a dialectic when logic is not used as a canon but as an organon. The logical fallacy differs from the transcendental fallacy in that its artificial illusion disappears when the fallacy is recognized, whereas the illusion of the transcendental fallacy is natural and remains even when the mistake basic to it has been shown. Kant has the same opinion of the logical fallacy which we already find in Meier (1752): 'When I notice the fallacy in syllogism, I reject it and it cannot deceive me' (p.432). Kant says in the Critique of Pure Reason: 'Logical illusion, which consists merely in the imitation of the form of reason (the illusion of sophistical syllogisms), arises entirely fron1 a want of due attention to logical rules. As soon as the attention is awakened to the case before us, this illusion totally disappears' (A296-7). In logically fallacious syllogisms there is only a deception whereas transcendental dialectic is

Analytic/Dialectic

183

always accompanied by illusion, as Kant determines by taking up the difference between fraus and illusio he made in the seventies in the field of anthropology and aesthetics (con1p. esp. XV903ff). With regard to the content, Kant with his doctrine of the inevitable illusion of reason ties onto the two forms of fallacy which he discussed in the last section of his dissertation of 1770, one being the influence of sensibility on understanding (vitium subreptionis) and the other being the misinterpretation of certain principles in favour of the use of understanding (principia convenientiae) as constitutive principles of things themselves (the latter in §30 of the Dissertation). The dialectic of reason is an illusion to which man naturally succun1bs. The spell of the illusion is broken only by a special form of the transcendental dialectic, the antinomy. In the process of reasoning, an object emerges about which contradictory assertions are possible; namely, the world in its totality. The antithesis in the concept of the world as a whole destroys the illusion of being able to make unlimited valid conclusions from the conditioned and on the basis of logically correct syllogisms alone arrive at objects thus shown to have the same status of knowability as that which is given under subjective conditions. Without this antithesis, the dialectic would become a transcendental sophistry, 'An art of producing dogn1atically such illusion (an art which is unfortunately too current among the practitioners of metaphysical juggling),' but would not be a 'critique of understanding and reason in regard to their hyperphysical use in order to expose the groundless nature of their pretensions.' (A63-4) The antithesis of the antinomy shows that a principle mistake has been made in the procedure of reason. The inferred concepts of the unconditioned - the ideas - have seemingly the same status as the conditioned from which they started and arouse the illusion that they designate objects which can be made a topic for human knowledge. If by means of the dialectic in the concept of the world one discovers the illusion, then one sees that reason has dreamed of knowledge which it cannot realize. The supposedly knowable objects of traditional metaphysics, the. I as such, the world as a totality, and God, do not exist in the sense which reason would like to give them. The only possible escape from the antinomy which shows the dialectic to be mere illusion is transcendental idealism: the doctrine of the subjectivity of space and time as forms of intuition and therewith the distinction of the thing-in-itself (Ding-an-sich) and appearance introduced in the 'Transcendental Aesthetic'. Without this escape, the dialectic would be a real antinomy of reason, and scepticism the only philosophical message. The dogmatism of metaphysics would thereby be destroyed, but in its place there would appear the non-doctrine of the impossibility of any knowledge by means of reason.

184

Reinhard Brandt

Just as the transcendental analytic presupposes the aesthetic as its organon (comp. A46), so the transcendental dialectic uses and affirms the distinction of the thing-in-itself and appearance made in the 'Aesthetic' for the resolution of the illusion. In his own interpretation of the critical philosophy Kant has the tendency to ascribe all the merit of having discovered transcendental idealism to the antinomy of pure reason and not to the transcendental aesthetic. Kant says in the Critique of Practical Reason that the antinomy is 'the n10st beneficial abbreviation which human reason could have ever fallen into by finally driving it to look for the key to get out of this labyrinth ... '(V 107). The separation of the thing-in-itself and appearance cannot be the result of the antinomy because we already find it in the dissertation of 1770 which is far from the concepts of a transcendental analytic and dialectic - that is to say far from every antinomy of reason. The declaration in the Critique of Practical Reason must mean that the discovery of the seeming antinomy of pure reason affirms the separation of the thing-in-itself and appearance and adds to the Dissertation of 1770 the critical insight that the res ipsae are not possible objects of human knowledge. And when Kant retrospectively writes: 'I seriously tried to demonstrate propositions and their contrary not in order to establish scepticism but because I suspected an illusion of understanding and wanted to know where it was hidden. The year '69 threw a great light on this matter' (Refl. 5037), he grants decisive merit in the forn1ation of his doctrine of 1770 to the antithesis as a heuristic procedure, but theses and antitheses, as they are spoken of here, and the transcendental dialectic in the concept of the world have in common only their formal structure of antithesis. They are not antinomies in the precise sense of the word as used by Kant in 1781. From the discussion up to this point we can see that the dualism of analytic and dialectic developed in the sphere of logic and episten1010gy and only here does it have its place. In 1781 Kant was of the same opinion and in this phase of his intellectual development nothing indicates that the structure of analytic and dialectic could be transposed to other fields of philosophy and that a further critique of practical reason and even of the faculty of judgement should be possible on its basis. Both themes are alluded to in the Critique of Pure Reason and in both cases Kant evokes the impression that a further treatment should presuppose the critical doctrine and can only be developed on the grounds of the critical insight of reason; in 1781 it is wholly unKantian to think that a separate analytic and dialectic could once again be possible as parallel phenomena. And nevertheless the Critique of Practical Reason of 1788 and the Critique of Aesthetic and Teleological Judgement published two years later are structurally based on the dichotomy of the logic of truth and the logic of illusion. We can already say that there must be at least a partial change in

Analytic/Dialectic

185

the functions of analytic and dialectic because reason in the field of moral philosophy is, as pure practical reason, the source of original knowledge. The antinomy which appears in the 'Dialectic' can therefore hardly be satisfied with the role of unmasking the pretended knowledge of reason as a mere illusion. Secondly, the two latter critiques in their analytics and dialectics treat of only one faculty; in the first Critique the faculty of practical reason, and in the second Critique the faculty of judgement. The basis for the dichotomies in the Critique of Pure Reason, which in the 'Analytic' treated of the understanding, the faculty of concepts and judgements, and in the 'Dialectic' treated of reason, the faculty of drawing conclusions, is absent. And thirdly, structural changes must emerge from the fact that there is no longer a dichotomy of aesthetic and logic within the doctrine of elenlents (Elementarlehre); the two later critiques cannot rely on an 'organon' whose doctrine is presumed and used in both parts of the logic. We should add that Kant himself did not write anything about this nlatter, but instead carried out the change and drew the implicit and far-reaching consequences. Let us turn our attention now to the dual construction of analytic and dialectic of the second Critique. The 'Analytic' which begins with the fact of the categorical imperative (V31) and then analyses this fact, turns the first part of the doctrine of the elements and the 'Analytic' of the Critique of Pure Reason upside-down (comp. V 16). It begins with the synthetic basic principle of the imperative and then passes over to the concept of the object of our will and finally discusses the motivating forces in its'Aesthetic'. By incorporating the aesthetic into the analytic, Kant changes his previous conceptions fundamentally; for the entire structure and the proof of the Critique of Pure Reason it was, as we have already suggested, essential that aesthetic and logic be heterogeneous trunks of human knowledge and that the aesthetic by no means belongs to the first part of logic, the analytic. The aesthetic provided the organon for the logic (A46); based on intuition, the transcendental logic in the 'Analytic' was able to furnish a deduction of the concepts of understanding and thereby a proof of the validity of the principles of understanding. In the area of reason and the ideas reason reveals, this organon is absent; logic substitutes itself for it and thereby becomes dialectical. In order to prove the dialectic to be only an illusion, the difference between thing-in-itself and appearance was used which had already been introduced in the 'Aesthetic'. In the Critique of Practical Reason Kant not only eliminates the fundamental dualism of logic and aesthetic for practical reason but he goes one step further. He changes post festu1'rl the guiding conception of the Critique of Pure Reason: 'The analytic of theoretical pure reason was divided into transcendental aesthetic and transcendental logic ... ' (V 90; compo 16 and also the Critique of Pure Reason BXXI, note: 'The analysis of the metaphysician

186

Reinhard Brandt

separates pure cognItIon a priort Into two heterogeneous elen1ents, namely the cognition of things as phenomena, and of things-inthemselves. The dialectic combines ...'). We do not want to go any further into this change of the original idea of the Critique of Pure Reason, but only insist on the fact that in the 'Analytic' of the Critique of Practical Reason no deduction can be found. Kant treats 'Of the Deduction of the Basic Principles of Pure Practical Reason' (V 42) but he discusses it only problen1atically and gives his reason for the rejection of the possibility of a real deduction. In the 'Analytic' a deduction of the synthetic judgement a priori, the categorical imperative, is no longer possible because of the incorporation of the aesthetic into the logic. The problem of a synthetic relation a priori of two heterogeneous elements, one conceptual and one sensible, is first found in the 'Dialectic of Pure Practical Reason' (V 107ff.). In it Kant discusses the object which must necessarily be added to the will which has previously been determined formally. This object is called the highest good. Pure practical reason tries 'to add the unconditioned to the practically conditioned (which is based on affection and natural needs) not in order to determine the will, but when this determination (in the moral law) has already been given, it looks for the unconditioned totality of the object of pure practical reason under the name of the highest good' (V 108). The dialectic arises, according to Kant's presentation (which we will criticize as systematically incorrect in the following discussion), through the disjunction (which in a non-critical philosophy is necessarily complete) of the aesthetic or Epicurean determination on the one hand and the logical or Stoic determination on the other (V 112). Both the Epicureans and the Stoics placed the components of morality and happiness in the concept of the highest good in an analytic relation of implication. 'The concept of virtue for the Epicureans was already implied in the maxim to further one's own happiness; whereas the feeling of happiness for the Stoics was already contained in the consciousness of one's own virtue' (V 112). But only the Stoic variant can satisfy conditions of morality and happiness which were set down in the 'Analytic'. The synthesis of morality and happiness, however, cannot be thought of analytically as the Stoics wanted to do. How is this connection possible if the maxim of virtue cannot be the effective cause of happiness under the real conditions of experience? Kant answers: But because I not only have the right to think of my noumenal existence in an intelligible world but have a purely intellectual determination of my causality (in the sensual world) by the moral law, so it is not impossible that the nl0rality of my attitude has, if not an immediate, a nonetheless mediate (by means of an intelligible cause of nature) and indeed necessary relationship as cause with happiness as effect in the sensual world. This connection in a nature that is

Analytic!Dialectic

187

only an object of my senses can only be accidental and does not suffice for the highest good (V 114-15)

The exclusion of one of the two theses demonstrates that the antinomy does not satisfy the formal principle of equivalence of thesis and antithesis in the dialectic of pure theoretical reason. There is good reason for doubting that the antithesis presented by Kant can be considered as a dialectic of pure practical reason. It is not our intention to examine here whether pure practical reason in Kant's systen1 can actually become dialectic at all and, if so, what form the correctly forn1ulated antinomy would take. It would have to adhere to the basic principle of the function of the highest good which, perhaps, can be formulated as follows: The absolute good, which consists in a rigorous adherence to the formal, law-like determination of the will demanded by reaSOD, must at the same time also be good for me and take into consideration my own inevitable idea of happiness. It would be an unreasonable reason which would constrain n1e to perform actions which only stand in accidental relation to that which is good for me, i.e., my happiness. Moral action lies within my power, not, however, happiness (as the Stoa erroneously presumed). The antinomy would have to portray a dialectic which is only illusory, and which does not belong to critical reason itself which, taken by itself, can never be dialectical, but instead, as in the Critique of 1781, lies in a natural and unavoidable error of the faculty of judgement. It would have to be possible to dissolve the antinomy by introducing a differentiation between the thing-in-itself (Ding-an-sich) and appearance. I do not believe that it is possible to forn1ulate an antithesis which would do justice to these desiderata. Let us turn from the antinomy of pure practical reason as delineated by Kant to its resolution. From the first, it is depicted in such a manner that it can only occur by answering the question: 'How is the highest good practically possible?' and that this question is presented as another question: 'How is the highest good possible a priori as a synthetic concept?' (V 112-13). The answering of this question is only possible by a transcendental deduction of the highest good. Thus within the dialectic we are confronted with a question and a form of response which according to the Prolegomena and its progran1me of transcendental philosophy (differing already from that of the Critique of Pure Reason) unequivocally belongs to the sphere of the 'Analytic'. ('The actual task which has been formulated so precisely and on which everything depends, is, therefore: How are synthetic judgements possible a priori?'

(IV 276)). The resolution of the antinomy, therefore, of practical reason is only possible by means of the deduction of the synthetic concept of the

188

Reinhard Brandt

highest good, a task, which in the first Critique had been the central problem of 'Analytic', not 'Dialectic'. Accordingly it does not suffice to demonstrate that the antithesis does not exist. Such a proof would be den10nstrated by elimination of the contradiction, but that would not, however, yield the positive proof of the objective reality of the problematical concept. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant argued that the inconsistency in the concept of the world proved to be mere illusion as soon as the differentiation in the 'Aesthetic' between the thingin-itself and appearance was taken into consideration. With this argumentation, the dialectic disappeared. The transcendental deduction of the ideas which was later undertaken in the 'Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic' was completely unrelated to the resolution of the dialectic. Here, though, the two are combined into one in Kant's text; the resolution of the antinomy is only successful if the synthetic concept of the highest good can be proved, i.e. deduced to be objectively real. At one point Kant appears to hint at the structure of the resolution of the antinomy which is familiar from the Critique of Pure Reason: 'As I have not the sole right to consider my existence as a noumenon in the world of understanding, but rather have with regard to the moral law a purely intellectual basis for my causality (in the world of the senses), ... ' (V 114, 34-115, 2). It could be said that the mere conceptual possibility of a world of the understanding provides a guarantee that the contradiction between thesis and antithesis in the antinomy is solved (whatever form this may take), and that the dialectic shows itself to be a simple if natural illusion discovered by means of the introduction of the differentiation between an object in itself and appearance according to the model of the Critique of Pure Reason. The proof of the objective reality of the noumenal would therefore be separated from the antinomy solution in the same manner as occurs in the first Critique, where the deduction of the subjective reality of ideas has, as we observed, no connection with the solution of the antinomy. However, Kant does not pursue this line of thought, perhaps because the mere conceptual possibility of the noumenal was already rendered more or less superfluous by the 'Analytic'; the categorical imperative ensures the objective practical reality of noumenal freedom. The following consideration can serve to contribute to the understanding of the linking together of the solution of the antinomy and the deduction. The concept of the highest good is a necessary concept of practical reason, not of theoretical reason. The proof that it is not contradictory is of no use to practical reason. It requires as such not only consistent conceivability but also the actual possibility of the concept demonstrated as essential to it. Thus only the proof of practical objective reality can save pure practical reason from aporia. The programn1atic question 'How are synthetic judgements a priori possible?'

Analytic/Dialectic

189

is thereby shifted from the 'Analytic' into the 'Dialectic'. In the latter there is to be found the proof of the synthetic connection of morality and happiness. It is in the 'Dialectic' and not the 'Analytic' that we find a deduction which, if it failed, would mean that practical reason itself would be destroyed (V 114). These findings concur with the fact that in the 'Dialectic' we find the key word which we examined briefly at the beginning of our discussio'n: the deduction of the concept of the highest good is 'difficult' (V 112, 34). Just like the 'difficult' transcendental deduction of the categories in the Critique of Pure Reason it is obliged to demonstrate the objective (even though practical) reality of a concept and not merely its subjective reality. Why is the deduction conceived of as transcendental (V 113)? The Critique of Practical Reason does not belong to the realm of transcendental philosophy and in the text Kant uses the concept of the transcendental (which, with strict consistency, does not appear in the Foundation of the Metaphysics of Morals) only in connection with problems of theoretical philosophy. And just that seems to be the reason here, as well: the concept of the highest good belongs, as is stated in the 'First Introduction to the Critique of Judgement', only indirectly to practical philosophy (XX 199, 24-5). Its realization does not lie in our power, as does the adherence to the imperative itself, and it depends on factors which would in thenlselves be the object of a theoretical knowledge of reason, if our reason was not merely a human one. In the Critique of Practical Reason the 'Analytic' has, in fact, become analytical. It analyzes the - synthetic - judgement of the categorical imperative which is existent in the will. How this synthetic judgement is possible a priori cannot and need not be answered. In the 'Dialectic', in contrast, the question 'How is the synthetic concept of the highest good a priori possible?' is posed ostensibly by an antinomy of pure reason and solved by a - transcendental - deduction of the concept. It is quite obvious that the concept of analytic and dialectic underwent a reversal between 1781 and 1788, and parallel to that it underwent systenlatic and necessary changes in the area between theoretical and practical reason. Herewith we return to the work with which we began this study, 'The Critique of Aesthetic Judgement'. In which relation do analytic and dialectic stand in this 'Critique'? In our introductory remarks we saw that Kant entrusts the dialectic of the judgement of taste with a continuation of the positive programnle of deduction by letting the claim to general approval be based on the relation of the judgement to the transcendental idea of the supersensible. Only the 'second' deduction, that is, actually, the second part of the deduction, explains 'how the feeling in the judgement of taste comes to be exacted from everyone as a sort of duty,' a duty founded on the

190

Reinhard Brandt

interest of reason which 'is not entitled to draw conclusions from the character of a merely reflective judgement' (V 296). Only the dialectic leads us to the point where we understand that 'the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good, and also only in this regard (of a relation which is natural for everyone and which also everyone demands of everyone else as a duty) does it please with a claim to everyone's approval' (V 353). Kant develops in the 'Dialectic of the Aesthetic Faculty of Judgen1ent' an antithesis of the principles of the pure judgement of taste. The 'incompatibility of the aesthetic judgements of sense' is just as nondialectical as 'the conflict of the judgements of taste, in so far as everyone only appeals to his own taste' (V 337). Only the judgement of taste of the 'critique', which is in its pretension pure and which demands unanin1ity from everyone else, is subtly rational (vernunftelnd) (V 286, 337; VII 240) and relates to general valid principles. The 'conflict of these principles underlying each and every (pure) judgement of taste' (V 339) is developed by Kant as the dialectic of the aesthetic faculty of judgement. The antinomy of these principles is similar to that of pure practical reason. The hedonistic side presents its thesis: 'The judgement of taste is not based upon concepts; for otherwise it would admit of dispute (decision by means of proofs).' The rationalistic counterpart claims: 'The judgement of taste is grounded on concepts; for otherwise, notwithstanding its diversity,~ the judgement of taste would not even admit contention (make a claim to the necessary agreement of others with this judgement)' (V 338-9). Both positions make the previously explicated judgen1ent of taste a pure chin1era; it is a 'baseless, empty phantasm' (V 345), as it is called from the point of view of the empiricists, but which may also be formulated by the rationalists in the same way. The antinomy states not only that there arises an (apparent) contradiction in the concept of the foundation of the judgement of taste, and thereby in the judgement itself, but also that the thesis as well as the antithesis contradict the judgement of taste which is explicated and also officially deduced in the 'Analytic'. If the antinomy proves impossible to resolve, and if a tertium datur outside the apparently con1plete disjunction of thesis and antithesis is not to be discovered, then the result of the whole 'Analytic' proves to be a 'groundless, empty delusion'. In this point, therefore, the 'Critique of Aesthetic Judgement' resembles the second but not the first Critique, because it is solely in the Critique of Practical Reason that the result of 'Analytic' of purepractical-reason is called into question to such an extent by the dialectic of the same capacity, that it could prove to be imaginary and false if the antinomy cannot be resolved and the highest good deduced (cf. V 114).

Analytic/Dialectic

191

The proofs in the antithesis are carried out apagogically: the negation of rationalism (no decision by proofs) leads to the empiricist thesis; the negation of empiricism (no purely private validity) leads to the rationalistic antithesis. In both cases it is presumed that the totality of possible bases for an aesthetic judgement is deternlined by the disjunction 'concept - no concept'. A further presupposition is that the concept is a concept of understanding which can be determined by predicates of intuition and that with the negation of this concept it is not the infinite field of the contradictory which is indicated, but only a certain position, namely that of empiricism which can be Ineant as the contrary. The illusion that this diaeresis is a complete disjunction arises according to Kant through the inevitable appearance that we are dealing with objects which are things-in-themselves. If this is the case, every judgement is confronted with this alternative: either to base itself in a nlerely subjective feeling or in an objective determination of the thing-in-itself. Transcendental idealism is, according to Kant, the only possible salvation of the judgement of taste from this destruction by the antinomy, and transcendental idealism saves it by showing that the antinomy is a mere illusion; it can be resolved by the distinction of the thing-in-itself and appearance because this distinction explodes the alternative of private feeling and objective concept by means of the tertium of the supersensible substratum of the objects and the judging subjects. The apparent antinomy from the logical point of view arose by unhesitatingly changing the contrary negation of a (determinate) concept and subjective feeling into a contradictory opposition - on the grounds of traditional metaphysics (and on the ground of the inevitable subjective illusion) a thoroughly correct procedure. But the negation of the determinate concept need not be identical with private feeling, rather it can, according to transcendental idealism, signify the undetermined and indeterminable concept or the idea of the supersensible substrate. The judgement of taste has a claim to validity for everyone 'because the deternlining basis of it lies perhaps' (i.e., if it indeed turns out to be a pure judgement of taste) 'in the concept of that which can be considered as the supersensible substrate of mankind' (V 340). Taste is 'basically a faculty of judging the sensual representation of moral ideas' (V 356).

Does the dialectic of the 'Critique of Aesthetic Judgement' follow theoretical or practical reason, i.e. is the antinomy resolved by revealing the contradiction to be merely illusory, or by deducing the seeming antinomian concept itself in its objective reality? That is the question. In favour of the first variant is the fact that the simple resolution of the antinonlY can be ensured by the designation of a tertium which need only be thinkable. This should be the undetermined concept of the idea of the supersensible. Accordingly Kant states: 'The resolution

192

Reinhard Brandt

of an antinomy only depends on the possibility that two theses, which to all appearances are opposed to each other, do not actually contradict each other, but can exist side by side, even though the explanation of the possibility of their concept is beyond our faculty of knowledge' (V 340, 23-7). However, Kant may not and does not remain at this stage of development for the following reason. The concept which leads to the antinomy is the concept of the basis ('Grund') to which the judgement of taste refers in its claim to validity (V 340, 341). Without the presentation of this basis, the claim to general consent cannot be validated. One point is quite clear: it is not sufficient for a possible basis-concept to be proved non-contradictory. As such a basic concept, it must be positively proved to be objectively real, even though a categorically definable basis is not involved. The resolution of the antinomy, therefore, cannot be carried out in the same manner as was done in the Critique of Pure Reason where the antithesis which contains an illusory contradiction of reason with itself was removed. Instead, the objective reality of the sought-for basis of the aesthetic judgement must in addition be proved or deduced. A higher authority, so to speak, must exist which justifies the claim that is generally linked to the aesthetic judgement. In this respect, the dialectic of aesthetic judgement is comparable with the dialectic of practical reason: the concept of the 'basis' is to be found at exactly the same systematic place as that of the highest good. It is added synthetically to the judgement which is only completely deduced with the deduction of its basis. Thus it is evident that Kant cannot conclude the resolution of the antinomy with reference to the merely thinkable supersensible substrate because whether this proves to be the basis for the judgement of taste cannot be decided by the n1ere contradictory thought of it. This consideration is further developed into the realization of this idea in practical reason. It is only in the concept of the good and of duty, so Kant seems to think, that the substrate attains the qualification of justifying the judgement of taste in its practical claim to general consent. It is possible to object to our interpretation on the grounds that Kant explicitly refers to the fact that the important factor concerning the resolution of the antinomy of taste is 'that two apparently opposing theses do not actually contradict each other, but rather exist side by side, even though the explanation of the possibility of their concept is beyond our faculty. of knowledge' (V 340). However, the phrase 'their concept' must refer to the idea of the supersensible introduced before hand. It is the undetermined and indeterminable basis of the judgement of taste. Being this basis, however, it solves not only the contradiction, but if deduced, also gives the judgement the foundation it requires. For the latter task there is no counterpart in the resolution of the antinomy in theoretical reason, but only in the dialectic of practical reason.

Analytic/Dialectic

193

At the end of his remarks on the resolution of the antinon1Y of taste Kant writes: 'If one concedes, at least, that our deduction has proceeded correctly ... ' This deduction within the dialectic refers to the idea of the supersensible as the basis on which the claim to necessity in the judgement of taste is rooted. The programme of proof in the 'Critique of Aesthetic Judgen1ent' attains perfection only in this deduction. In a letter to the composer Johann Friedrich Reichard dated 15 October 1790, I(ant wrote that taste does not judge according to objective concepts of reason but according to the subjective moral feeling (we may add: which is made possible by those concepts) when it claims consent as if this were a judgelnent according to laws (XI 214). In the Anthropology of 1798 Kant establishes the relation of the judgement of taste to principles of reason without hesitating. The judgement of taste is 'subtly rational' because pure reason plays an undetected part (VII 240); the idea of reason that lifts us above sensual taste, and is indeed supposed to do so, is a moral idea: Now the pleasure that can be considered not only with regard to the feeling subject but also with regard to everybody else, i.e., as generally valid, (because it must contain the necessity of this pleasure, including a principle of it a priori, in order to be able to be considered as such), is a pleasure in the correspondence of the joy of the subject with the feeling of everyone else according to a general law which must originate fron1 the general legislation of the feeling subject, including his or her reason. That means the choice according to this pleasure stands formally under the principle of duty (VII 244)

Only in the 'Dialectic' of the aesthetic faculty of judgement does Kant uncover, with help of the antinomy and the only possible resolution of it, the basis which he has called here the condition of the necessary consent: the general law of reason of the feeling subjects (and not the harmony of the interplay between imagination and understanding which Kant spoke of in the 'Analytic'). The deduction in the 'Dialectic' is indeed the complement and perfection of the deduction of the concept of beauty and with it of the judgement of taste; only through the relationship of this feeling to the supersensible substrate that underlies the beautiful appearance and the judging subject does the judgement receive its objective reality, even if this is only an indeterminate and noumenal reality. However vague and open Kant's remarks about the symbolic character of the beautiful n1ay be, we cannot doubt that the judgement of taste must be thought of as having some kind of relationship with the supersensible and so to freedom and its law. Only in this relationship does the necessity of the accord of all find its justification. The judging subject feels more than the mere formal harn10ny of a phenomenon when it appears to him as beautiful. The 'Dialectic' shows that this 'something extra' is no empty

194

Reinhard Brandt

chimera of a private aesthetic superstition but finds its foundation in the supersensible. I would like to point out two further areas within which the dynamic play of the two parts of the demonstration in the 'Critique of the Aesthetic Faculty of Judgement' can be found. Firstly, it is the task of the 'Critique of the Aesthetic Faculty of Judgement' to n1ediate between understanding and reason; nature and freedom; the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason and to create a transition from one to the other (V 195-7). This transition is realized in the work itself by Kant's treating first of the components of knowledge and then of those of duty. The 'Analytic' focuses on the purposeless-purposeful play of the faculties of knowledge, imagination and understanding; the 'Dialectic' culminates in the sentence: 'Now I say: Beauty is the symbol of the morally good' (V 353). Both of these shall be shown to be present in the judgement of taste; namely the possibility of a theoretical relationship to the object which is suitable for possible knowledge and the practical reference in the thought of the supersensible substrate as constitutive for the judgement of taste. The second complex is the topic itself. The judgement of taste is determined by two components of beauty: the form or proportion of the figure and the meaning of beauty as such. With this doubling Kant stands in a tradition of aesthetic thought and incorporates it into his dual concept of analytic and dialectic which at the latest was developed in the Critique of Practical Reason. The 'Analytic' provides the subjective formal determinations which th~ pure judgement of taste cannot contradict and which guarantees its universality by the identity of the faculties of knowledge in all judging subjects. The 'Dialectic' furnishes the deduction of the idea of reason which to a certain degree guarantees the objective reality and meaning of beauty and therewith the necessary validity of the judgement. The free beauty of nature pleases on the one hand because of its purely formal composition: 'Flowers, free-hand drawings, lines that are composed without purpose and which are known by the term filigree signify nothing, depend on no determinate concept, but nonetheless please.' But then Kant continues, 'The pleasure we receive from beauty must depend on the reflection on the object which leads to any concept (however indeterminate) ... (V 207). This indeterminate concept is alluded to in the 'Analytic' (camp. also V 244), but only in the 'Dialectic' does it receive its theoretical elucidation as an idea of reason. The beautiful forms of nature now take on meaning. The inner purposefulness in the relationship of our faculties when judging these products is characterized 'as such a one that must be explained as necessary and valid generally by reason of a supersensible basis (of the judgement)' (V 350). To the grace of p~~j~~_~oE~~!P~

Analytic/Dialectic

195

dignity of beauty; to the play of harmonized parts comes the consciousness of 'a certain ennobling and elevation' (V 353).

NOTES

1 Quotations refer to Kant's Gesammelte Schriften (Akaden1ie-Ausgabe). The Critique of Pure Reason is quoted in the editions A (1781) and B (1787). Text and passages quoted from Kant translated by Madeleine Kinsella and Victor Gustitus.

10

Understanding Individuals Wilhelm Vossenkuhl

Imagine a man wearing coat and hat. We know what a coat and a hat are and we know that the man does not always wear coat and hat. We also know that he and not somebody behind or near hin1 is wearing that coat and hat. Again, in1agine a grove, which you see from your window. You know that there are a nurnber of trees and bushes standing close to each other. You cannot count or distinguish them fron1 where you are. But you know that you could, although their boughs and branches are interlaced and can hardly be disentangled from your present vantagepoint. In both cases a nun1ber of particulars belong together and form different wholes. No matter whether we can visually distinguish some of the particulars, we know that they somehow relate to each other. They are the component parts of individual wholes or units that we are able to make sense of and name. But how do we form these wholes? How do we aggregate particulars in our visual field into meaningful wholes? The particulars themselves do not seem to comprise such wholes on their own. They could belong to different wholes, as boughs and branches can be parts of a grove or of a single tree. Kant suggests that the wholes that enable us to put particulars together in a meaningful way are contributed by judgement. The understanding of such wholes like groves, trees and men is not reducible to aggregates of sensuous input. Judgements about individuals have a non-natural basis in the subject who makes them. But, if meaningful wholes derive from judgements that are independent of empirical particulars, how do these judgements relate to the actual world? How can we warrantably ensure that the objects of our judgen1ents are things in the world and not just illusions? In his Critique ofJudgement (CJ) Kant rules it out that an objectively

Understanding Individuals

197

valid answer to this question is possible. He argues instead that whatever we are able to make sense of in the empirical world presupposes the human faculty of judgement that is a priori, i.e. not empirically determined. As against the Critique of Pure Reason (CPR) where he maintains that the conceptual understanding involved in the laws of nature is objectively valid, all judgements concerning individual things are conceived to be 'only' subjective in the CJ. Both conceptual understanding and judgement allegedly have an a priori basis. And it is just this basis that is held to ensure that judgements do concern individual things in the world and not illusions. But it is not clear how this is possible. This paper is to analyze Kant's notion of judgement in the third Critique and his understanding of the respective human faculty. Judgement is the faculty to understand individuals. This is more obvious from the teleological part of the third Critique than from the aesthetic one. But it is in the 'Critique of Aesthetic Judgement' where Kant describes the structure of judgement. It is this structure as a special faculty of the human mind which enables us to understand individual things without knowing the laws of nature which govern them. Kant does not say this directly in the aesthetic. It looks as if he just offered an account of aesthetic judgement as an a priori foundation of taste. But he realized that he could only do this on the basis of a general account of human judgement. His deduction of aesthetic judgement turns out to be a 'deduction' of human judgenlent in general, of the aesthetic and epistemic understanding of individuals.

1

FROM CATEGORIES TO DOGS

The special faculty or power of judgement is designed to solve the problem of understanding individuals. This problem is approached on the conceptual level of categories in the first Critique. Here the possibility of the experience of individual things seems well defined by the categories. The categories describe the domain within which individuals can be understood. All candidates of possible sensory experience Kant determines in terms of quantity, quality, relation and modality (CPR, A80/B106). This is to say, they fall under one of the three subcategories of each of these four categories just because each of the candidates is e.g. one thing, real, caused by another thing, and possible. From the first Critique it is quite clear that there are no individuals beyond this donlain of possible experience. But it is clear as well that the understanding of individuals through the categories is purely conceptual in the Kantian sense. Knowing that an individual is one and not many or all of a set, real and not a negation or limitation, caused

198

Wilhelm Vossenkuhl

according to some law and nota substance, possible and not actual or necessary leaves us somewhat puzzled. We cannot name it. We lack all the describable features like colour, shape, size etc. which correspond to those parts of our imagination of things which we form in sense experience. The faculty of judgenlent borrowed from the third Critique offers a solution: we presuppose that the categories apply without knowing the relevant law or laws of nature and judge the individual by adjusting it to sonlething we are able to understand, name and describe. It is a subjective type of understanding as it wholly depends on our faculty of judgement. Although the conceptual determinations of knowledge apply, the understanding of individuals cannot benefit from them. We will never recognize and understand what something is just by subsuming it under the categories. But whenever we recognize something the categories explain why this experience was possible. In the first Critique Kant saw the problem that the conceptual framework of categories does not imply the sensuous conditions of their application. He offered within the 'transcendental doctrine of judgement' the 'schematism' to determine these conditions (CPR A137/B176ff). The 'schema' is meant to represent the 'pure and formal' condition of sensibility. It results from the application of categories under the condition of time. Time comes into play here as the 'inner sense'. Kant takes this 'sense' to be the only condition of experience which belongs both to the realm of categories and to the realm of appearances. He declares time to be homogeneous with both (CPR A138/B177). But this homogeneity is purely structural. It is the structure of concatenation of mental and of empirical representations. Both these kinds of representations are unified by the very same structure of time. Synthesis through time is the point of the schema. But no schema of any of the categories has itself an empirical content. Thus the schema of quantity is the number of homogeneous particulars which are united in a certain representation. If it is the representation of a dog the schema of quantity is the number one. The schema of quality in this case is that there is something corresponding to our senses, the dog's reality in our own spatio-temporal framework; the schema of substance is 'permanence in time' and the schema of actuality 'existence in some determinate time'. However, when a dog is represented in our imagination, our image of it is not the joint product of these schemata. No individual representation is formed by the schemata of the categories. But there is one more kind of schemata, namely those of empirical concepts. The schema of an enlpirical concept is supposed to be a 'general method' to provide the concept with a suitable picture (CPR A140/B179-80). Thus, we do not have the image of a certain dog in our mind. But we are equipped with a 'rule' which enables us to recognize the shape of

Understanding Individuals

199

a quadrupedal animal as that of a dog (cf. CPR A141/B180). There is no argued transition from the schemata of the categories to the shape of the quadrupedal animal. We can try and clarify this transition: the structural units of mental and empirical representations (i.e. the schemata of the categories) are unbound epistemic variables. They can be bound by a variety of schemata for empirical concepts like 'dog', 'horse', 'cat' etc. Kant obviously assumes that we have a schema for each of these quadrupedal animals which enables us to find the correct image for each of them by which we recognize their respective shapes. We could approach the relation between an in1age and its .schema as a relation between a token and its type. We could further explain these types to be the values of the epistemic variables, the values of the schemata of the categories. But this functional account of the connection between the schemata of the categories and those of empirical concepts does not explain the transition from the first to the second. It is exactly this transition which remains in the dark. Kant called this transition a 'hidden art'. The 'transcendental doctrine of judgement' in the first Critique finally cannot explain the understanding of individuals. The chapter on schen1atisn1 gives us an idea of the problem but no solution. We might well argue that within the project of explaining the possibility of experience - as against actual experience - we cannot expect an account of individuals. This is certainly correct. But to exonerate the first Critique from an account for individuals should not obscure the fact that there is no way from the framework of categories to an understanding of individuals. If this was Kant's strategy to account for individuals in the schematism of the first Critique, it failed. But it is hard to tell whether he really wanted to give a full account of the possibility of individuals. Kant's interest in the possibility of individuals, of tokens or of in1ages of things, in the end seems only marginal in the schematism. He concentrates rather on the general relation between categories and sensibility. Without further clarification he tries to give an intuitively plausible view of this relation: the schemata of sense not only realize the categories but also restrain them to the empirical conditions which are external to the understanding (cf. CPR A146/B185-6). It is, of course, quite desirable to interpret the schemata as sensuous constraints on the categories. But it is question-begging as long as it is unargued that the schemata of the categories count as conditions of sensibility external to the understanding. Kant quietly moves from the schema of categories to the schema of sensibility. He gradually switches from an internal to an external view of the schema undisturbed by the fact that he only introduced the schen1atism to show that both perspectives are convergent. We look in vain for an argument for this convergence.

Wilhelm Vossenkuhl

200

But even if such an argument were available in the schematism chapter it would not help us to proceed from the categories to an understanding of individuals. There is no way from the categories to, say, dogs. The empirical constraints on the categories which restrain them to conform to the mental in1age of a certain type of quadrupedal animal presuppose this image. The image must be available to enact the relevant set of constraints. But how does this image emerge? How is it formed? These are questions which remain open in the first Critique. They are asked again in the third Critique in a different theoretical framework. Now the categories seen1 to be wholly out of focus. Kant introduces a set of concepts to explain the formation of representations, of mental images, which are no concepts of understanding. They are concepts of reflection, of imagination, and judgement, like 'purpose', 'purposiveness', and 'whole'.

2

KANTIAN INDIVIDUALS

Remerrlber the man with coat and hat, and the grove. They are individual entities in the world. They comprise a number of particulars like clothes, boughs, branches, and leaves that are combined in a special way: they are parts of different wholes and units, belonging to that man and the grove you see from your study window. For Kant those particulars only make sense as con1ponent parts of wholes. But the particulars in our examples are of course to be distinguished as separate entities. Not all of them are connected with their respective whole in the same way. Hats and coats may belong to and be used by different persons. Leaves and branches are parts of individual trees and bushes, not necessarily of groves or woods. These particulars can be identified on their own, independently of their respective wholes as we can refer to them one by one. We identify hats, coats, leaves and the like independently of persons, trees and groves. We name those particulars and assign certain predicates to them, e.g. 'this is a dark grey hat', 'that leaf shows the golden autumn colours'. They obviously are to a certain extent independent of their contexts. This is not questioned by Kant. His point is that they are only recognized as particulars which normally function as parts of a whole. Hats are norn1ally used as headgear. Leaves and branches norn1ally belong to trees, bushes and flowers. It would not make sense to call something a 'branch' in the natural sense of this word if it was never part of a tree, bush or flower. And it would not make sense to call something a 'hat' in terms of headgear if it was not to be used by a person to cover his or her head. Kant argues that the sense of particulars is detern1ined by the purpose

Understanding Individuals

201

they actually or potentially fulfil as parts of a whole. We would rather use 'function' than 'purpose' here. But we shall see in a moment that there is a point in using Kant's terminology. Now the purpose of a hat is to cover one's head, the purpose of a branch is to carry leaves which themselves serve various purposes for a tree, a bush or a flower. Each whole represents a purpose and each part of a whole is purposive with respect to that purpose. Kant takes great care to avoid an ontological or categorial understanding of 'purpose' and 'purposiveness'. Neither a tree nor a person exists as a purpose, as they exist, say, in certain spatio-temporal locations. And the purposiveness of leaves and branches for the tree is nothing we can immediately refer to in the external world. None of these concepts of 'purpose' and 'purposiveness' refers to objective properties of things. A 'purpose' in the Kantian sense is neither an empirical nor a categorially determined property. We had therefore better stick to this concept instead of using 'function'; because we use lots of empirical and conceptual 'functions' in a way we cannot use 'purposes'. We can express and analyze logical and mathematical functions. It does not make sense to understand these functions as purposes. We are of course able to explain the biological functions of leaves for a tree. These functions are indeed purposive and they are observable. This is special for - what Kant called - 'natural purposes', like all organic wholes (d. C] §77). But 'natural purposes' are a special case where all organic parts are purposive towards the survival and self-reproduction of the organic whole. The general functions of survival and self-reproduction are purposes. But again, they are neither immediately observable nor categorially determined. They are man-made hypotheses for the understanding of biological processes. Kant's claim that purposes are non-empirical is only partly justified for 'natural purposes'. What speaks in favour of Kant is that any hypothesis that starts empirical research and guides it in the beginning is non-empirical insofar as it is not inductively derived from the observational data it leads to. But an hypothesis is only prolific if it is empirically testable. It must have an empirical point before the research starts. Kant admits that purposes serve as 'heuristic principles' in the search for empirical laws of nature (d. CJ §78). But this gives them an empirical status. This does not seem to be a problem for Kant. He would not rule out the biologist's empirical explanation of the purposive functions of leaves for a tree. But he would claim that the biologist's research needs heuristic assumptions to get under way. It would start off with some idea of the purpose that makes leaves parts of trees. This is to say that the biologist must have some understanding, even if it turns out to be incorrect, of a tree as an organic whole before he starts

202

Wilhelm Vossenkuhl

doing science. In Kant's terminology, the biologist needs the power of judgement to reach successful causal explanation. And the power of judgement comes down to an understanding of the purpose of e.g. organic wholes that are not themselves enlpirical but serve as heuristic guides in empirical research. Now, it is most important that Kant denies purposes a categorial status. They are ascribed an a priori status. This is purportedly implied in the claim that they are non-empirical. The denial of the categorial status seems to be compatible with the a priori status. If purposes are not part of the categorial framework they cannot validate and legitimate knowledge to be objectively true. They only have subjective value: they only have explanatory value for the human subjects. But this apparent weakness of their subjective status is their strength. Kant clainls that we could not understand things in the world if we did not subjectively impute purposes to them. This is of course not to say that we could not categorially determine or empirically describe anything without imputing purposes. According to the first Critique we know that every object of possible experience is governed by a causal law, that it has a spatio-temporallocation, and is deternlined by the categories. But all this knowledge we have does not imply - as we saw above - that we understand an individual thing. So far it should be clear that, for Kant, individuals are the objects of judgement, judgement of a special kind. Individuals are, of course, empirical things. They are determined by the categories. But their categorial determination offers no clue for us to understand them. We understand them by assigning them purposiveness. But as these ascriptions are not based on the categories our understanding cannot be objectively valid. Individuals are the objects of a kind of judgement Kant calls subjective-retlecting judgement. 1 Now it is far from clear how this understanding of individuals like trees, hats and leaves relates to real trees, hats and leaves. Why should we need Kantian individuals to understand the things in the world? Must we really impute purposes to the world in order to understand what trees, hats and leaves are? This question is even more urgent since we know that Kant does not doubt that trees, hats and leaves are real things, empirical entities with certain spatio-tenlporal location. Why should some purely empirical understanding of those things be impossible? Why is subjective judgement required for our understanding of individuals?

3

THE SUBJECTIVE NATURE OF JlJDGEMENT

The questions we asked can only be answered through an account of the subject's epistemic relation to the world. The subject's position vis-

Understanding Individuals

203

a-vis the world is roughly this: the subject is confronted with an unstructured manifold of nature that affects his sensory apparatus. But unlike the en1piricists Kant does not believe that sensory input causes understanding. On the contrary, he holds that sensory input presupposes a conceptual framework which imposes its own structure on the unstructured manifold of experience; and only through the subject's conceptual framework is experience possible. The subject, as it were, prescribes the categorial understanding to nature. This notion of subjectivity is not denied in the third Critique. It is only applied in the epistemic context of the individual subject, and not in the context of the timeless subject in general. It is now the individual person who tries to understand individual things and the relations between them. In the third Critique nature is still the manifold of appearances which is structured by the a priori conditions of understanding. But the individual subject cannot gain an understanding of individual things immediately from the a priori lawfulness of nature. The subject's understanding is brought about by the subject's own judgement. Each of his judgements presupposes the categorial detern1inations of possible experience. Thus, each subjective judgen1ent falls under some law of nature. The subject may even know this law. But the subject's knowledge of a priori valid laws does not determine any of the real instances of such laws. The subject's problem is therefore to find the general for the particular, starting off with the latter. The individual epistemic subject in the third Critique seems rather helpless compared to the powerful subject in general in CPR. Kant did not change his notion of subjectivity of experience at all. The subject still constitutes the world. It is only the how and why of his constitution that changed. In the Critique of Judgement it is the individual thing that is constituted. But constituting individuals by subjective judgement is not to be done by means of categories, because the categories are general concepts legislating for the world. And general concepts do not determine the rules by which to find the general for the specific. A specific blade of grass is not to be understood by n1eans of general concepts. But we obviously understand what specific things like a blade of grass or the leaf of a tree are. Still, however we understand the specific, there must be an a priori foundation for it. Otherwise Kant would not hold its understanding to be justified. The justification of understanding individuals which Kant proposes is a priori without being categorial. It has a subjective validity only, as Kant clain1s. In the aesthetics part of the third Critique he tries to tackle the problem of how subjective validity is possible. The problem is treated as the problem of how subjective judgements are to be justified. 2 Kant develops his notion of subjective judgement in detail by offering

204

Wilhelm Vossenkuhl

what we could call his philosophy of mind. The human mind, he argues, in bringing about subjective judgements, works as a joint operation of two different faculties, namely intuition and conceptual understanding. Intuition, Kant declares, is the 'productive and self-enacted author of arbitrary forn1s of possible perceptions' (cf. C] A68/B69). It is intuition which structures the n1anifold. Kant dubs intuition somewhat enigmatically a 'free lawfulness', a 'lawfulness without law' (cf. C] §22). Non-metaphorically speaking, intuition's task is compiling and composing the given manifold. Parts of possible perceptions are compiled in such a way that they conform to the freely composed forms of representations. Intuition works like a draughtsman. But the draughtsman normally sees what he draws. He has sensory experience before he starts working. But intuition is taken to work independently of the empirical insofar as it does not reproduce actual sensory experience. As it enables us to experience individual things it cannot be a product of experience. For Kant intuition is not only independent of experience, it is independent of the conceptual as well. There are no conceptual rules which govern the way intuition composes forms of representations. Nevertheless, as intuition creates these forms it produces forms of possible perceptions. But if it creates forms it works in a lawful way. It seems possible to explain the task of intuition on the sensory level only. Here the forms of representations already have the Gestalt of perceptions. Remerrlber our grove with its trees and bushes. What intuition is supposed to do is to select and compile homogeneous sets of perceptions like leaves and branches to form a whole that we distinguish from its surroundings. Intuition, Kant says, 'comprehends the manifold', 3 where comprehension is meant to be the self-enacted creation of arbitrary forms. 'Arbitrary' here does not mean 'random'. The forms of possible perceptions are arbitrary insofar as they are not superimposed by more general forn1s but freely created by intuition. Take the form of leaves or branches. Kant believes that intuition offers a form of leaves and a form of branches that enable us to con1prehend sensory input in such a way that we perceive leaves and branches. It should be noted here that the products of intuition are not taken by Kant to be in any sense private. The forms created by intuition do not depend on the psychological apparatus of an individual. Therefore their products are not psychological entities. This needs to be explained later. Now, let us assume that intuition works as Kant explains. How does it cooperate with the second faculty, namely conceptual understanding? 'Conceptual understanding' here does not mean that there are a priori concepts of the forms created by intuition. Nor is 'conceptual understanding' here. synonymous with categorial determination. Kant calls the function of conceptual understanding here an 'indeterminate

Understanding Individuals

205

concept'. It is taken to represent but not determine what intuition comprehends. In representing the products of intuition conceptual understanding 'applies a rule' to these products. 4 But this rule again is indeterminate. We cannot account for this rule independent of its application. When the rule is applied the result is the ordering of the products of intuition. Without this order we would not be able to represent individuals in our perceptual field. We would further be unable to select and name individuals within this field. Bringing order into the perceptions is the sole concern of conceptual understanding in its cooperation with intuition. Take our grove again. Suppose that intuition renders the forms which enable us to perceive leaves and branches, trees and bushes. The comprehension of these perceptions is now ordered by conceptual understanding. This ordering serves a single purpose: it makes the perceived object accessible for reHection, i.e. for deliberation, and finally makes it amenable to judgement. The judgement in our case would be that it was a grove we perceived. This outcome is due to a mental operation which puts the structured comprehension, i.e. the leaves, branches, trees and bushes, together with the representation we have of a grove. This representation orders the products of intuition and makes judgements possible. The point of I(ant's account of the two faculties of the mind, intuition and conceptual understanding, is that there is no guiding principle for their cooperation. The relation between intuition and conceptual understanding is ungoverned. There is no paramount faculty in control. It is a free cooperation. But each partner needs the other to bring about judgement. Kant construes both faculties as irreducible. Neither could replace the other, the composition and structuring of sensory input through forn1s could not be accomplished by conceptual understanding, and the ordering of structured perceptions could not be achieved by intuitions. It is important for Kant to keep intuition and conceptual understanding apart. Otherwise he could not explain the subjective character of their cooperation. Cooperation is required because there is no direct, determinate and objective access to the objects of judgement. Only because the accessibility of the objects depends on the cooperation of two independent faculties of the mind is the judgement subjective. The judgement would be objective in Kantian terminology if it were determined by the categories. We must note that the categories apply to all objects of judgement but they do not determine individuals. Therefore judgements concerning individuals are not deduced fron1 and determined by the categories. The key to the subjective character of judgement is what intuition and conceptual understanding do to the objects. They make the objects

206

Wilhelm Vossenkuhl

accessible and thereby purposive for judgement. Now, this purposiveness for judgement, which is not an intrinsic property of empirical things in the world, is the core of the subjective nature of judgement. Things are not purposive in themselves but they are made purposive for judgement by intuition and conceptual understanding. Thus the subjectivity of judgement connects with the purposiveness of individual things. We are now in a position to answer some of our earlier questions. One of these was how we n1anage to understand individual things if categorial determination applies but cannot tell what something is beyond its general properties. We saw that these general properties in tern1S of categories cover the domain of individuals. But to grasp what an individual is we need a special kind of judgement based on the interplay between intuition and conceptual understanding. We further saw that conceptual understanding here is not categorial determination. It is still the element of generality in our judgement. But it is empirical not a priori generality. Kant seems to take conceptual understanding in the ordinary sense here: via reflection we find empirically determined concepts for each individual in nature. 5 This allows for an ordering of the perceptual field. The more fundamental questions raised earlier were why subjective judgement is required for the understanding of individuals and why there is a need to impute purposes to the things in the world to understand them as individuals. There seems to be a single answer for both these questions now: the understanding of individuals through judgen1ent is possible only if things are made accessible for judgement and thus purposive for judgement. This is brought about by the interplay between intuition and conceptual understanding. But the subject is only able to make things accessible for judgement by imputing purposes to the things in the world. This is, I think, Kant's understanding of the subjective nature of judgement in the third Critique.

4

THE INTENTIONALITY OF THE MIND

Looking at the consequences of this answer for why purposes are required for an understanding of individuals we realize at least two problems: first, why should individuals have a purpose just because they are purposive for judgement and understanding? Second, what about those things in the world that do not have a purpose, i.e. which are neither wholes nor parts of wholes, like, e.g., the pebble in my shoe, the empty bottle on the pavement or the stain on my book? Are we able to understand then1? Kant of course realized that not everything has a purpose, is a whole or part of one. He did not in fact conclude from the purRQ~iy_eJ1~ss_ !1t

---------------------------------------

----------------------

_

Understanding Individuals

207

individuals for judgement that they must be given some purpose. But he maintained that the hunlan 11lind cannot help but attribute purposiveness to things, even if they cannot be ascribed any purpose at all. Remenlber the biologist researching the purpose of leaves for the life of a tree. He might at some stage assume that the shape of leaves is purposive for some of the functions he is investigating. And this nlight be correct for some plants but not for others. Still, it seenlS overstated to claim that the mind cannot but ascribe purposiveness to things. What about that pebble in my shoe, the empty bottle on the pavement and the stain" on my book? Do I really understand these things only because I take them as if they had some purpose? This seenlS rather weird but it is not when we look at it more closely. The purpose attributed need not be some good or positive purpose. Both the pebble and the bottle fulfil some negative purpose compared to the purposes of shoes and pavements. They hinder my walking. But nobody put them where they are intentionally to hinder my walking. Nevertheless to realize that something does not have a purpose presupposes a purposive approach to it; there need not be any intentional action involved in its location. The stain on my book is slightly different. I might not notice it, given that I am not a very tidy person. But if my attitude to things is a bit antiseptic I will definitely take disapproving notice of that stain. Kant did not bother to give too many examples to elucidate his claim that human judgement and the understanding of individuals is systematically purposive. Rather, he tried to strengthen that claim by introducing in the aesthetics the notion of 'purposiveness without purpose'. This notion is crucial to his analysis of beauty (cf. CJ §§10-17). We need not here go into his account of taste and beauty but we must follow up the connection between purposiveness, judgenlent and the human mind. Let us pick up his exposition of purposiveness from his thought on aesthetics as it reveals the general relation the mental has to the empirical without being determined by the latter. Kant holds the mind to have a volitional attitude to things - not to the things themselves but to their purposiveness. His explanation of purposes runs as follows: ... the purpose is the object of a concept, in so far as the concept is regarded as its cause ... ; and the causality of a concept in respect of its object is its purposiveness (forma (ina/is). Where then not merely the cognition of an object but the object itself (its form or existence) is thought as an effect ... there we think a purpose. The representation of the effect is here the determining ground of its cause and precedes it.

Further down he continues:

208

Wilhelm Vossenkuhl

But an object ... is called purposive, although its possibility does not necessarily presuppose the representation of a purpose, merely because its possibility can be explained and conceived by us only if we assume for its ground a causality according to purposes, i.e. a will which has ordered it [the causality] according to the representation of a certain rule. The purposiveness can then be without purpose, so far as we do not posit the causes of this form in a will, but yet can only nlake the explanation of its possibility intelligible to ourselves by deriving it from a will. 6

I propose to interpret these passages in terms of Kant's philosophy of mind. Kant maintains that the mind conceives of purposes as 'caused' by concepts. The concepts of purposes precede the purposes, as they produce and effect them. Kant wants to explain, in the passage quoted, the way we think of purposes. What he explains is partly a truism: what we direct our attention to is its purpose. Every end of a mental activity is the purpose of this activity in a vague sense. But the transcendental? part of his explanation is not a truism: whatever (purpose) we direct our attention to is the object of a concept. He implicitly claims that we cannot direct our attention towards anything (object, purpose) without a concept of it. Kant further claims that if the concept actually guides our attention to the form of existence of an object, that concept is purposive. 'Purposive' here stands for 'suitable' and 'successful'. A concept is suitable and successful if it renders the form or existence of an object. The difficulty is that we do not know of any concept which causes the form or existence of an object. The difficulty arises because we do not understand what Kant means by 'concept' here. Kant seems to believe that we can only direct our mental activity towards an object if we have a concept available which directs the mental activity. He misleadingly calls the guiding function of a concept its 'causality'.8 He further holds that this causality of a concept is its purposiveness'. If we understand 'concept' here in terms of conception or representation we might see what Kant has in mind: we must have a conception of something otherwise it cannot be the object of thought. To think of a circle we must have a conception or representation of a circle. But why should the circle be a purpose and the representation a cause of it? If I have something in mind with a centre and every point on it is equidistant from the centre I have a conception of a circle. With this conception I am abfe to think and even communicate the geometric form of a circle. With any other conception, say, something round with a centre, I would not think of a circle in terms of a geometric object. This conception therefore would not be purposive, i.e. suitable and successful if the object of thought is a circle. The conception which enables me to think the geometric form of a circle has_ ......__ ~l1__ ~_<:!~t~~

_

Understanding Individuals

209

terminology - purposiveness in respect of a circle. Of course, it would not be purposive (suitable and successful) in respect of a triangle. So far we understand the causality of a concept: we are enabled by a conception or representation to think a certain object. The purposiveness of this conception is its success in rendering an object of thought. The purposiveness of the conception is further its suitability for a certain object of thought. If it is a geometric object like a circle we can think its form and - in a broad sense - its existence too. Now, we might still wonder why a circle should be a purpose. What exactly could it be a purpose of? In the passage quoted Kant stipulates that a purpose is the object of a conception. A circle can be the object of a conception. In the vague sense I already n1entioned, a circle might indeed be understood as the purpose of the mental activity of having a conception or representation of it. What Kant claims seems more ambitious than this vague sense of a purpose. Otherwise he would not insist that we 'think a purpose' where 'the object itself (its form or existence) is thought as an effect.'9 The type of object he is aiming at is the ordinary spatio-temporal individual. The leaf of a tree would be the object of a conception or representation. The conception is that it is part of an organic whole, a tree, with certain biochemical functions. The leaf exists only because it suits this conception. Thus we n1ight call the leaf a purpose of our conception of it. As against the circle the conception of a leaf implies biochen1ical causes which effect the growth of a leaf on a tree. Before we know about these causes we hypothetically assume that the leaf is the purpose or object of the conception we have of it. Finally, my thought of a spatio-ten1poral object like a leaf is not at all different in type from my thought of a geometric object. In both cases, for Kant at least, the object of thought is the product of human reflection. The difference in empirical content between a circle and a leaf does not figure. No matter what kind of entities they are, they are conceived as purposes by Kant. But the vagueness of the sense of 'purposes' ren1ains even with spatio-temporal objects. The existence of a leaf is not brought about by my conception of it. My conception only enables me to think 'this is a leaf'. We need not be bothered by the vagueness in Kant's view that we conceive of objects as the purposes of our representations of them. We simply do not fully know what the objects of thought are. We are either unable to determine what they are, as in the case of works of art; or, as in the case of spatio-temporal objects, we are able to gradually improve our knowledge. It is for this basic epistemic situation that Kant spells out the fundamental claim that we even conceive of objects which are not purposes as if they were purposes. His general clain1 is that we can

210

Wilhelm Vossenkuhl

only think of objects in a volitional way. The idea behind his use of 'purpose' in an epistemic context is that the relation between thought and object is analogous to the relation between the human will and its purposes. This explains why he applies the model of cause and effect to the relation between thought and object. For Kant, thought operates like the human will. Its ability to conceive of objects is a kind of power, like will-power. To think of some object is like effecting it. Kant makes use of the notions 'cause' and 'effect' in quite a liberal way. He applies the causal relation in a non-categorial way to volitional relations. Where he would talk of causality according to the will we would talk of intentionality. My will to do something presupposes my conception or representation of what it will be like. This intentional relation may make me realize what I want. But the representation of what I want is not a cause which makes me go ahead. If it is a cause my behaviour is definitely pathological and heteronomous in Kantian terms. Of course, Kant's notion of 'a causality according to purposes'10 is not coined for natural causation according to empirical laws. Neither is it coined for heteronomous causation according to desires or compulsives wishes. The causality according to purposes is a qualification of the will which abstracts from the context of moral self-determination. It is autonomous will without its limitation to moral purposes. I take the gist of Kant's idea of a volitional causation of purposes to be that the mind is basically intentional in its relation to objects. Intentionality here is meant to be the purposive relation between thought and object: thought wants, and is inclined, to conceive objects by making them purposive for its conception. Objects are made suitable to the conditions of successful judgement. To make objects thus suitable requires a self-enacted power like that of a will. My interpretation, of course, in1plies an epistemological point as well as a point about the subject's relation to individuals. If we can explain the conception of objects only as an intentional relation, then the subject's cognition of individuals presupposes intentionality. We know what something is only if we direct our attention to it. Finally, the categorical determination of individual objects would then presuppose intentionality too. I will not go into the epistemological consequences of intentionality here. But it should be clear that there are consequences which lead to a modified understanding of Kant's notion of the subjectivity of theoretical cognition. 11 An intentional construal of the passages from C] quoted above reveals that intentionality is a causal power. It brings about the conception of objects by making them purposive or suitable for judgement. This kind of causation is argued in the fashion of a transcendental argument: we can only conceive of the possibility of judging individuals if we

Understanding Individuals

211

presuppose a will from which we can derive the purpOSIveness or suitability of these individuals for judgement. To avoid misunderstanding I prefer to elucidate the role of intentionality along the lines I offered earlier in non-causal talk: intentionality is the hun1an power which enables us to conceive objects in a way that is suitable for judgement. Intentionality is the power which makes judgement possible. This is to say that we could not direct our mind to anything in the world, like groves, leaves and trees, without intentionality. And it is further to say that the way we direct the mind to the world is the way in which we understand it. Intentionality is a key notion for understanding what Kant meant by 'power of judgement': it is a fundamental intellectual ability of the subject and not just one faculty among others. According to this power the subject is in full control of all his judgements, i.e. of the way he uses intuition and conceptual understanding in performing judgements and in control of the conceived object. Still, although in full control, judgement is a subjective power not able to clain1 objective validity. For Kant there is no understanding of individuals which is objectively valid. Kant took great pains to show that the subjective validity of judgement does not imply a deficiency. Judgement would be deficient if it were only private, not communicable and not to be shared generally by all subjects. Kant argues that although 'only' subjective, judgement is necessary and not contingent,12 a priori valid and therefore to be communicated and shared by all subjects. His final argument for the validity of subjective judgement is his deduction of aesthetic judgen1ent. It is the only deduction in CJ and turns out to be a deduction of human judgement in general, not only of aesthetic judgement (cf. CJ §38, §58). The objective of this deduction is analogous to the deduction of categories in CPR. We therefore meet the very san1e question, namely, how are synthetic a priori judgements possible (CJ, A147/B149)? To answer this question in CJ is to explain that the conformity of representations with the condition of judgement is a priori valid for everybody (cf. A149/B151). Surprisingly, Kant declares that the answer to these questions is easy because the deduction is not obliged to justify the 'objective reality of a concept' (A150/B152). As against Kant, we took exactly this to be the major difficulty, namely to justify the subjective validity of judgement without resort to conditions of objectivity. To put it briefly, Kant is convinced that he has two arguments for the validity of subjective judgement. First, as the subjective conditions of judgement, i.e. the faculties of the mind, are the same for everybody, the representations of objects do conform a priori to those conditions in the judgements of everybody. Second, the subjective conditions of

212

Wilhelm Vossenkuhl

judgement are the same ('einerlei') with all hun1an beings, as otherwise they would not be able to con1municate their representations and cognitions (A149/B151, footnote). To argue like this seems question-begging. In each of the two arguments Kant tries to show the validity of something which he then assumes to be valid in the other argument. But it is neither evident that the subjective conditions of judgement are the same for everybody nor can we take it for granted that we are able to communicate our representations and cognitions. To make both assumptions Kant would need something like a principle of charity that assigns equal or at least sin1ilar chances to all human beings of having the same mental faculties and of being able to communicate their representations and cognitions. But a principle of charity is not to be used as an a priori foundation of judgement because it, contains empirical claims about n1ental dispositions and con1munication. It is not important here to decide finally whether Kant's deduction of judgement is successful or not. It is more interesting to observe Kant's general strategy for unfolding the subjectivity of human judgement. He obviously takes the faculties of the n1ind, intuition and conceptual understanding, to represent the two basic principles of his philosophy: lawfulness and freedom. Intuition is free in its composition of unstructured sensory input while conceptual understanding stands for lawfulness in ordering the unities of comprehension (cf. CJ, §35). Judgement is a compound of the two; that is, only if freedom and lawfulness are synthesized, is judgement possible. But there is nothing beyond freedom and lawfulness. Intentionality connects intuition and conceptual understanding. It combines freedom and lawfulness. But it is nothing beyond these principles. Intentionality allows for judgements like 'this is a leaf', 'this is beautiful', 'this is a pebble'. Without intentionality, without the interplay between intuition and conceptual understanding judgen1ent concerning individuals seems impossible for Kant. The content of judgement depends on intentionality. Although the content of judgement is available, we cannot explain the way it works. Thus the power of judgement, intentionality, is in the last resort inexplicable in its performance. We cannot explain the conditions of conformity between intuition and conceptual understandIng.

This becomes explicit whenever Kant deals wi~h cases where the conforn1ity is the object of analysis, like e.g. the genius of art or aesthetic ideas. In such cases conformity of intuition and conceptual understanding is supposed to be given, real and even expressed by works of art. And these cases Kant uses to clarify the inexpressibility and inexplicability of that conformity.13

Understanding Individuals

213

There is no reason to deplore that the conformity of intuition and conceptual understanding cannot be fully explained. The limitation points towards Kant's view of the autonomy of judgement. judgement is a self-determining power. This reveals the general perspective Kant has in mind not only in Cj but in the two other Critiques as well. The self-determination of judgenlent links up with the self-determination of man in theory and practice. It emerges that autonomy is Kant's own name for intentionality. It is the principle behind purposiveness, behind the suitability of objects for judgement and the success of judgement itself. But while intentionality only names the power of judgement, autonomy sets a normative standard of cognition. Autonomy means that the human mind should only rely on itself, that it should be self-enacted, that every human being should be, in Kant's phrase, a 'self-thinker', that human thought should start off from the unconditional. Intentionality as a notion for the human power of judgement allows for degrees. The power of judgement varies. judgement can be more or less successful, its objects more or less suitable. But autonomy does not allow for degrees if it is taken in its full sense. The understanding of individuals seems better off with the intentional account of judgement. The power of judgement is needed instantaneously while autonomy remains a metaphysical project.

NOTES

2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

By 'reflection' Kant means the deliberation required 'to compare and hold together' representations with other representations. A full account of the possible objects of subjective judgen1ent could not ignore, as I do here, the difference between subjective and objective sensation. Both kinds of sensations are only subjectively valid. I concentrate on the structure of the subjective judgement which is the same for both kinds of sensations. For a detailed analysis of the difference between subjective and objective sensation, see Schaper, 1979, pp. 43 ff. 'Erste Fassung der Einleitung in die Kritik der Urteilskraft', Kant, Weischedel edn, vol. V, p. 198 (my translation). Cf. Ibid., p. 188. Ibid., p. 188. C], trans!. Bernard, p. 55; translation slightly modified according to A32-3, B32-3. My italics in the second passage. Kant explicitly wants to offer a 'transcendental' explanation of the notion of a 'purpose'; C], §10, first sentence. C], end of A32/B32. See the second sentence of the first passage quoted, p. 207. C], A33/B33; see the second passage quoted p. 208. Some of the consequences, based on a different line of argument have been

214

Wilhelm Vossenkuhl

12

pointed out by G. Prauss (1983). He shows that on the basis of intentionality, theory and practice in Kant's philosophy can be given a unified basis. For all these claims see the four moments of aesthetic judgen1ent in C],

13

§§1-22. C], A190/B193; A195/B197; A213/B215; A237/B240; A239/B242.

Part V

Idealism and Transcendetal Structure

11

Realism and Realization in a Kantian Light Gerd Buchdahl In this paper I want to try, in brief outline, to give a precise account of a certain methodical procedure, a certain attitude towards Kant's thought (or Kantian thinking), in order thereby to remove some wellknown difficulties that have almost universally stood in the way of a proper understanding of Kant's position. I am here thinking in the first place of the vexed problem of the thing-in-itself. In that connection, I want to try and make precise a distinction between two different kinds of 'realism' which on more careful examination are to be found in Kant; a distinction which takes on a fresh interest in the light of the fact that contemporary philosophers like Hilary Putnam have recently taken up a certain realist position vis-a.-vis the status of scientific theory, which according to them - whether justified or not we shall have to see - bears a considerable resemblance to Kant's own. 1 A further problen1 - which will emerge as directly related to the foregoing - is whether there exists a possibility of suggesting a more meaningful interpretation for Kant's doctrine concerning the so-called 'affection of sensibility' than has hitherto by and large been provided. In these contexts, one of our main tasks will be to clarify the different interpretations or n10des of description of the Kantian notion of the 'object' or 'thing': of the thing as 'appearance'; as something 'existing in itself'; as 'noumenon'; as 'thing in general' [uberhaupt]; and finally, as 'transcendental object'. The confusions which these different terms have caused in the literature on Kant are too well known to need stressing. Now in Kant, of course, these different labels for the concept of the thing stand in certain relationships to one another, and in figure 1 I have atten1pted to give a graphical representation of these. A brief discussion of some of the details there shown will bring us to the core of our methodical approach.

218

Gerd Buchdahl

T~e (fictional)

I

I

vi:- T~ *e-'-'. y.''"' . oy.

~y.

~..:..~" ,~""

(theoretical) counterfictional, and shadow of pre-critical

T I11

.,y.

T;,//;

1;-;

6~O<,I"('l~-,. t-{;, 1/;%;6~

,1/0

<....

Q

TI~ (practical)

Till

The move from T g to T b T m constitutes a 'metaphysical' type of realization; from T g to T a or Tn 'critical' types of realization. T w = Object in the sensory world; philosophically neutral, with its ontology unappraised. Confined only to phenomenological aspect. T g = Object in general [iiberhaupt], with ontology indeterminate; phenomenological aspect 'bracketed out'. T 1 = Object as a purely 'logical' notion. To = Object with 'zero' ontology, after reduction; 'the transcendental object'. To (M,F) = material and formal attributes of To: To (H) = 'transcendental matter - (Sachheit, Realitat)'; To (F) = the formal aspect of To; the categories regarded as purely logical concepts. T a = Object as appearing, or as 'appearance', 'grounded' in To; result of a 'critical' realization. T a (m,f,c), where m = matter in the appearance; f = spatio-temporal form; c = schematized categories. Tm = Object as result of 'metaphysical' realization; pre-critical positions. Tn = Object as noumenon, either in 'positive sense' (TI~) or in 'negative (problematic) sense' (T;;-). T s = Object as 'thing-in-itself'; standing variously for Tn, or To, or T g , or T m (= object as occurring in the pre-critical schemes of, say, Descartes/Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, etc.). t j = transcendental in 'immanent' sense; to = transcendental in 'idling' sense; t r transcendental in the context of 'transcendental reflection'. t m = transcendental in the context of a 'metaphysical' realization, with tm,r = the rationalist version, and tm,c = the empiricist version. T~, T~, T~ =

a system of objects as a theoretical or systematic unity of nature, qua 'transcendental', qua appearance or qua thing-in-itself.

Figure 1 Flow chart of Kant's transcendental dynamics: realizational stages of Kant's concept of the object (Rn == type of realization).

Realism and Realization in a Kantian Light

219

I Viewed generally, figure 1 represents an explanatory scheme, with a view to providing a picture of the structure of the Kantian notion of 'thinghood', in such a way as to n1irror its various nuances in an immediate fashion and so to speak 'at a glance'. First, however, a few terminological explanations. To start with, it will be necessary to distinguish two sides or aspects of things - more specifically, of the . concept of a thing. I will designate these as the 'phenon1enological' and the 'ontological' aspects, respectively. By 'ontology' I shall here understand 'the account or explanation of the possibility of things and facts', and of the corresponding forms of discourse; where, moreover, in the typical Kantian contexts this must almost always be understood as meaning 'the possibility of the cognition of things'; or more briefly, 'the possibility of empirical things'. (This use of 'ontology' occurs occasionally also in Kant, as for instance in some of the letters, as well as in his Fortschritte essay.)2 By contrast, phenomenology is here to be understood as signifying the general forn1s of discourse (of 'experience in general', or again, of 'experience as a syste.m', etc.) which the ontological account seeks to define. (It should be noted that this use of the term is different from that to be found, for instance, in the writings of Husserl and Heidegger, where 'phenomenology' and 'ontology' are identified, both designating what I am labelling 'ontology'.) Let us now turn to the schema of figure 1, which is intended to represent the different conceptions of the notion of 'the thing' to be found in Kant. First, however, some additional explanations, concerning the real significance of my graphical mode of representation. The various 'stations' indicated in our figure, such as T w, T g , To, T a , etc., are not merely intended to represent the different interpretations of the Kantian concept of the thing, but in addition are meant to signify as many conceptual stages in the 'ontological development' - as I will term this - of a thing. What matters here above all is that we should become aware of the 'dynamical' side of the Kantian ontological approach. That is to say, instead of thinking merely in terms of different simultaneously existing Kantian types of 'object' still less of different simultaneous ontological types of being, such as the don1ain of appearances, of thingsin-themselves, etc. - I propose to view the situation as though a thing were passing through different developmental stages, in such a way that we advance from one stage or station in our figure to another, by virtue of 'the action' of certain 'enabling functions'; or alternatively, that we move in the reverse direction, via the suspension or elimination of these functions, thus returning to the starting point of the individual

220

Gerd Buchdahl

developmental stages. (In the Kantian context these functions are of course the different transcendental conditions, mediated via sensibility, understanding, imagination, etc.) Let us add some further comments towards an explanation of some of the details of these 'stations' or 'developn1ental stages'. As shown in figure 1, we begin with what Kant sometimes terms 'the object of the senses', or 'the world of sense' (Tw ), e.g. at A538-66, where a distinction is drawn between the 'appearance' and 'the intelligible' side of one and the same 'object of the senses'. (In our diagra1l1 this implies the distinction between T a and Tn' as contrasted with T w') T w has here evidently a 111erely phenomenological significance (in the sense of this term just explained); so far we are abstracting entirely from the 'ontological' side of the matter; we form as yet no judgement concerning what Kant terms 'the real possibility' of T w (cf. Bxxvii). 3 It is therefore of the utmost importance not to confuse the 'sensory object' with the 'appearance' (Tw with T a) - even if Kant himself frequently employs the same term 'appearance' for denoting either of these concepts - since 'appearance' presupposes a certain interpretation of the world of things or objects in general; i.e. in our graphical scheme it represents a later stage in the 'development' of the object. T w bears a certain similarity to Husserl's so-called 'life-world' [Lebenswelt]; just as the next step in our developmental schema likewise follows somewhat the Husserlian procedure - not surprisingly, given that Husserl himself was deeply influenced by certain aspects of Kant's transcendental approach. 4 (Kant's procedure will presently be shown to be rather more radical than Husserl's.) For the moment, however, I want roughly to follow Husserl; employing his terminology, in order to describe the evolution of our various developmental stages. We begin, then, by provisionally 'bracketing out' the phenomenological aspect of T w; subjecting it - to speak with Husserl - to a certain 'suspension' or 'epoche', in order to advance - again in a 'dynamical' sense - from stage T w to the next stage, T g: the concept of the Kantian 'thing in general' (T g). As Kant himself once describes this, in a little-known passage of his Reflexionen: 5 we so to speak 'suspend' the phenomenological aspect - 'suspend everything sensory' - in order to 'free reality as far as possible via reduction of that which belongs to it qua phenon1enon'. All subsequent stages will then be confined to accounts of the ontological aspects of Kant's enquiries. Thus in the particular case of the 'object in general' (T g), its 'ontology' will be viewed as so far being entirely 'indeterminate', as yet to be determined during the subsequent stages; precisely what the term 'thing in general' (Ding uberhaupt] expresses. The next step is perhaps the one that is the most important. Following the Husserlian terminology, we shall say that we subject T g to 'a reduction', such that to the so-far-indeterminate 'ontological value' of

Realism and Realization in a Kantian Light

221

T g we now assign a 'determinate' value; which in the present case will be the value of 'episten1010gical [i.e. ontological] nullity' (as Husserl once describes this).6 That is to say, temporarily and provisionally we pretend not to be in the possession of any ontological account of the possibility of things; indicated in the diagram as the stage To (Kant's so-called 'transcendental object'). In reference to Kant, this signifies that the thing is being viewed as having so far reached neither the stage of appearance nor of something subsisting in itself. (As indicated symbolically in figure 1: neither as T a nor as Tl~') Instead, as our diagram indicates, To is so far only pointing in the direction of T a , say, or alternatively, of Tn; it has not as yet 'arrived' at any of these stages. For these can only be reached by way of certain 'realizational processes', or 'realizations' for short (as will be explained presently; for instance, Kant's 'transcendental deductions'). (Hence our charaterization of the Kantian method as something 'dynamical': the different interpretations are represented pictorially as dispersed in space as well as in time.) Before going further, it should perhaps be noted that although these reductive and realizational accounts to some extent correspond to parallel accounts in Husserl and Heidegger, our interpretation of their equivalent in Kant involves relatively simpler and clearer constructions, although the significance of the relation of the Kantian n1ethod to these later writers will not perhaps be lost on the reader. Let us now consider in some more detail the reductive step from the 'object in general' to the 'transcendental object' (from T g to To), as indicated in our diagram. As noted before, the Husserlian notion of 'reduction' occurs already in Kant, though Husserl vastly generalizes this method of reduction in a systematic fashion. By contrast, however, Husserl views the reductive step in a less radical way than Kant; frequently apparently identifying 'reduction' and 'epocht?.Specifically, on Husserl's account reduction merely leads to what he calls 'the pure phenon1enon', which is really akin to Kant's 'undetermined intuition'; whereas (as we shall presently see) the Kantian reduction leads to a 'suspension' even of the intuitional stage, in order to advance to the 'object in the transcendental sense', i.e. the transcendental object (To). To this we shall return. For the moment I want to say a few words concerning the next step, the one which follows upon reduction as just described. In our schema this corresponds to the path, or 'n10vement', from the object as something with 'merely transcendental' import (t oimport in our diagram) to the object as something that 'appears' (from To to T a for short); a step which I want to describe as a 'realization of To as T a ': the movement from the object as something transcendental to that of appearing. Kant himself occasionally employs the term 'realize', in order to characterize the step from the level of the merely logical to that of the 'real' - or more precisely, from merely logical to

222

Gerd Buchdahl

real possibility. Thus in the chapter on the Schen1atism he says that 'the schemata of sensibility ... first realize [realisierenJ the categories'; and again, that the categories, apart from prior schematization, possess only a purely logical status, whereas their capacity for representing objects derives subsequently 'fron1 sensibility which realizes the understanding [die den Verstand realisiert]'. (A146-7/B186-7) We may therefore say that in an experiential context sensibility, and subsequently the understanding as well, realize the transcendental object as appearance. Kant himself, indeed, on one occasion describes this realization of the transcendental object quite explicitly - albeit without using this term explicitly: For this reason the categories [when in their purely logical state] represent no special object, given to the understanding alone, but serve only to determine [our 'realize'] the transcendental object (the concept of something in general [von etwas uberhauptJ) through that which is given in sensibility, in order thereby to cognize appearances empirically under concepts of objects. (A251)

In what follows, I shall - for reasons that will become clear occasionally symbolize 'appearance' in a more articulated fashion as Ta(m,f,c); where m = the 'matter in the appearance', which 'corresponds to sensation' (A20/B34); f = the spatio-temporal modes; and c = the schematized categorial relations. Also, the method of reduction-andrealization I shall label 'the R-R method' for short. All these symbolic representations seem to me to be absolutely necessary in order to emphasize the internal structure of the elements of the Kantian argument, and in order that one may follow more clearly the various transitional stages which, according to the account here given, characterize that argument. In a later part of CPR Kant speaks in a fashion similar to the passage just quoted, referring explicitly to a 'realizing' of the 'Idea of the systen1atically-complete unity' of objects (A677/B70S); a realization which, so Kant there argues, can in this case be effected only via a methodologically determined process of scientific theorizing; whilst by contrast, when we abstract from such a process, the idea of unity denotes no more than a 'transcendental object' (A698/B726)! A reminder, by the way, that the expression 'transcendental object' denotes not only single objects, but on occasion also a whole system of objects. What matters is whether we are dealing with a realized or an unrealized, i.e. reduced, entity. Realization thus represents a process whereby with the aid of certain transcendental functions such as sensibility (space and time), understanding (the categories), etc., the object, originally subsisting only at the 'transcendental' level (To state), advances to a state of appearing (T a state). As will emerge, and is repeatedly stressed by Kant himself,

Realism and Realization in a Kantian Light

223

we are never dealing with two, let alone several objects but solely with a single object (one world), viewed as passing through a variety of realizational 'stages'. To this we shall return. For the mon1ent, however, a few general remarks concerning the actual philosophical motivation for the R-R method may be in place. Let us ask: what is really the point of all this R-R rigmarole? Why first take something away through reduction, only in order to restore it subsequently via realization? For instance, why move from Tw, via Tg and To, to T ;:D seeing that the starting- and endpoints both represent entities in the sensory world? 'The reply is as follows. One of Kant's chief aims was - as he repeatedly stresses - to explain the possibility - or better: the validity - of synthetic a priori judgements and principles. And according to him, this is only possible provided such judgements are identified as transcendental presuppositions of the possibility of experiential facts; which in our terminology becomes: provided they are shown to function as instruments for realization. Now the significance of the realizational process consists precisely in the assun1ption that apart from the latter, any object in question will be 'nothing at all'. But now: we can be certain of this fact only provided the object in question has first been explicitly transposed to a stage of 'ontological nullity'; i.e. has first been subjected to a reduction. For if the world could as it were 'precede' this process of reduction followed by realization - if instead it were viewed as in some way 'pre-given', as a 'thing-in-itself' (one of Kant's uses of this term, symbolized in our diagram as T m ), as, say, the product of a divinely-grounded realization, then of course there would be no need to proceed to a realization on our part in the first place. But then, such an assumption will exert its price, for - as Kant once remarks if objects are interpreted as things in themselves (T:) from which we could then derive their categorial forms and principles, (leaving aside the question how the object could become known to us), our concepts would then be merely empirical, and not concepts a priori (A129; and see the same point, made in reference to the idea of the unity of nature, at A693/B721.)

That is to say, in such a case our categorial concepts etc. could so to speak be applied to objects only 'from without' ('empirically', as Kant puts it), instead of being internal to them from the start, and thus a priori. (Incidentally, this is an interesting example of an occasional use made by Kant of the concept of the 'thing-in-itself'. For instead of harping on its 'unknowability', he here uses it on the contrary in order to argue that in empirical philosophies objects lnust have the status of things-in-themselves (T m in our diagram). Which no doubt is his reason

224

Gerd Buchdahl

for saying, in the CPrR, that 'Hume took the objects of experience as things-in-themselves'.7 The R-R method thus simply expresses a certain philosophical attitude towards the world; as in the case of all creative metaphysical systems, so also here: the Kantian edifice is not so much a question of 'proofs' as the creation of a certain constructive approach in order to secure a meaningful formulation for certain philosophical positions; in the case of Kant, that of the a priori status of space, time and the categories; of the methodological maxims of science; and finally, of Kant's moral and religious philosophy. In all these cases Kant makes use of what one might call a principle of philosophical autonomy, as instanced above in the decision to subject the \vorld to a preliminary reduction, with the consequent 'necessary' requirement of a certain realizational process whose principles thereby acquire a priori status. Kant hin1self pregnantly formulates this approach in a well-known passage in the second edition of CPR, where he says that 'we can cognize of things only that a priori which we place into them ourselves' (Bxviii). But clearly one will be entitled to such 'placements' only on condition that the 'object' should previously have been transposed to a state of reduction. Our aim is to articulate the method involved in Kant's thinking, and in particular, the underlying imagery, in concrete form, instead of reducing it to abstract arguments. Let us return to the realizational process as such. Until now we have only discussed a single case of realization, viz. that of 'appearance', the movement from To to T a • But may there not still be other cases, asks Kant; i.e. realizations not leading to the object as it appears, and instead yielding an object as it is 'in itself'? Since in that case we have to 'abstract' from sensibility - as Kant says at B307 - the thing can be viewed only as an object of thought, or (to use the Greek term) as a 'noumenon' (Tn). However, in this latter case, Tn represents so far only something problematic; certainly not anything sensible; for which reason Kant speaks of it as 'the noumenon in the negative sense' (T~; B307). It should be noted that (as is also clear fron1 our diagram) on this reading T;:; is not in any way identical with To; contrary to what has usually been claimed. For T;:; denotes a stage which represents To, as it were, already 'on the way to' - using a Heideggerian locution - a potential realization, whether successful or not; one that may possibly rest, not on sensibility but on son1e other enabling instrun1ent of realization. By contrast, it would make no sense to speak of To as 'being on the way' to anything, since it represents after all precisely that stage of the object prior to its realizational development; something as yet to be realized; a distinction that can be grasped clearly, however, only on the basis of a 'dynamical' approach, such as the one here employed. Such a view at least explains Kant's wavering between the

Realism and Realization in a Kantian Light

225

first and second edition of CPR; in the rewritten portions of the latter, the expression To is usually replaced by T~; whilst, rather confusingly, Kant continued to refer to To rather than to T~ in the unaltered parts of the second edition. However, it is already evident, and will become even clearer below, that Kant really requires both terms; an instance of the fact that later generations may be able to grasp more clearly the structure of an author's thought than was perhaps possible for the latter himself; as Kant indeed himself observes at A314/B370. At any rate, in order to advance from T~ to something positive, to T~, Kant recognizes, as our diagram indicates, only two ways: (1) with the aid of a 'non-sensory intuition' (B3 07); also called 'intellectual intuition' (cf. B72); (2) in the context of practical reason. (T~ (theor.) and T~ (pract.), respectively.) The first of these is for Kant basically counterfactual - a shadow of his own pre-critical position, arrived at largely on lines of Leibnizian principles. 8 It is made use of, however, at the level of 'theoretical reason', in the section of CPR, entitled 'Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic', where Kant outlines the principles of his approach to scientific theory construction, and where as a way of picturing the realization of the Idea of the System of Nature via scientific processing (man's theoretical reason), he additionally introduces - as a fiction - the 'analogon' of a Divine theoretical reason, pictured as an underlying 'substratum'; the system now being viewed, not as appearance (as in the 'human' case) but as an 'object of my idea according to what it may be in itself' (A678/B706).9 In general, however, T1- (theor.) - in so far as it depends upon intellectual intuition, as a counterfactual function of the understanding - constitutes a case which the CPR describes as something not 'really possible', and only reserved for the 'originative intuition' of the Godhead, compared with the merely 'derivative intuition' of man; an intuition which is 'dependent upon the existence of the object' (B72). (On this, more below.) In our graphical scheme, the pre-critical case of realization is represented by the n10vement fron1 the 'object in general', via the object taken explicitly in a purely logical sense (as found, e.g., in Leibniz), to the object as existing in itself (e.g. Leibniz's monads; cf. A267/B323) - in our symbolisn1, the n10ven1ent fron1 T g via T 1 to T m ; the latter the pre-critical version of T:. In this pre-critical version, both 'divine understanding' and 'human understanding' are viewed, according to Kant at least, as conditions of the possibility of the existence of things, and not just of their 'appearance'.lO So far we have met with three interpretations of the term 'thing-initself': T~, T: (theor.) and T: (pract.). The second of these, as noted, has its counterpart in Kant's interpretation of certain pre-critical philosophical positions: not only his own, but also that of Leibniz, Berkeley and Hume. Thus we have already seen that according to Kant,

226

Gerd Buchdahl

Hume treated the 'objects of experience' as having the status of 'thingsin-themselves'; as indeed they will have to, if we regard them as the result of the realizational process that leads from T g to T m' Leibnizian monads are characterized through the same label (e.g. at A270/B326). Finally, and perhaps most important for our own account of the structure of Kant's thought, there is the fact that, as we shall see, Kant occasionally applies the term 'thing-in-itself' also to the transcendental object (To) - perhaps in order to signify that any thing in this state can obviously not 'appear'! But one can easily imagine the considerable confusion that these different uses of the expression 'thing-in-itself' have produced in the literature on Kant. Yet the merest glance at our pictorial scheme will perhaps now make it obvious that there is a world of difference - and will explain the nature of that difference - between a thing as yet entirely unrealized (To), when contrasted with one that has been realized, thus possessing some kind of constitution, either counterfactually so (Tl~ (theor.)), or viewed in some historical context (T m), or finally, in a context belonging to the domain of morals (T: (pract.)). At any rate, it is to be hoped that where most previous critics have only been able to see 'contradictions' and 'lack of sense' in Kant's position vis-a-vis the thing-in~itself, it will now be possible to appreciate better the various distinctions which Kant actually observed in his approach to the subject. Without doubt, the most interesting part of our 'dynan1ical' structure is the concept of the object in the transcendental sense of the tern1 (To); i.e. the stage from which we move to the realization of the object. Let us consider this in somewhat more detail. First, a preliminary question: what are we to understand, in its various contexts, by the term 'transcendental'? At its most general, Kant contrasts 'transcendental logic' with 'general logic'; the distinguishing feature being that the former, in addition to the purely logical relations studied by the latter, 'is concerned also with the origin of our cognitions, in so far as this cannot be ascribed to the objects' (A55/B80); e.g. to sensibility, understanding, etc. (The problem of characterizing what it is that can 'be ascribed to the objects' we shall deal with below, especially in section IV.) 'Transcendental' thus treats of what I have called the 'ontological' side of things, i.e. of the conditions of [the cognition of] their possibility. However, it is important to be aware that a considerable number of quite different applications in Kant's writing - about four or five! - of the term 'transcendental' fall under this general explanation. The first of these is the one best-known. Thus for instance Kant speaks of 'the transcendental unity of apperception'; or of the categories as transcendental presuppositions of the possibility of experience, and of objects of experience. In such cases, Kant speaks of the categories las being an 'immanent' component o~~~_~~~~t_~~29_6!~~~~)~'I_hey so __

Realism and Realization in a Kantian Light

227

to speak 'mesh with' the other components of the object. Let us label this use of the term 'transcendental' as, 't/. It is in this sense that Kant occasionally describes the categories as 'ontological predicates' 11. In contrast with the foregoing there is a second case, where in relation to the object we abstract from sensibility; here the categories (says Kant) 'lack employment'; let us say that in such a case they are as it were 'idling', similarly to the idling-wheels of a machine. Kant describes this case by saying that 'the pure categories, without formal conditions of sensibility, haven1erely transcendental significance [Bedeutung], but no transcendental employment [Gebrauch] ...' (A248/B305). We will symbolize this 'idling' case as 'to'. It should be noted that Kant's frequent reference to the 'merely transcendental' employment of the categories (e.g. at B304) naturally has in mind this to sense of the term only. A third application of the term 'transcendental' connects with the pre-critical version of 'realization', already discussed; represented in our diagram by the path from T g to T m. Now just as human sensibility, understanding and reason are regarded as the transcendental conditions of experience (and thus also of empirical objects), in the t i sense of the term, so Divine Reason ('The Ideal of Reason') is also described by Kant, in parallel fashion, as being a 'transcendental condition ... for all possibility' (A573/B601). This sense of 'transcendental' we may label tm; and as shown already, t m conditions are always viewed by Kant as conditions of the 'existence' of things, and not of their appearance, or of their cognizability. As our diagram suggests, t m itself splits up again into two cases: (1) t m grounding via the divine understanding - the rationalist approach associated with the school of Leibniz for instance; label tm(r); (2) t m grounding via the human understanding - the empiricist approach, exemplified in Berkeley's slogan, 'esse == percipi'; label tm(e). Finally, there is yet a fourth case, discussed for instance in the 'Appendix' to the Transcendental Analytic ('The Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection'), and which connects with what Kant calls 'transcendental reflection'. Here we move, as it were, in an explicit manner beyond the world of objects (empirical or otherwise), contemplating it - so we might say - 'from outside', situated in a 'new dimension' - as I-Iusserl once described it. 12 Thus, when Kant in the Amphiboly examines the question, whether space and time 'belong to the pure understanding or to sensory intuition' (A261/B317), then according to him this takes place on the basis of a 'transcendental reflection' obviously in the sense of this fourth type of 'transcendental', which we will designate as t r • With these explanations we can see at once that the transcendental object (To), seen from the perspective of this extra dimension, is 'transcendental' not only in the to, but also in the t r use of this term.

228

Gerd Buchdahl

In the san1e way, our whole reduction and realization procedure is evidently viewable only from the perspective of the tr-dimension. It has frequently been objected to Kant that since in accordance with his own teaching all reality must lie within the horizon or 'sphere of reason' and its associated 'field of experience' (A762/B790), it is incomprehensible how it should be possible for hin1 to treat of this 'sphere' as such, since this surely assumes that the philosopher himself has become conscious of its nature and existence, and is thus contemplating it so to speak 'from without'. Now whilst this observation is perfectly correct, Kant was not unaware of the need for a special dimension, yielding a perspective fron1 which to view this sphere, via a transcendental [t r type] of reflection. (Cf. also the distinction he makes between 'lin1its' and 'boundaries' in Prolegomena, para. 57: whilst 'limits' confine experience to a given space, 'boundaries' point 'beyond them' .13 Note again the importance of rendering Kant's ideas via a certain imagery!) At any rate, speaking generally, it is clear that only by way of transcendental (t r) reflection as such can the world be described as the result of reductions and realizations. We have noted that the transcendental object (To), though this may be viewed as lying within the t r dimension, also has a transcendental status in the to sense. What else can be said about To? In many treatments of Kant's philosophy one simply meets with the remark that To is nothing; perhaps synonymous with the 'thing-in-itself'; or that at best it is identical with the noumenon, especially when taken in the 'negative sense' (T~). Now in one way such suggestions are not entirely incorrect. For since To, as the result of a prior reduction, is situated at the limit, i.e. at the start of a realizational process, its constitution considered in the 'ontological' respect - has by definition only a zero value. But note the proviso: we are here solely concerned with the ontological question as to the possibility of the world; only in reference to the provisional 'reduction' of the ontological aspect of the world do we here speak of 'nothing' (zero value). Naturally - to speak with Husserl - we can at any time 'step back' into the 'life-world' of T w; its phenomenology is untouched by any reduction-realization procedure taking place at the ontological level. Kant himself was indeed perfectly clear about the zero value of To, for he expressly remarks: Whilst it is not possible to give an answer to the question as to what may be the constitution of a transcendental object, namely, what it nlight be, it is certainly possible to reply that the question itself is nothing, and that, because no object of such a question has been given. (A479/B507)

Note well: in the concept of To nothing is as yet 'given' (in the don1ain of experience), for this 'giving' presupposes of course the invoking of

Realism and Realization in a Kantian Light

229

a realizational process; for the case of the advance from To to T a , we require the activation of sensibility, as well as of the understanding and the imagination, together with the various kinds of syntheses associated therewith; in short, all the special apparatus connected with the transcendental deduction which there is no need to discuss here since this topic is sufficiently well known, forming - as it does - the breadand-butter of the normal Kant commentaries. It is thus in principle not possible to make any statements concerning the constitution of To; for To is just the concept of something - 'an etwas == x' (as Kant usually describes it) 14 - a kind of transcendental empty 'transparency', which so far subsists only 'on the way to' some possible realization, qua 'appearance' or qua 'noumenon' etc., but not as yet realized. 15 In this context, the already-noted immense difference between To and Tn + is again greatly clarified. The latter represents a concept of something regarded as the result of a realization, if only 'problematically' (cf. A254ff/B310), or even counterfactually; whereas To as such is precisely something that always lies at the starting-point of a realization; something that is as yet to be realized, and which, if this is successful, may reach the T; stage. It is as it were a category-mistake on a monumental scale to confuse To with Tn. The whole issue is made perfectly clear in a passage of CPR, although it is exactly this passage that has sometimes been described as the very apotheosis of Kantian incomprehensibility.16 Kant, in this passage, maintains that 'the object to which I relate appearance in general is the transcendental object, i.e. the wholly undetermined thought of something in general [von etwas uberhauptJ. This cannot be entitled the noumenon; for I know nothing of what it may be in itself ...' (A253). But - thus runs the con1ment - what possible meaning could one attach to the point Kant is here making? Is he saying that although we cannot know what the transcendental object (To) is in itself, such knowledge is possible when we are dealing with the thing-in-itself (T;), notwithstanding the fact that Kant almost throughout categorically denies any such knowledge? I think, however, that by now it will be perfectly clear that our account dissolves this apparent contradiction at once: To simply represents the state of the object prior to any realization whatever (by definition, so to speak), so that it would not make any logical sense to ask how we can know what it is in itself; whilst Tn, or indeed T;, as such represents the concept of something whose realization has either been attempted or achieved; a realization which Kant after all declares to be possible 'in a positive sense' at least in the context of practical reason. 17

230

Gerd Buchdahl

II I now want to try and give a sonlewhat fuller explanation of the notion of the transcendental object than has so far been attempted. We have seen that - as Kant rightly noted - no questions concerning its 'constitution' can be asked, simply because it expresses no more than the fact that the object which it denotes, so far subsists only in the state of reduction, prior to its possible realization, either as Ta or as T:. I now want to go further and show that one can nevertheless - indeed, that one must- attribute something more to this notion (To) than treating it simply just as an expression for 'nothingness'. To make a start, let us consider the transcendental object in the way in which, according to Kant, any object can be considered in general, namely, fronl the point of view of its formal and material characteristics. For - as he stresses in the section, 'The Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection', referred to previously - 'matter' and 'form' are 'two concepts [that] underly all other reflection, so inseparably are they bound up with all employment of the understanding' (A266/B322). Now 'matter', Kant continues, 'signifies the determinable (BestimmbareJ as such', ... 'form' its 'determination' [BestimmungJ; and he adds the interesting comment: 'both in the transcendental sense, where one abstracts from all difference in that which is given, and from the mode on which it is determined' (ibid.); evidently yet a further explanation of the concept of the transcendental, in the to sense discussed previously. We have already seen that, speaking generally, Kant applies the expression 'transcendental' to logical conceptions insofar as they also 'aim at the origin of our cognitions of objects [auf den Ursprung unserer Erkenntnisse von Gegenstanden gehenJ' (cf. AS 6/B81); the sentence, 'auf . .. gehen', being an interesting verbal rendering of the 'dynamic' side of the 'movement' from the transcendental object to its various realized stages, which our diagrammatic representation has been intended to represent in pictorial fashion! As regards matter and form, Kant continues, 'in every entity the constituent elements of it are the matter, the mode in which they are combined in one thing, the essential· form' (ibid.). Let us symbolize these two elements for the case of the transcendental object as To (M,F). As an exanlple of To(F) Kant mentions the copula 'is' in any subject-predicate proposition (A266/B322). Moreover, comparing To with its 'realized' state, T a , To (F) - in so far as it means more than mere 'form in general' - will correspond to Ta(c) - the categorial or schematized aspect of the object of experience (appearance) - the 'copula' representing the unity of apperception. (As Kant says at

Realism and Realization in a Kantian Light

231

B142: 'The objective unity of apperception ... is what is intended by the copula "is" .') The notion of 'correspondence' here involved is - as Stadler (1883) already observed a hundred years ago - extraordinarily important and central for any understanding of the various relationships here involved. It explains for instance Kant's mysterious comment, at A2S0, that 'the transcendental object ... can serve only as a correlatum of the unity of apperception'; evidently a reference to the 'forn1al' aspect of To (i.e. To (F)), and a point that will be shown to be of central importance for our discussion of the 'problem of affection' in the last section of this chapter. In the context of apperception the categories are of course always to be viewed as schematized - 'realized by sensibility', as we have found Kant to say at AI46/BI86. By contrast, when in the state of reduction, they are to be viewed only as something logical, mere 'forms of thought' (cf. A2S4/B309), or transcendental, in the 'idling' or to sense of the term; what we have syn1bolised as To (F). The important thing is, to become aware of the 'correspondences' which Kant traces between the to and the t i states of the object, and to which in our scheme we have given a 'dynamic' interpretation. Above all this will help us to see that the To state of the object is no mysterious excrescence on the Kantian corpus, but an essential tool for its proper understanding. The correspondence-structure of Kant's analysis can also be shown to be decisive for a proper grasp of his approach towards the problem of 'realism', in connection with the interpretation which on one occasion he gives to the material aspect of the transcendental object (To(M)). To begin with, consider a passage where Kant introduces another of his 'correspondences', arguing this time that 'the transcendental object ... corresponds to sensibility as a receptivity' (A494/BS22). Now surely, only when viewed in terms of the general scheme here proposed, is it possible to understand Kant's claim that the transcendental object corresponds both to the unity of apperception, operating at the level of the understanding, and to receptivity, at the level of sensibility! And in the last-named case we have evidently again an application of the notion of correspondence between the two states of reduction and realization, the reference to sensibility here implying a correspondence between To(M) and 'the real of sensation' (B207), and the associated intuitional aspect of T a : T a (m,f) in our symbolic representation. (Remember that for Kant, sensibility is the transcendental condition of obtaining a realization of To (M) as T a (m,f); i.e. of the transcendental object as something 'appearing' in the form of certain spatio-ten1porally organized qualitative states.) To grasp the significance of To (M) fully, we must consider a further and very important instance of the application of the 'correspondence' notion in the chapter on the Schen1atisn1. We have already alluded

232

Gerd Buchdahl

briefly to the correspondence which Kant mentions at A20/B34: 'That in the appearance which corresponds to sensation I term its matter'; our T a (m) - the 'material' part of T a (nl,f). Now in the Schematism passage this leads Kant to suggest a further analogy (or correspondence), namely between the matter in the appearance and the matter in the transcendental object; i.e. between T a (m) and To (M), with an explanation of the significance of the latter which is absolutely central for any understanding of the overall structure of Kant's thought, though this seems hitherto to have received remarkably little attention. At . A143/B 182 Kant says that that which in the appearance corresponds to sensation, i.e. its 'nlatter', is (when considered in its state of reduction) 'the transcendental matter of all objects, as things-in-themselves'; synlbolically: T a (m) corresponds to To (M); where the expression 'things-in-themselves' must here of course be understood as referring to To! However, for us the most important aspect of this passage is that Kant, after the words '... things-in-themselves' adds, in parentheses, and by way of explanation, the two ternlS, 'Sachheit, Realitat'. 'Sachheit' is a term difficult to translate. 'Sache' denotes something like 'state of affairs'; compare the English 'matter' in a context such as, 'matters are as follows'. 'Sachheit' - we shall henceforth always use the Gernlan term, as being least misleading in the discussions that follow - thus points to the merely conceptual aspect of the holding of a certain state of affairs; in particular, to the fact that such and such is the case; where the 'what' and the 'how', including the spatiotemporal aspect, is for Kant of course entirely a function of sensibility and understanding. (For the case of sensibility, cf. B44, where Kant remarks that, like space and time, the qualitative aspects of things 'belong merely to the subjective nature [Beschaffenheit] of the n1anner of sensibility, for instance, of sight, hearing, feeling, as in the case of the sensations of colours, sounds, and heat ... ') Evidently, in terms of our scheme, Sachheit denotes the 'material' aspect of things under reduction; hence Kant's point (at A143/B182) that '[at the level of reduction] reality, viewed as a pure concept of the understanding [something "formal", with which, as just noted, Kant associates the corresponding "material" Sachheit or transcendental matter] is that which [at the realizationallevel] corresponds to a sensation in general' .18 'Sachheit' thus points evidently to that aspect of the object, qua 'object in general', or rather, qua transcendental object, here To (M), which under realization makes it that there should obtain a certain qualitative state of affairs, organized in the spatio-temporal mode; sensibility being the transcendental condition for its realization. As we shall see in the last section, this interpretation will be of vital importance for an understanding of Kant's 'doctrine of affection'. To recap, it is clear that all the spatio-temporal as well as qualitative

Realism and Realization in a Kantian Light

233

aspects of things disappear under reduction, and that what remains is the 'detern1inable matter' (To (M)) or Sachheit; Kant's 'transcendental matter of all objects as things-in-themselves'. That is to say, the expression 'Sachheit' refers to that elen1ent in the object which subsists prior to realization, when still in the state of reduction. It denotes the fact that under realization something, e.g., red rather than green; hard rather than soft, etc., will come to manifest itself, i.e. 'appear'. In other words, although the qualitative side (the greenness, redness, etc. of the object - its 'how') is detern1ined by sensibility, that some particular instance of green, or red, will manifest itself, rather than some other this is already predetermined, except that at the stage of reduction we lack the linguistic framework in terms of which to express this aspect of experience. As Kant notes at B72, sensible intuition does not 'originate' the object, but on the contrary 'is dependent upon the existence of the object'; depending indeed upon being 'affected by that object'; where the status of 'object' involved must evidently of course again be that of the object in the transcendental sense (To). We shall return to this in the last section; in particular, to the sense in which To can be said 'to affect the subject'. Here we only note that the 'Sachheit' aspect of To is a reminder of the fact that experience is a 'finding' rather than an 'originating'. All of which explains Kant's insistence in the Prolegomena, para. 13, Notes II and III, that he has never denied the 'existence of things' prior to their 'appearing'. What he there fails to explain is that the expression 'existence of things' refers, not to things-in-then1selves, but to things qua transcendental objects, in the sense just explained; just as the expression 'existence' itself must be taken in that special 'transcendental sense' in which Kant at A372 says that the term 'outside us' must be understood when used in relation to the transcendental object.

III With these explanations we are now in a pOSItIon briefly to discuss some of the problems mentioned at the outset: firstly, Kant's conception of the thing-in-itself; secondly, what kind of 'realism' is represented by this conception; finally to try and make the doctrine of the 'affection of sensibility' more intelligible than it has seemed to most students of Kant. As to the 'thing-in-itself', most of the problems surrounding the place of this concept in the Kantian scheme have perhaps already been sufficiently clarified, by the sin1ple device of interpreting this notion as a reference to the various stages of the R-R process; such as those described as T g' To, Tl~' T: and T m. Speaking generally, it is to be

234

Gerd Buchdahl

hoped that the preceding account will have supplied enough clarification concerning most of the problematic passages in the Kantian texts which connect with the notion of the thing-in-itself, so that it will be sufficient to confine ourselves to just one or two examples, additional to those already mentioned. Let us consider then a well-known problematic passage in the Third Antinomy of CPR, A538/B566, where Kant outlines a way of considering the subject in the two alternative contexts of nature and moral freedom. Since appearances 'are not things in themselves, they must rest upon a transcendental object [ein transzendentaler Gegenstand zum Grunde liegen muss] which determines them as mere representations ... '. (The same clainl is made also at A358, in a passage which we shall take up in more detail in the last section.) In the above, a clear distinction is evidently drawn between 'things-in-themselves' and the 'transcendental object'; the latter now is to be interpreted as the starting point for a realization. And this is indeed how Kant views the situation in this passage. To start with, to say that the transcendental object 'determines appearances as representations' is simply a sunlmary account of the transcendental type of realization, as we have termed this, contrasted with what we have called 'the metaphysical type'. Kant then proceeds to argue in terms of the two alternative transcendental realization procedures, by saying that we may 'ascribe to the transcendental object' the concept of causality in two different contexts; one, when operating on the object (here: the subject) qua 'appearance', as 'belonging to the sensible world'; the other, where we consider the subject merely 'in its intelligible character', and where causality is assumed as not 'standing under any conditions of sensibility'; i.e. the realization of the subject as a 'thing-in-itself' in the sense of the moral noumenon (TI~); on which some further remarks below, p. 237. Concentrating on the first of these realizational types, it may be worthwhile to refer back to the passage from A251, already quoted before (p. 222), which illustrates Kant's realizational approach especially well, but whose significance can now be appreciated more clearly. Kant here speaks of the categories as 'determining' 'the transcendental object through that which is given in sensibility'. Remembering his argument that the categories 'acquire [objective] significance from sensibility, which realizes the understanding ... ' (A147/B187), these two passages obviously provide a particularly clear example of the realizational process: The activation of sensibility yields the realization of the object as something so far 'undetermined' (A20/B34); and the process of realization is completed by way of the injection of the categories which are thereby 'realized' as the corresponding 'schemata', yielding the fully deternlinate objects 'according to the unity of the categories' as true 'phenomena' (A249).

Realism and Realization in a Kantian Light

235

Let us summarize the realizational process as follows: We begin with the transcendental object (To), articulated in terms of 'matter' and 'form' (To (M,F)). The 'determinable' matter (or 'Sachheit') is realized as 'sensation' via the activation of sensibility, 'corresponding' to the 'formal' concept of 'reality' (cf. A143/B182), yielding the so far 'undetermined object' (A20/B34); syn1bolically: T a (n1,f). The latter is then realized completely via the detern1ining function of the categories of the understanding, yielding T a (m,f,c): the fully-determined object. The notion of 'Sachheit' which plays an important part in the above account has some considerable bearing on the problem of a proper characterization of Kant's attitude towards realisn1. As is well known, Kant's official position is one of 'empirical realism' in relation to the objects of experience; a realism which is to be viewed as located within the boundaries of a 'transcendental idealism'. Nevertheless, in addition (so it seems to n1e) Kant distinguishes yet a further, and more refined, characterization of realism. For in his debate with the kind of 'idealism' associated with, for instance, Berkeley, he maintains, as we have already briefly hinted, that - unlike what he holds to have been Berkeley's position - he, Kant, had never in any way wished to deny 'the existence' of things, viewed as lying beyond the transcendental boundary of experience, and thus existing 'prior' to any cognitive occasion; a contention which, given the usual understanding of Kant, has frequently been felt to be, to say the least, somewhat puzzling; seemingly underwriting a positive attitude towards the existence of things-inthen1selves; quite inconsistent with what he seems to claim elsewhere, viz. that nothing can be said to 'exist' in abstraction from the conditions of experience. (He affirms this quite categorically for instance at A178/B221, A227/B279, A601/B629.) Not surprisingly, therefore, his contention that 'things exist', as distinct from their 'appearing', being a seen1ingly inconsistent aspect of his thought, has usually been overlooked; the most recent example is Hilary Putnam, who in adopting an 'internal [i.e. "empirical"] realist' position, in terms of a denial of the existence of any 'noumenal' realm, explicitly appeals to the example of Kant's opposition to noumena whilst overlooking the just-n1entioned aspect of Kant's teaching. 19 At any rate, in the Prolegomena Kant certainly sought expressly to defend himself against the criticism that his philosophy seemed to boil down to no more than a form of Berkeleyan 'idealism'; what would, in terms of our adopted terminology, constitute a tm,e-type of realization procedure. (Cf. the realizational n1oven1ent indicated in figure 1, with the arrows pointing from T g via T 1 to T m.) In reply, Kant repeats what, so he maintains, has always been his official teaching, viz. that any physical body is no more than an 'appearance of that to us unknown but nevertheless real object' which lies behind the appearance. 20 And

236

Gerd Buchdahl

in a similar vein he clain1s that he had never at any time doubted 'the existence of things [die Existenz der Sachen J' - be it noted; 'their existence prior to any realization'! - but that instead his position concerns merely 'the relation of our knowledge' to our 'capacity for cognition of things', and not of the 'things themselves': ' ... the existence of the thing which appears is here not cancelled [aufgehobenJ, as in the case of actual idealism, but it is only shown that it [this thing], as it is in itself [!], cannot ever be cognized through the senses' (Prolegomena, Note 11).21 I will label this position, for reasons to be explained presently, a form of 'reductive external realism', which Kant here introduces in addition to his 'empirical' or 'internal' realism; 'reductive realism' being contrasted with its 'n1etaphysical' form - what Kant frequently terms 'transcendental realism' (cf., e.g., at A372); obviously to be taken in the t m sense of 'transcendental'. By contrast, when Kant insists - as in the passage just cited - that he has never denied the 'existence of things', i.e., as distinct fron1 their 'appearance', he obviously intends by this a reference to things qua 'things in general' (Tg); more specifically, to things in their reductive state (To); i.e. the expression 'existence' in the above passage must again be understood in the 'transcendental sense' (in the to or reductive sense of this term); much in the way in which in the Fourth Paralogism a distinction, as already noted before, is drawn between two uses of 'outside us': (1) in reference to 'appearances', said to exist 'outside us' in the empirical sense of 'outer appearance' (and thus in our ti-sense); and (2), where 'the transcendental object', 'the cause of our outer intuitions', is said to be 'external in the transcendental sense' - i.e. in the to sense of this term (A272-3). In respect of the term 'cause', it should be noted that in section ix of the Second Introduction to C], Kant remarks explicitly that the word 'cause', when used of the 'supersensible' (including, surely, To), always 'only signifies ground', 22 an expression to which I shall return. We have reached a stage where there is not much need to discuss all the different passages bearing on this matter in detail, for Kant's various contentions will, we may hope, by now be fairly clear, provided we keep in n1ind the overall structure of the realizational scheme. Thus the famous 'troublesome' passage, where Kant claims that on his position it is logically otiose to n1aintain 'that appearance could be something without there being anything that here appears [daf5 Erscheinung ohne etwas ware, was da erscheintJ' (Bxxvii), will now be perfectly comprehensible, provided we understand it in the sense of our dynamical process; according to which what is meant, is: in the course of a realization, To (M,F) is converted into son1ething having the status of an appearance; it is converted into T a (m,f,c), i.e. brought to the state of appearing; where To (M,F) is not of course some mysterious

Realism and Realization in a Kantian Light

237

'substance' underlying T a (m,f,c), still less an additional 'object', a mysterious 'thing-in-itself', in some Tn sense of this term, but simply an 'earlier stage' of the object, i.e. the state of reduction: the transcendental object being brought to a state of appearing (the object qua T a (m,f,c)); the latter being 'grounded in the transcendental object' (A538/B566; A358). The 'thing-in-itself', in the sense of To, is not a second, additional, independent object but only a certain interpretation (realizational stage) of one and the saine thing, for the case where we abstract from the contribution of sensibility, and only consider the properties that remain under reduction, i.e. To (M) and To (F), in the sense explained at length; properties that as such subsist prior to the 'realized' state of 'appearing'; which explains Kant's use of the expression 'thing-in-itself' to serve for this case as well. But to one more problern. We have indicated that both T a and Tn are realizations of To. And we have seen that this 'transcendental' type - we could also term it the 'critical type' - of realization must be sharply distinguished from the metaphysical type (Berkeley, Leibniz), mentioned earlier, involving the 'immanent' form of 'transcendental' (t m ), as explained by Kant at A573/B601). 'Critical realization' is the type specifically discussed, for instance, in the Third Antinomy, in the passage from A539/B567, referred to earlier (above, p. 234), and which characterizes, of course, the positive aspects of the method employed in the whole of the CPR. As we saw there, Kant describes the subject when viewed in its 'intelligible character', in terms of the 'causality of freedom', as 'thing-in-itself' (T~ in our symbolism). In the light of our general approach, it is worth noting that Kant, in CPrR, actually describes this literally as a 'realizing' of the 'concept [thought], of the 'intelligible'; where by the expression, 'the intelligible', the whole context of course implies that this must be a reference to To (F).23 All these details will, it is to be hoped, confer further plausibility upon the image which we have tried to make for ourselves of the method of realization in general. The section of the Antinomy here considered raises, however, an additional problem, whose consideration will again contribute towards an appreciation of the complexity of the Kantian R-R structure. In the passage cited before (A538/B566), we found Kant arguing that objects qua appearances n1ust be grounded in a transcendental object. However, the sentence introducing this point seems at first sight to involve a surprising contention: 'For since they [appearances] are not things in themselves, they must be grounded in a transcendental object ... ' (A538/B566); seemingly implying that things-in-themselves are not so grounded! Yet, have we not just seen that Kant's contention in the rest of that passage is that things both qua appearances and qua 'in themselves' (realized via the causality of freedon1) are equally grounded in a transcendental object?!

238

Gerd Buchdahl

Once again, however, our graphical schema will come to our aid and provide a straightforward answer. For evidently Kant is here distinguishing - as already anticipated - two kinds of realization: (1) the 'critical' type, which in our schema corresponds to two possible 'moves', from To to T a , and, alternatively, from To to T: (prac.); (2) the 'metaphysical', here: Leibnizian, type which goes - as indicated in our diagram - from T g via T} to T m ; being effected by way of the mediation of divine action - the theological version of the 'genuine' pre-critical thing-in-itself; i.e. presupposing no experientially mediated realization procedure. It follows that the two clainls in our Antinomy passage do not contradict one another at all. The kind of realization process which yields 'existence', rather than cognition of existence, does not involve the grounding of T m in To, unlike T a or Tl~ (which are so grounded). For as our diagram shows, the 'metaphysical' reductionprocess - by-passing To - goes from T g directly to T I . For instance, Leibniz's starting-point is the positing of a number of 'logically possible worlds' (T1), the realization of which is effected via the principle of sufficient reason, itself grounded in God. 24

IV In conclusion let us test the general approach to Kant's teaching that we have suggested by seeing how it may enable us to cope with what has traditionally been perhaps one of the most intractable of the problems of Kant exegesis: the so-called 'problem of affection'. This emerges already right at the start of the section on the Transcendental Aesthetic, when Kant writes: Intuition takes place only in so far as the object is given to us. This again is only possible, to man at least, in so far as the mind is affected in a certain way. The capacity (receptivity) for receiving representations through the mode in which we are affected by objects, is entitled sensibility. (A19/B33)

And again, a little later: The effect [WirkungJ of an object upon the faculty of representation, so far as we are affected by it, is sensation. (A20/B34)

This wording has led to endless debates since the very publication of the Critique, the first and nl0st pressing question always having been: what sort of 'object' is it that is here said to 'act on the mind'? For remember: Kant's basic doctrine is that objects, for us, have the status of 'appearances' or 'representations'. But the above passages suggest that the latter are the result of the action of objects on the mind. Is Kant saying that there is a first kind of objects which, by acting on the

Realism and Realization in a Kantian Light

239

rnind, thereby produce objects of the second kind (appearances)? One of the most classical responses to this question, by no means the first, and followed by many others, was that given by Adickes: the so-called 'doctrine of double affection'. Adickes held that the term 'object' here stands for two things: (1) the thing-in-itself; (2) the thing as appearance. (1) is suggested by the fact that on Kant's account the result of the affection is, as just noted, the object qua appearance; but since the latter can hardly also function as 'cause' (cause of itself?), the source of the affection must be objects as they exist in themselves. (2) In so far as 'object' here stands for appearance, Kant may also be thinking of the action of the object qua appearance on the subject (likewise with the status of appearance). Obviously, since such a subject will itself presuppose a prior 'affection', i.e. an affection by things-inthemselves, (1) above, this· must hence come from the self qua thingin-itself, or perhaps qua 'transcendental subject'. 25 The second of these answers is clearly not very interesting since it is of course uncontroversial that appearances can stand in causal relations with others, including empirical subjects. As to the first answer (1), as it stands this is implausible, if only because we have seen at length already that for Kant the thing-in-itself (T J (except in a 'practical', i.e. moral context) lacks any positive ontological status; in our terminology: it is not realizable. T s is only invoked as a 'contrast notion', having the 'negative sense' of something that is 'not an object of our sensible intuition' (B307). As Kant puts it so graphically at A762/B790: 'Outside the ... field of experience there is nothing that can be an object for reason' in any 'positive sense'. But further, since the employment of causality is justified for Kant only when holding between appearances, in a spatio-temporal rnode, it cannot be invoked when applied to thingsin-themselves. Strawson's criticisn1 is here telling: We can understand [the doctrine of affection] just so long as the 'affecting' is thought of as something that occurs in space and tin1e; but when it is added that we are to understand by space and time themselves nothing but a capacity or liability of ours to be affected in a certain way by objects not themselves in space and time, then we can no longer understand the doctrine, for we no longer know what 'affecting' n1eans, or what we are to understand by 'ourselves'.26

Now such criticisms are so obvious, that it is difficult to see how Kant could have failed to see the weaknesses in his account. At any rate, the first thing to note in relation to the sort of objection voiced by Strawson, let alone to Adickes' first version, is that Kant himself already rejects the whole idea of things-in-themselves acting on us causally. Thus, in the Fourth Paralogism he writes:

240

Gerd Buchdahl

If we regard outer appearances as representations produced in us by their objects, and if these objects be things existing in themselves outside us, it is indeed impossible to see how we can c011le to know the existence of the objects otherwise than by inference fronl the effect to the cause; and this being so, it must always remain doubtful whether the cause in question be in us or outside us. (A372)

And he goes on to reject the whole doctrine, as involving things that are quite 'unknown' to us, since our concern is only with 'appearances'; but especially because 'neither space nor time ... is to be found save in us' (A373); evidently already anticipating Stravvson's criticism! I think our conclusion from all this must be that Kant's mode of expressing his doctrine of affection is misleading, or at any rate perhaps even nlore subtle than appears at first sight. To start with, we need to note that there is a quite explicit statement fronl him which argues that the very phrase, 'affection by objects' ought to be avoided because of its misleading implications. His warning occurs in a letter to Beck, written in 1792, where he comments on the latter's elucidation of the teaching of the Critique. He writes: Perhaps right at the outset you may avoid defining 'sensibility' in terms of 'receptivity', that is, the manner of representations in the subject in so far as he is affected by objects; perhaps you may locate it in that which, in a cognition, concerns merely the relation of the representation to the subject, so that the fonn of sensibility, in this relation to the object of intuition, makes knowable no more than the appearances of this object. 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 the determination of the subject. 27

These remarks make it perfectly clear that when Kant here speaks of 'affection by objects', he is intending the ternl 'object' to be understood at the very most in the sense of 'representation', and thus, of 'appearance'. Evidently, his account is meant as an analysis of the process of experience; here: of the nature of the consciousness that accompanies the activation or 'affection' of sensibility. (Where it should be noted that the German word for 'affection', viz. 'Affizierung', suggests less anything causal, and more something like 'being brought to' - or 'being in' - a state of conscious awareness.) In other words, the account is of what occurs (in our terminology) at the level of realization, as the description of an 'independent' and 'ultimate' descriptive fact about sensibility by itself. More of this in a moment. At any rate, in no way does Kant's statement here involve any supposed interaction between an extra-experiential world (T s ) and the subject. Whether more is involved, as expressed by Kant's phrase, 'determination of the subject', remains to be seen. At present, let us note that there actually occurs in the Critique itself already a phrase which anticipates the position of the

I

Realism and Realization in a Kantian Light

241

~etter to Beck, for at A494/B522 Kant significantly writes: 'The faculty 1of sensible intuition is strictly only a receptivity, a capacity of being ,affected in a certain manner with representations [mit Vorstellungen laf(iziert zu werden], (my italics). Anticipating, it is becoming clear that the affection doctrine, so far, involves no more than an analysis of what takes place at the level of experience; viz., sensibility's being activated - meaning: finding itself in a certain state of consciousness, in respect of some given representation. What the relation of this 'finding' is to the extra-experiential level of things (the level of reduction) we shall consider presently. Before turning to this, we must consider one more passage which, whilst it relates 'affection of sensibility' to an 'object', does so in a less misleading, and indeed more enlightening way. At B207 Kant writes:

Appearances contain in addition to [the forms of] intuition the matter for some object in general ... ; they contain, that is to say, the real of sensation as merely subjective representation, which gives us only the consciousness that the subject is affected [affiziert] , and which [representation] we connect with [beziehen aufJ an object in general.

Now this n1ight again at first sight be read as though Kant was saying that the object in general was the putative 'cause' of the affection. But here we need to remember the details of our realization account. On the latter, we start with the concept of the object in general (T g), or indeed, with the transcendental object (To), which we then proceed to 'realize' as appearance (T a) by reference to the transcendental apparatus. (Where - remember! - 'realizing' means: interpreting a previously 'reduced' notion in a new context of certain transcendental conditions, such as (here) sensibility.) Thus, in the present instance, the process of realization, operating on T g' or To, begins by 'realizing' the 'material' part of the transcendental object (the 'transcendental matter', To (M)), interpreting it as 'sensation', with the latter analysed further as an 'affection of sensibility'; literally: brought to a state of awareness with respect to sensation, and the corresponding intuition. In other words, 'affecting with representation' (Kant's locution!) denotes a certain phenomenological state of the subject, best described as 'finding itself in a certain representational state'. We are beginning to see that the I(antian locution, 'affection by objects', apparently refers not so much to any 'external', 'causal', action, but rather to a description of "vhat is involved in experience as such; here: of that part which corresponds to 'sensation', or 'n1atter in the appearance'. (With the latter (remember!) 'corresponding' to the 'transcendental matter' at the level of reduction.) 'But', so one might still want to ask, 'why this rather than that sensation? What is its ground?'

242

Gerd Buchdahl

Now if this is a request for reintroducing the thing-in-itself once again as a putative cause of particular sense-impressions, it is a forlorn hope as an interpretation of Kant's intentions, for we have already seen him rejecting the idea of things-in-themselves 'producing' their appearances in us (cf. A372, quoted above). But perhaps the suggestion of a 'ground' of the affection (which as we shall see is frequently mentioned by Kant in this connection) may have a deeper significance. Thus it is interesting to note the follow-up to the passage at A372 (above, p. 240), where Kant writes: Now one can, it is true, adnlit that something, which may be (in the transcendental sense) outside us [sc. the transcendental object; here: To (M)], is the cause of our outer intuitions, but this is not the object of which we are thinking in the representations of matter and of corporeal things; for these are merely appearances ... (ibid.)

Similarly, at A494/B522, we have seen Kant speak of the 'transcendental object' as the 'purely intelligible cause of appearances in general'; where, as mentioned before, the term 'cause', in all such contexts, is nleant to function in the sense of 'ground'. Here let us return to a passage, discussed earlier (A538/B566), where the idea of the transcendental object (To (M,F)), as the 'ground' of the appearances, is stated even more explicitly, Kant saying that since appearances 'are not things-in-themselves, they nlust be grounded in a transcendental object (diesen ein transzendentaler Gegenstand zum Grunde liegen muss]' (see above, p. 237). Summarizing our account of the reduction-realization model, we can interpret this as follows. Thingsin-themselves may be viewed either as 'self-subsistent', or better, as the result of what we have termed 'a metaphysical realization'. Appearances, on the other hand, require for their (transcendental) realization the transcendental apparatus of sensibility, understanding etc.; the cognitive apparatus that operates on the two basic elenlents of the transcendental object, its 'matter' and 'form' (To (M) and To (F)), so as to 'determine' the object qua appearance, in terms of its empirical matter and form (Ta(m,f,c)). Let us briefly once more go over the transition from To to Ta, this time with the particular objective of achieving clarity on the use of Kant's notion of affection. We will do this by emphasizing more explicitly than before the various 'correspondences' to which we have seen Kant point in the course of his argument. Consider first To (F): This designates, so we saw, no more than the set of categories, viewed as purely 'logical forms of thought' whose potential function it is to 'determine an object or the manifold of a possible intuition' (cf. A254/ B309). 'Realization' will then involve the employment of the categories

Realism and Realization in a Kantian Light

243

in the various syntheses of the understanding and imagination. (Hence the 'correspondence', between 'the transcendental object' (here To (F)) and the 'unity of apperception', to which Kant alludes at A2S0.) Similarly for the 'material' aspect of To, i.e. To (M); where we found Kant marking the correspondence between the 'transcendental matter', or 'Sachheit', and 'sensation in general' (with 'Sachheit' being associated with, or falling under, the category of 'reality' (A143/B182)). Here realization will involve the introduction of sensibility and its affective state, 'Sachheit' thus becon1ing converted into, or speaking more formally: being interpreted as, sensation. Or taking it in the reverse direction: sensation, under reduction, becomes something merely conceptual ('reality'), not expressible in language; a mere 'something == X'. Looking ahead, we are beginning to see that just as 'reality' or 'Sachheit' (viewed as something 'purely conceptual') expresses something 'ultimate', 'uncaused', the contingency of the world, so will, at the realizational level, i.e. in line with the experiential interpretation, the' corresponding' affection of sensibility (or 'sensation') constitute something ultimate, 'simply given as such', being thus no n10re than the equivalent version of 'reality', but now at the level of experience. The concept of 'reality', located in the 'pure understanding', is thus not something that could meaningfully be imagined as 'affecting' sensibility in any physical or psychological, or more generally, causal sense. Similarly, Kant's characterization of sensibility as 'receptivity' is not intended to imply its 'receiving' any in1pressions 'from without' - remember his warning to Beck against such an interpretation - but says only that sensibility, unlike the understanding, does not function 'spontaneously'; only 'finding itself' with such 'matter of sensation' as corresponds to the 'real' at the level of reduction. Now just as the notion of 'receptivity' can be misleading, by seemingly pointing to a 'transcendental' source of the affection, so can Kant's constant insistence that the transcendental object is for ever something 'unknown to us', something 'we cannot understand' (A277/B333); giving the in1pression that what is here involved is some sort of empirical ignorance concerning some unknowable independent object. But obviously all such locutions are simply a reference to the logical status of To as just noted. Sometimes, of course, the language of ignorance is explained more clearly on these lines. Thus at A2S0, after saying that 'we can know nothing whatsoever' of the transcendental object, he goes on to remark (on the lines he had already argued at AI04-9) that this notion is 'not itself an object of knowledge, but only the representation of appearances under the concept of an object in general'; more specifically, what we have symbolised as To (F); and that furthermore it is a concept 'which is determinable through the manifold of these appearances': i.e. it receives an interpretation via the acts of the

244

Gerd Buchdahl

understanding, via the 'unity of apperception', resulting in the notion of the empirical object qua 'appearance'. Nevertheless, more frequently Kant describes this purely logical point about the status of To (M,F) in misleading terms. Thus, instead of marking the fact that the material aspect of transcendental matter lies of necessity at the reductive level, and is thus by definition not anything cognizable, he talks in many places as though this was a matter of profound and mysterious ignorance. Thus at A278/B334, where he speaks of 'the secret source of our sensibility', he goes on to say that 'the relation of sensibility to an object and what the transcendental ground of this [objective] unity may be, are matters undoubtedly so deeply concealed that we ... can never be justified in treating sensibility as being a suitable instrun1ent of investigation for discovering anything save always still other appearances - eager as we are to explore their non-sensible cause'. After what we have shown, this is undoubtedly true, except that the language is misleading in suggesting that this is more than a purely logical matter; as though Kant was pointing to some hypothetical and hidden world-in-itself; instead of which all that is happening is that we are here viewing the object via two alternative interpretations, viz. under reduction and realization, respectively. Anyway, in the light of the above, we can understand Kant's insistence, in his letter to Beck, that 'affection' should be treated as a phenomenon that is 'internal' to the experiential side of the process of realization. (Remember the locution of 'affection with representations' (at A494/ B522!)) Finally, there is a well-known passage in the Second Analogy which has frequently been quoted as supporting Kant's putative belief in the doctrine of our affection by things-in-themselves. At A190/B235 he writes: 'How things may be in themselves, irrespective of the representations through which they [sc. things, simpliciter!] affect us, is entirely outside our sphere of knowledge. 28 But given Kant's letter to Beck, it is clear that what was meant here is that things (things tout court!) affect us qua representations, i.e. interpreted as given at the level of realization. The transcendental point of view after all allows of only one level of empirical reality (e.g. sensation), defined by the transcendental boundary of sensibility and understanding. Nevertheless, and despite all of this, there are passages which at first sight seem to contradict Kant's position on 'affection' here suggested. Thus at A358 (Second Paralogism) he writes, surprisingly at first sight: The something [Etwas: always a reference to the transcendental object; here To (M)J which lies at the basis [zum Grunde liegt] of the outer appearances, what so affects our sense [was unseren Sinn so af{tziert] that it obtains the representations of space, matter, shape; this something, when viewed as noumenon (or better, as transcendental object) could nevertheless be at the same time also the subject of thoughts, although the mode in which our outer

Realism and Realization in a Kantian Light

245

sense is thereby affected gives us no intuition of representations, will etc., but n1erely of space and its determinations. This something however is not extended, not impenetrable, not composite, because all these predicates concern only sensibility and its intuition, in so far as we are affected by such objects, otherwise unknown to us.

In quoting this passage, we are not concerned with Kant's general argument, intended to contest the claim to the simplicity of the soul or thinking self, but only with the way in which 'affection' occurs therein. We have given the text in full because it seems to us to provide a touchstone for our approach to this whole question of 'affection', offering by implication an understanding of the very core of Kant's philosophical imagery. To start with, let us see whether we can make some sense of Kant's various alternative locutions 'through which he is seeking to characterize 'affection': (1) by the object; (2) by the representation; (3) with the representation; where the variety of expressions is indicative of the 'dynamics' of the logic of the situation as indicated in what has just preceded; our particular concern here is the passage at A358. The first sentence begins by stating that the transcendental object (here with respect to its 'material' side, To (M)) is the ground of the outer appearance; and the significance of this we have just explained. The sentence continues: 'what so affects our sense that it develops the representations of space, matter, shape'. It is important to note the choice of the word 'what' [German: 'was'], rather than 'which'; Kant is simply saying that the affection of sensibility involves developing the representations of space, shape, etc. Here, the specification of 'space' and of 'shape' is already sufficient to prove that these can hardly be the result of a 'causal action' on the part of the transcendental object To. For it is, after all, one of Kant's central contentions that space and time have significance only in the context of experience - here: of the affection of sensibility, as its 'forms'. So what Kant is saying is that in the context of the activation of sensibility, transcendental matter ('Sachheit, reality') expresses itself as n1atter in the appearance, space, shape, etc.; is affected with these representations. More specifically, that it is affected with such and such representations is all that is expressed by the concept of 'transcendental matter' at the level of reduction. Moreover, that sensibility is affected with such and such representations becomes clear also from the wording of the last sentence of our passage, where Kant says that 'extension', 'impenetrability', etc. are 'predicates [which] concern only sensibility and its intuition, in so far as we are affected by such objects'; the reference to 'objects' here being to these representational predicates, and not to their 'transcendental ground'. Speaking generally, we thus see that the notion of 'affection' is something that always characterizes sensibility at the realizationallevel.

246

Gerd Buchdahl

It is not intended to point to any causal action on the part of some 'external object', be it 'thing-in-itself' or 'transcendental object'. Certainly not the 'thing-in-itself', a possibility which we have seen Kant himself reject explicitly; and as to the transcendental object, this above all denotes no more than the object at the level of reduction; in particular, the concept of 'transcendental matter' ('Sachheit, Realitat'); which when 'realized' 'corresponds to sensation' (A143/B182); i.e. characterizing the object at the level of appearance, as something with which sensibility finds itself, as a contingent and ultimate matter of fact; which fact is nothing more than part of the logical characterization of 'experience'. What is thus absolutely central is that the affection and receptivity of sensibility expresses something ultimate, simply 'given' - not pointing to any 'external cause'; precisely 'corresponding' to that 'ultimacy' which is already expressed by the notion of the transcendental matter. To end, and summarizing our findings: we have throughout noticed Kant's alternative locutions of 'affection by objects' and 'affection by (or with) representations'. This double use already suggests the complex and tentative attitude he displays towards the problem of affection. 'Affection with representations' refers to the phenon1enological account: an object can only be something 'empirically real' if interpreted as 'representation'. As to 'affection by the object': here the 'object' has to be understood as interpreted prior to realization, i.e. at the level of reduction, with all the 'subjective' aspects (in the transcendental t i sense) removed, i.e. those that are due to sensibility and understanding; in which case, as we have seen, what remains of the 'genuinely objective' aspect is 'transcendental matter' (in the to sense) or 'Reality' or 'Sachheit'; all understood as something purely conceptual - 'pure concepts of the understanding',as we have found Kant to say. In other words, what remains at the reductive level, though 'real' enough, is an object only understood as a mere 'something == X'; meaning that it is not as yet expressible by means of any speech-modes, not being anything experiential. Now we have noted Kant as saying that Sachheit or reality (both reductive notions) correspond (at the realizational level) to sensation (cf. A143/B182). More specifically this means that Sachheit is the concept which points to what, under realization, corresponds to the specific 'this or that' of some given sensation; whilst the 'how and what' of the sensation is a function of the 'constitution of sensibility' (B44); thus again being something 'subjective' (ti-conditioned). By contrast, the 'this or that' (e.g. this or that particular shade of colour sensation) is what is simply 'found' in experience, is what 'affects sensibility', part of the logical character of experience in respect of those aspects that are not a function of subjectivity. We must beware, however, of imagining that there are 'two things': a Sachheit and a 'this-or-that',

Realism and Realization in a Kantian Light

247

since we are here dealing with only one thing: the contingency (the 'that') of experience; rendered by reference to Sachheit when viewed at the level of reduction; being that aspect of experience which is not a function of the transcendental apparatus, and thus independent of it. In other words, under reduction, abstracting from the contributions of sensibility, understanding, etc., what remains is the general concept of 'that-ness' or Sachheit. What we must not say is that the latter 'affects sensibility', since Sachheit simply emphasizes the aspect of the contingency of experience, mirroring the contingency of the world, corresponding to its experiential interpretation. In sunl: Kant has posited two 'corresponding' domains: (1) the donlain of experience; (2) this domain, taken apart from the transcendental context, and thus nothing experiential. However, it is most important not to view these two domains as two independent worlds; the two domains are just a description of one and the same reality (say, the 'object in general' (Tg )), one and the same way of talking about facts, taken either in abstraction fronl the transcendental context or understood as within it. Let us go back to the world understood as the 'life-world' (T w). Kant holds that it has a certain logical status which is best described as 'contingency'; i.e. uncaused reality. (Compare his refutations of the ontological and cosmological argunlents.) And now it seems to me that all he is saying is that this type of contingency is reproduced at the level of experience - here: sensibility - by saying that the latter just finds itself, as an ultimate matter of fact, with such and such sensations; is 'affected by' - in respect of - what the notion of 'transcendental matter' or 'Sachheit' expresses. And that is all that 'receptivity' amounts to as a logical description of the character of sensibility. What sensibility 'finds' is sinlply the 'factuality aspect' of certain abstract facts of the matter; facts that become part of the content of experience (here: sensation, intuition) only when taken in the context of sensibility and those aspects of experience for which it is responsible, i.e. spatiality, temporality, and the qualitative side of intuition. What sensibility 'receives', i.e. registers, is only the fact 'that such and such is the case'. So to repeat: neither Sachheit (at the reductive level) nor the 'that' at the level of experience can be viewed as an 'object' that could be said literally to 'affect sensibility', since this latter mode of speech only denotes the fact that 'experience' contains a 'non-subjective' element, viz. that it finds itself with such and such sensations, or rather representations; inlplying Kant's alternative locution of sensibility being 'affected with representations'. On the other hand, the notion that Sachheit stands for the fact that sensibility finds itself determined in respect of 'this or that' particular sensation, may in a loose manner of speech be said to designate its 'affection by the object' - i.e. the 'that'aspect of the object.

248

Gerd Buchdahl

Basically, what has confused us is the misleading empirical model of an external world acting on the subject. Whereas we are - when engaged in transcendental analysis - only concerned with one world, viewable under the alternative states of reduction and realization; including, under the latter, physical interactions between enlpirical objects and subjects. (Kant was well aware of the processes of the action of light on the observer.) By contrast, it is this whole 'single' world of subjectscum-objects which is the 'object of consciousness', realized via the transcendental conditions of experience, and emerging from its status of transcendental object at the level of reduction.

NOTES 1

Putnam, 1978, part 4.

2 'Welches sind die wirklichen Fortschritte, die die Metaphysik seit Leibnizens

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18

und Wolffs Zeiten in Deutschland gemacht hat?' (1791), Werke, Weischedel edn, vol. III, p. 622. For a similar use of 'ontology' in some of Kant's letters (e.g. to L.H. Jakob and J.S. Beck), see Zweig, 1967, pp. 125, 182. All references A and B are to the first and second editions of CPR, Kemp Smith transl. Husserl, 1970, pp. 91-120. Ak. 18, 554-6 (Refl. 6286). Husserl, 1964, p. 31. CPrR, transl. L. White Beck, p. 54. See for instance Kant's Nova Dilucidatio, Weischedel edn, vol. I, pp.401-508. For a more subtle and complex version of this, cf. CJ, especially par. 77, transl. J. H. Bernard, p. 253. For the case of the 'Human Understanding', cf. the comparison by Kant of his own position with that of Berkeley, in: Prolegomena, para. 13, note II, transl. P.G. Lucas, pp. 45-6. CJ, [Second] Introduction, sect. v, transl. J .H. Bernard, p. 17. Cf. Husserl, 1970, para. 32, p. 118. Prolegomena, §57, transl. P.G. Lucas, p. 121. See for instance A250 for this characterization. There exists a parallel here with Wittgenstein's notion of 'objects', as found in the Tractatus (Wittgenstein, 1922), where he renlarks in an aside: 'In a manner of speaking: objects are colourless' (2.0233; my trans!.). Cf. Gerold Prauss (1974, p. 127), whose account otherwise has a certain amount in common with the treatment here given. CPrR, trans!' L. White Beck, p.44: 'The moral law ... defines it [Sc. a purely intelligible world - i.e. Tn] positively ...'; thus yieldingT: (pract.). The details of the parts of the realizational process here involved are discussed by Kant in the section on the 'Anticipations of Perceptions' of CPR; cf. especially B208-9.

Realism and Realization in a Kantian Light 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

249

Cf. Putnam, 1978, part 4. Prolegomena, §13, Note II, trans!' P.G. Lucas, p. 45. Ibid., p.46. C], trans!' ] .H. Bernard, p. 32. CPrR, trans!' L. White Beck, p. 49. Cf. Leibniz, 1714, para. 38. For this, cf. Wolff, 1963, p. 170. Strawson, 1959, p.41. Trans!. in Zweig, 1967, pp. 183-4; my italics. For the same point, involving an almost identical locution, see Prolegontena, trans!' P.G. Lucas, pp. 45, 47.

12

The Identity of the Subject in the Transcendental Deduction Dieter Henrich 1

THE COMPOSITION OF THE TEXT OF THE TRANSCENDENTAL DEDUCTION

In the transcendental deduction of the categories Kant developed the ultimate foundations of his theoretical philosophy. The real task of this somewhat meagre text is to demonstrate that the use of a priori concepts in knowledge, which is likewise a priori, is restricted to those propositions which lay down conditions of the possibility of experience. This demonstration is crucial for achieving the aim of the entire Critique of Pure Reason. For this work aims to draw a firm distinction between classes of a priori propositions which are merely thoughts and which though perhaps necessary thoughts cannot become knowledge, and other a priori propositions which can be justified as knowledge. Now if it is shown that a priori concepts only enter into knowledge through their use in propositions about conditions of experience, then this means that there can be no metaphysics as 'science' that goes beyond the realm of experience and hence that the negative part of the programme of the critique of reason has been carried out. There is, however, a corresponding positive part; and it is virtually this part alone which attracts the' interest of philosophers. For Kant convinced everyone of the untenability of genuinely metaphysical theory with considerably less effort than he himself had expended. What this positive part is concerned to rule out is the view that in the end there are no valid a priori propositions at all. Thus it is concerned to den10nstrate that scepticisn1 in relation to supposedly universal foundations of knowledge is mistaken. It is the fulfilment of this aim which requires the critique to clarify the connections in which knowledge unfolds and in relation to which it can be justified. In the text of his transcendental deduction Kant brought together almost all the component theories which are necessary presuppositions

The Identity of the Subject

251

and constituents of an understanding of the conditions of the possibility of knowledge. In particular, it is in this text that he first gives a place to the analysis of self-consciousness as the supreme principle to which, in his opinion, all forms of rationality ('employment of the understanding') can be traced back. Conceivably this principle might itself have been made the subject of a special investigation within the critique of reason. Such an investigation could even have been undertaken right at the beginning of a systematic work; though in that case the structure of this work would not have been exclusively determined by the task of critically separating and justifying kinds of knowledge. It would have had to make a claim which goes much further than the one made by the critique Kant wanted to write: to comprehensively investigate and explain the faculty of knowledge, and not merely to justify certain forms of a priori knowledge and reject others according to a principle. However, Kant thought there was no pressing need for such an explanation of knowledge and even that it was impossible. 1 Because the structure of his whole work was determined by a limited aim he accepted that the part of the text which was central from a systematic point of view could only be given the attention and the space warranted by an important auxiliary theorem; and this only on account of what it achieves, not for its own sake. This in part explains why the highest degree of interpretation is needed to clarify Kant's foundational thoughts. But this is also explained by the fact that with these thoughts Kant had entered entirely new territory. The conceptual forms and theorems of the traditional metaphysics and of the Wolffian system as a whole, whose genuine order and origin he brought to light with the instruments of the critique, provide him with a frame of reference even in his thoroughly critical presentation and reorganization of them. But the laying of the foundations which was to yield these instruments had to be carried out in an entirely new way. Thus Kant also had to develop anew the concepts which were to be employed in this laying of the foundations. He took them as far as possible from a stock of concepts current in his time and, where necessary, transformed them in line with his new theoretical purpose. But Kant did not have as clear a view of the internal structure of the intended basic structure as he did of its critical application to the theoretical tradition. Indirectly this is shown by the fact that Kant never managed to produce a text in this area which argues calmly, works out an analysis in all its ramifications and deals with all sorts of possible misunderstandings in a way which achieves ever greater clarity for his own theory and terminology. Kant does not 'deny the obscurity' which 'attaches' to the first version of the transcendental deduction. 2 And the second version still bears all the marks of having been written down in haste. The second edition also lacks that kind of extended reflection which gives the transcendental dialectic its distinctive clarity.

252

Dieter Henrich

Thus despite the historical distance the interpreter must repeatedly attempt to clarify the theory which Kant had in view, but which he only expounded in haste, and then not for its own sake but in order to use it. In so doing he must pursue at least two equally important aims: to remain true to Kant's intentions and to achieve as tenable a form of argument as possible. What the interpreter presents as the transcendental deduction should not merely correspond in theme and style with that which Kant intended and which he only sketched in outline. Such a deduction should be able to employ the ideas and concepts which Kant chose as his starting-points, and which he believed to have den10nstrative force, in the sense which they had for him. A transcendental deduction which is developed as the one which is most satisfactory from the point of view of Kant's theory as a whole need not necessarily agree with what is yielded by a mere textual analysis in no way concerned with the cogency of the deduction. However, it must still be possible to n1ake clear the reason for the. divergence and the degree of distance from the don1inant intentions in the text. Texts with themes of the depth-dimension in which the transcendental deduction moves are not necessarily unambiguous in the conduct of their thoughts. It is the task of the interpreter to characterize the dominant lines of thought in the text and to determine the extent to which other lines of thought, which can also be shown to be present in the text, but which perhaps allow of more convincing justification, diverge from them.

2

CRITERIA FOR THE SUCCESS OF A TRANSCENDENTAL DEDUCTION

The transcendental deduction is a deduction of categories. To 'deduce' categories means to exhibit the grounds from which the use of concepts, as predicates of a priori propositions, derives; and to show that the knowledge-claim connected with these propositions is legitimate. Kant's deduction shows this by reference to self-consciousness; in relation to the possibility of self-consciousness the categories can be regarded as conditions of the possibility of experience. It would be important to make clear what sort of justification Kant expects under the heading 'deduction'. It is not the sort of justification which takes the form of syllogistic inference or derivation in a formal theory, which is what we are accustomed to associate with the word 'deduction'; rather it is a completely different form of justification which was common in the legal practice of Kant's day.3 However, we shall not pursue this here. The clarification of the methodology of deduction would be helpful to any attempt to construct a convincing deduction

The Identity of the Subject

253

in Kant's sense. But even without achieving clarity in methodology it should still be possible to arrive at a justification which remains in genuine and controllable contact with Kant's texts on the deduction. Three criteria for the success of a transcendental deduction in Kant's sense can be specified. These are criteria which have not been observed in many attempts to reconstruct the deduction. Two of them can be specified immediately and in direct connection with each other; the third will be added a little later. According to the first criterion the categories cannot be demonstrated to be conditions of experience simply by showing that as principles or 'functions' they represent activities which are indispensable to the accomplishment of knowledge. Rather they must be shown to be indispensable in such a way that the person who has experiences actually uses them as principles for this experience, and hence as the a priori concepts they are. In other words the person who has experiences must consciously make use of the categories as such a priori concepts in his knowledge. The second criterion can be directly linked to the first: the conscious use of categories must be such that it can be attributed to every rational being with respect to its ordinary empirical knowledge. The knowledge and use of the categories as a priori concepts presupposes neither philosophical analysis nor even the conscious pursuit of scientific knowledge. They are basic concepts of the experience which arises from the natural use of reason. We can call this criterion the 'Rousseauian' criterion. The deduction justifies the ordinary person in claiming the right to have experiences in a wellfounded way at any time and to use the principles which are indispensable to this. It does not establish any claims to exclusive knowledge on the part of a few. Accordingly, categories like substance and causality must actually be involved in the ordinary possession of knowledge and must be competently employed in every form of empirical relation to the world - and not just in scientific knowledge, however superior this may be to natural experience in the particular area on which it concentrates. Now as regards the principle of the deduction, the derivation from self-consciousness, both criteria for the success of the deduction have consequences for the coordination of self-consciousness and consciousness of the categories: the deduction cannot confine itself to proving, from the distance of an external analyst, that self-consciousness could not come about without the use of categories. For this would not be to show the internal connection between the consciousness which is self-consciousness and the natural consciousness of the validity and functioning of the categories. It must be shown from the perspective of the person who is conscious of hin1self, that his knowledge of himself cannot be separated from the knowledge of the categories as a priori concepts and of their actual use. There thus emerges a deduction-programme which is possibly much

Dieter Henrich

254

stronger, but in any event much more specifically formulated, than in a merely vague pre-understanding of Kant's intention in the deduction of the categories. But this programme is also actually set up in the Critique in this strong form, though not perhaps as clearly as one might have desired. It emerges most clearly where Kant in the first-edition version of the deduction formulates for the first time the connection of form between self-consciousness and the use of categories which is really crucial for the deduction: Kant states that self-consciousness as such could not be achieved a priori if it did not have 'before its eyes' those functions which make experience possible a priori (Al08). That this is so is, at this stage of the Critique, merely an assertion which unfortunately is not followed by a justification. And from the complete body of texts purporting to provide a deduction it is difficult even to put together a sequence of justification which actually develops all the intended argun1ents and which is thus no longer dependent on assertions, all of which must first be translated into justifications by the interpreter. And so the question arises: how is one to n1ake clear from the form of self-consciousness its dependence on a knowledge of functions necessary for the unity of experience? In this connection a third criterion for carrying out the deduction in a way that corresponds to Kant's intentions must be considered. If the possibility of self-consciousness is made dependent on the use of categories, and if one can only speak of categories being used where this use is governed by a knowledge (however implicit and hence unanalysed) of the categories as a priori concepts, then the selfconsciousness with which the deduction begins must itself have the status of an a priori certainty. Whatever the properties of selfconsciousness are to which the deduction refers, they must be known a priori in a self-consciousness which, although related to experience, is not dependent as regards its structure and mode of consciousness on experience had on a particular occasion. And furthermore it must be possible, according to Kant's complete analysis, to attribute these properties to self-consciousness, which is disclosed with Cartesian certainty, in such a way that his theory of self-consciousness and his theory of knowledge as a whole do not fall apart. In what follows the problems of such a deduction will be discussed. Finally we will sketch the basic outlines of an actual deduction which does justice to the three criteria we have forn1ulated. 3

SUBJECTIVITY AND UNITY AS THE BASIS FOR A DEDUCTION

But how is an argument from self-consciousness which satisfies these criteria to be constructed? To do this the formal properties of self-

The Identity of the Subject

255

consciousness on which such an argument could be based must be detern1ined. Kant attempted to derive these formal properties systematically and based his systen1atization of the so-called paralogisms of rational psychology on them. 4 This systen1atization does not figure as such in the text of the transcendental deduction. But three of the forn1al properties of self-consciousness are brought into play in the argunlent of the deduction, partly in isolation and partly in relation to one another; though in the text itself the precise character of this relation remains unclear. These properties are the subjectivity, the unity and the identity of self-consciousness. Subjectivity means that all thoughts in relation to which the thought that'!' think them is possible do not have this property by virtue of the content that is thought in them. They are 'my' thoughts because I think them, or can think them. Unity obtains in self-consciousness in so far as all the thoughts which a thinking being can think with the consciousness that it itself thinks them are by this very fact brought together to form the one complex of everything thought by a subject. And identity belongs to selfconsciousness in so far as through self-consciousness one and the same subject is conscious of itself in all these thoughts. Fundamental systen1atic ain1s of Kantian thought seem to favour the project of a deduction which bases itself on the connection between the subjectivity and the unity of self-consciousness. If the contents of the thoughts of the self-consciousness thinker do not have the property of being his thoughts of themselves (and so do not have this property in common of themselves) then this property must be conferred on them by the self-conscious being, which is thus a subject. Subjectivity is thus necessarily a conferring of unity. But the categories are defined as the functions through which what is pre-given to thinking can be brought into a connection of unity in accordance with self-consciousness. And through their property of making such unity possible they are synthetic principles; just as self-consciousness itself is a principle of synthetic unity in relation to the connection of unity which becomes possible through it. But Kant describes all cognitive processes as a synthesis of a given n1anifold into unity which takes place in accordance with a principle of unity. The property of self-consciousness through which It confers unity and shows itself to be a principle of unity can thus seem to be the most natural starting-point for a deduction. And furthermore, it seems we can say with Kant that the categories, which make possible the form of unity of all thoughts of what is given, would have to be used by the self-conscious subject in such a way that that subject is conscious of their unifying function; hence in such a way that they stand 'before its eyes' when it becomes conscious of itself as a principle of unity. And its consciousness of itself consists in nothing else. Considerations such as these then would seem to provide the

256

Dieter Henrich

outline of a deduction which does justice both to Kant's system as a whole and to the criteria of success for a deduction of the categories. But on closer inspection this project is open to objections, objections of a kind which correspond to the doubts to which Kant's text on the deduction has given rise again and again. It can be granted that in an 'I' of many thought-contents all these contents conle together. And it also makes sense to attribute the coming about of this being together to an activity of the self-conscious being, which activity could thus be called 'synthesis'. Since all synthesis is a combining into a unity, and is directed toward this unity, it can also be said that the synthesis in selfconsciousness presupposes the unity of this self-consciousness as its unity-sense, hence that it is directed toward it, and that therefore this unity-sense governs this synthesis and provides it with its rule. However, this is not to say - and this is the heart of the objection - that this unity-sense consists in something other than the unity which is already completely realized by the continuity of the one consciousness'!' in relation to all thoughts which are its thoughts. But a deduction of the categories depends entirely on our ability to show that the unity of selfconsciousness is itself only possible under the further condition that more specific functions of unity (the categories) are used, by virtue of which alone it is possible for that unity to come about which consists in the singularity of the one thought 'I think' in relation to all and any thought-contents. If these contents can only have the unity defined by self-consciousness by virtue of the subject's accompanying them with an 'I think' -consciousness, then this'!', without any further specification, would not only supply the ground of their coming together but would also be the sole respect of unity in relation to which they are brought together in the synthesis. Synthesis and unity, it is true, would only be intelligible in relation to each other. But this unity would not be of a kind which required particular functions of synthesis. And thus the circle of mutual dependence between synthesis and unity would be closed without further concepts of unity being included in it. The analysis of self-consciousness would therefore be complete without any sort of basis for a deduction of the categories having been provided. An entirely different problem from that of a deduction of the categories arises if one raises the question of whether a synthetic mechanism must be posited to explain the coming together of thoughts in the unity of self-consciousness. No doubt such a unity has particular causes; and presumably these include combination-elements or combination-acts which are constant in their form. But such elements or acts would then be part of a causal nexus which cannot be determined a priori and of which one is not conscious in self-consciousness and hence does not control. No conditions of self-consciousness which cannot like itself be clarified from the self-conscious being's own

The Identity of the Subject

257

perspective can be given a transcendental grounding and hence be categories; for these are only internal conditions of the unity of an experience accompanied with possible self-consciousness.

4

'OBJECTIVE UNITY' THE BASIS FOR A DEDUCTION?

The second interpretation of the transcendental deduction suggests another way of deriving the categories purely from the unity of selfconsciousness. It first characterizes this unity as 'objective' in contrast to another kind of unity which is called 'subjective'. And it then goes on to explain that the objectivity of the unity of self-consciousness can be disclosed in the form of judgement. Now if judgements are possible in various particular forms, and if it can be shown which of these forms are indispensable to objective unity, then this also provides a basis for the deduction of the categories. For according to the explanation of the concept of a category (B128), categories are nothing but forms of judgement employed as concepts of objects. So all that would be needed to complete the deduction would be to explain the basis for the employment of the forms of judgement as concepts of objects and then determine more closely the manner in which this employment takes place. This version of the deduction rests on themes which are genuinely distinctively Kantian. It can be developed, as it was in the second Marburg Kant school, 5 into a Kantianizing idiolect, which gives the impression that the subtlety of its language is governed by a cogent deduction argument. What confers possible truth, hence relation to an object, on judgements is located in the objective unity of consciousness. Since, however, the objective unity of consciousness in the judgement is understood in terms of the unchangeable unity and sameness of the one 'I think', this 'I think' itself is shown to be, through the necessary object-relation contained in the form of judgement, the ground of unity of possible thoughts of the object, and hence of all categories. This line of thought can take various forms. But it can always be easily recognized, by the language it employs and its particular emphasis of Kantian terms and themes, as belonging to this type of attempt at a deduction. According to this line of thought 'I think'-consciousness's reference to an object belongs to it directly simply by virtue of its character as thinking, thinking which is independent of particular contents and is possible a priori. This rule-governed reference to an object is grounded in self-consciousness as such and hence does not require one to presuppose the knowledge that the nature of thinking consists principally in the mastery of rules.

258

Dieter Henrich

This version of the deduction has considerable advantages. It fastens on to a theme which Kant hin1self singled out as the one in terms of which the deduction can most easily be carried out. 6 From the outset it interprets the categories as, on the one hand, forn1s of judgement and, on the other hand, as, in a particular en1ployn1ent, concepts of an object as such. In other words it interprets then1 as having the role they must have in any version of the deduction. Furthermore, it construes the unity of self-consciousness - and this is something it also specially emphasizes - in a way that makes it clearly distinguishable from a merely mental special phenomenon of subjectivity; something which is essential if a deduction is to achieve even a minimum of persuasive force. It nevertheless suffers from the same weakness as the deductions of the type previously discussed. And like the forn1 of deduction discussed previously it is open to the criticism that it conceals the lack of a genuinely decisive deduction-argument behind a veil of merely verbal emphasis. For a deduction from self-consciousness would only result if it could be shown that the property referred to when the unity of selfconsciousness, 'I think', is characterized as 'objective' is completely the same as that which consists in the truth-capacity and object-reference of judgements, such that the latter property can be understood in terms of the former. For one will readily concede that the consciousness 'I think' is a form of consciousness that can only occur in relation to thoughts. And everyone will aln10st as readily admit that the possibility of self-consciousness belongs to the conditions under which judgements can be made objective. But this in no way settles the question of whether the unity of self-consciousness which is tern1ed 'objective' is as such so constituted by the use of judgen1ents about objects that the use of judgements itself, and in particular their use in the knowledge of objects, consists in the production of precisely this objective unity of the consciousness defined solely by the possibility of self-consciousness. If there is not such a relation of mutual definition between, on the one hand, a self-consciousness described as 'objective' but which cannot be other than the possible consciousness 'I think' appealed to by Kant, and, on the other hand, the form of 'objective' thoughts as judgements, then in the argument intended by this type of deduction nothing at all regarding the form of judgement would follow fron1 the analysis of selfconsciousness. And as it is the form of judgement which in this type of deduction is supposed to n1ake possible the theoretical move from selfconsciousness to those a priori rules, which, in all of Kant's sketches of the deduction, determine the meaning of 'category', the desired basis for a deduction of the categories from self-consciousness would also be lacking. There would thus have to be a more extensive analysis of the transition fron1 the property of self-consciousness which consists in its

The Identity of the Subject

259

being 'objective' to that objectivity which distinguishes the use of judgement and the use of categories in knowledge; and this analysis would have to be carried out in full awareness of the alternatives and of the danger of a derivation based merely on the ambiguous use of language. What then is the meaning of 'objective' in its application to that unity which is the unity of the same 'I think'-consciousness in relation to all thoughts? In answering this question three possible meanings of 'objective' should be kept distinct from one another, although they must all be brought together in the result of the deduction intended by Kant. They have in comn10n the meaning-component which distinguishes everything objective from what is valid for someone, or appears to be valid, in certain circumstances, and so possibly only at a certain time: (1) A judgement is objective if it can be justified; and it is objective as regards its form in so far as this form itself already includes a claim to verifiability. (2) But not every judgement must assert something about objects on the basis of perceptions. An object is something whose reality can be established in many circumstances and by anyone with the capacity for experience. Thus judgements about objects are 'objective' in this second sense. In the text of the second edition deduction Kant n1akes a connection between the two meanings (B138-9) which, though quite plausible, is not justified by him and made clear, but is simply asserted and laid claim to as a basis for the deduction. (3) The situation becomes even less tenable if these two senses of 'objective' are not distinguished fron1 a third. This third sense, however, is the only one which can be said, without more elaborate argument, to have immediate application in the analysis of self-consciousness; the unity in the consciousness 'I think' is 'objective' in so far as it only consists in this one consciousness and its relation to every content which can be a thought. One can see that this provides a sense of 'objective' as applied to the unity of self-consciousness when one considers the contrast with a sense of 'merely subjective' which is essential to every determination of the sense of 'objective'. Unities formed in accordance with laws of association are 'merely subjective'. In such formations the n10de of unity between the representations is dependent on particular conditions. They are explained by reference to capacities of the thinking being which are not connected (at least not in a way into which we can have insight) with its capacity for being conscious of itself. We can therefore say that in so far as self-consciousness occurs in relation to unities among representations produced sin1ply by association it is a consciousness on the part of the representing being of empirical properties and states of itself. It is a different matter in the case of the self-consciousness which consists in nothing more than the possibility of 'I think'-consciousness. For in such self-consciousness any content that can be thought at all is

260

Dieter Henrich

comprehended in the unity of possible thoughts of a thinking being. To the generality of this combination of content, than which none greater can be conceived, but equally none more unspecific, there corresponds the fact that nothing comes to consciousness in the self-consciousness that is coordinated with this content but the empty subject of this unity - thus nothing which has even the determinateness of a determinate association or association-tendency. Thus although the occurrence of the self-consciousness which has objective unity involves an act of reflection, this reflection has a different structure from the reflection involved in introspection. The former kind of reflection is always possible and involves no effort (B131), whereas observation directed toward oneself only succeeds in conditions favourable to it, conditions which are not favourable to the sort of thinking which is consistent and directed toward objects. In the Critique Kant did not distinguish this elementary meaning of 'objective' from the other meanings which are already orientated toward the form of judgement. But from the transcript of a lecture (AA XXVII, 227), it is quite clear that he was familiar with it. What has previously been said should also have made it clear that Kant's treatment, within the Critique, of subjective and objective unity, but also of the way in which the 'I think' can accompany all my representations, becomes much easier to understand if he is seen as invoking the third (and elementary) sense of 'objective'. But then it also follows from this that this third sense of 'objective' cannot be made out to be, as something that can be taken for granted, the ground of the deduction of the first and second senses, let alone to be equivalent to them. The relation of consciousness purely and simply to contents of thoughts is certainly a presupposition of the intelligibility of logical operations, in so far as these are considered not only in formal systems but from the point of view of their performance by rational subjects. But this does not mean that the completely general consciousness 'I think' considered by itself contains something that enables one to construct, or even merely to postulate, the forms (i.e. constants) of logical unity. That I can have the simple consciousness of myself with respect to whatever I represent says nothing about whether this consciousness is for its part tied to the thought of a system of possible relations between thoughts. The objectivity of this consciousness (in the third sense of 'objective') can only consist in the following: I can represent anything you please, in whatever manner; and I can perhaps also think what I represent as combined into a comprehensive representation which can have any degree of richness of content, but which is also diffuse; and in relation to this comprehensive representation I can in turn have the thought 'I think', which is wholly unspecific with respect to content.

The Identity of the Subject

261

Of course, in so far as the sense of logical form which is constitutive of all thinking is brought into the description of self-consciousness through the use of 'think' in 'I think' then it also follows that all 'I think'-consciousness is dependent on the use of this logical form. But then the connection between'!,-consciousness and logical form is arrived at by presupposing a knowledge of the logical form. This is the exact opposite of a deduction of this form. For the rest, one would have to say with regard to self-consciousness that in this version of Kantian argumentation in particular it has not been established whether '1'consciousness is tied to the logical form which itself grounds the first .and second senses of 'objective'. Everything would depend on proof that this is so or at least on a structural exhibition of the coordination of the two senses of objectivity if a perspective were to be opened up for the deduction of logical form or of categories. Promiscuity in the use of the term 'objective', however, does not open up such a perspective; it merely suggests it. 7 Kant himself had the right which comes from being the discoverer of such a perspective. He cannot be reproached for not being able to elaborate a n1ethodology of his deduction and for not always making the really necessary distinctions in a field which he was the first to disclose. But when it comes to working out Kant's theoretical intentions the interpreter is subject to stricter obligations. If he fails, at those points which are absolutely crucial for the construction of the theory, to consider possible argumentative moves and to establish which of them are the most reliable, then although he perhaps creates an effective idiolect he will be completely unable genuinely to remove, as opposed to merely stifle, the doubts about the possibility of a deduction which takes up and comprehensively elaborates Kant's ideas.

5

THE MEANING OF 'NUMERICAL IDENTITY'

However, the discussion of the concept of objective unity, and of its potential for a deduction, has yielded something. The meaning of the objective unity which belongs directly to self-consciousness has been clarified. It will have significance for any sketch of a deduction. And the task which any such sketch must first of all set itself has also been more clearly defined: to bring to light a structure which is rich enough to enable one to at least connect the concept of objective validity and the theory of categories with it; a structure, moreover, of which it can be shown how far it necessarily goes along with self-consciousness and can also be understood fron1 the perspective of self-consciousness. Three formal properties of self-consciousness have previously been discussed as properties to which a transcendental deduction could be

262

Dieter Henrich

tied. The examination of unity in connection with subjectivity and of unity in the specific sense of 'objective unity' resulted in the conclusion that so far, and taken by themselves, these properties have not yielded a convincing way of carrying out the deduction. So the only remaining point of departure for a transcendental deduction is identity. In almost all the places in which Kant formulates the central thought of the deduction he also refers to the formal property of selfconsciousness which consists in its identity. Thus in the first edition he writes: 'For the mind could never think its identity in the manifoldness of its representations, and indeed think this identity a priori, if it did not have before its eyes the identity of its act, whereby it subordinates all synthesis of apprehension ... to a transcendental unity' (Al08). In the second edition he summarizes his position as follows: 'Synthetic unity of the manifold of intuitions, as given a priori, is thus the ground of the identity of apperception itself, which precedes a priori all my determinate thought' (B134). These central passages would seem to compel the interpretation of the transcendental deduction to concentrate on the identity of apperception and to· look for the basis for this deduction in this identity. This opens up the prospect of a theory which must be of particular interest from the point of view of contemporary philosophical theory. Because of developments, which need not be recalled individually but which are connected with the developn1ent of modern formal logic and philosophical semantics, identity has a far greater theoretical significance than it could have had in the Kantian philosophy in general. It can be regarded as having been demonstrated that the logical forms and semantic functions connected with identity belong to a high level of complication. For contemporary theory identity must also be regarded as a concept which is constitutive for the reference to objects. If it should turn out that Kant's deduction also focuses on identity, moreover on identity in a sense which can be brought into some kind of harmony with modern theories, then the interest it can arouse will be strengthened considerably. This connection also explains why the most important interpretations of the deduction stemming from modern semantics atten1pted to reconstruct the argument of the deduction with the aid of the concept of identity. 8 It is obvious, however, that such attempts to establish interesting connections between theories separated by centuries call for particular caution. As a problem-heading 'identity' covers an extremely broad field of special problems. 9 It is significant that at a central point in his deduction texts Kant invokes the notion of the identity of selfconsciousness. However, it must be made clear in which way, and in which sense, he is using the concept of identity here. The sketch of a deduction, which the interpreter has in any case to work out

The Identity of the Subject

263

independently, n1ust be guided by this use of identity if it is to remain within the possibilities of thought disclosed by Kant himself. That Kant actually emphasizes identity as the starting-point for a deduction is all the more striking as he attached very little significance to the concept of identity in questions of ontology, to which the theory of categories belongs. In the school of Wolff 'idem et diversum' take precedence over causality and simultaneity as basic concepts of a chapter of the Ontology.lO Kant, however, thinks that 'basically these concepts belong to logic' (AA XXVIII, 2,1,569); it is only in connection with metaphysical propositions of Leibniz that they have crept into ontology. Their function is to n1ake possible a determination of relations 'in which concepts in a state of mind can stand to one another ... ' (B317). Prior to all knowledge of objects, of whatever kind, it must be established whether our representations refer to one object or to different objects. And precisely that is accomplished by means of the concepts of oneness and difference. However, this according of a minimal role to the concept of identity does not rule out the possibility that, in so far as it is to be attributed to self-consciousness, identity can explain the relationship of selfconsciousness to the categories. It simply makes comprehensible why Kant does not take the trouble to give a deeper analysis of the sense of identity required in this context. For the rest, in detern1ining the concept of identity Kant followed the pronouncements of the Wolffian school, despite the fact that he shifted its theoretical location from ontology to logic. Moreover he understood logic in the broad sense which it had for the Wolffian school, according to which all the procedures involved in the acquisition of knowledge also belong to the sphere of logic. Kant attributes numerical identity to self-consciousness, again following his Wolffian text-books. 11 Wolff understands by numerical identity the total identity of an individual thing. It differs from the identity which, for example, a lead weight and a stone weight on the scales have with respect to the turning of the scale. From the point of view of weight, the two bodies are substitutable, and, hence, in this respect, identical with one another (Wolff, 1729, §181) .12 An individual, however, is identical with itself from every point of view. It can, therefore, as Wolff puts it, 'be stated of itself' (1729, §5182). Wolff explains this as follows: the expression which designates it can be repeated and different expressions which designate it can be used in relation to one another. As an example he uses the relationship of names: if someone is called Johann and Jacob then it can be said that Johann is Jacob. The other definition, according to which an individual with numerical identity cannot exist twice, is seen in connection with this definition. This has a trivial meaning which simply results from the

264

Dieter Henrich

fact that the thing exists as, precisely, an individual thing; and also a meaning, criticized by Kant, which follows fronl Leibniz's Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles. In every case it can be assumed that when he refers to the identity that belongs to an individual thing Kant is speaking of numerical identity (B319, AA XXVIII, 2,1,645, where he speaks about the 'numerica identitas' of 'individuorum'). So if Kant attributes numerical identity to self-consciousness, this means that self-consciousness exhibits the identity which also belongs to an individual thing. It is clear, however, from Kant's critical theory of the paralogisms of rational psychology that the identity of selfconsciousness is not (sufficient to enable one to infer the identity of a real thing or even of an object which is knowable with respect to its real nature. Numerical identity belongs to self-consciousness as such. For this reason Kant is inclined to call it the 'logical identity of the "I'" (A363), this 'I' for its part being regarded as a 'mere thought' (ibid). However, this cannot be taken to mean that one can only speak of a mere thought of identity. Rather self-consciousness is sonlething which as a thought has a reality which is peculiar to it: the thought implies a reference, which is unspecifiable in itself, to something real; and by virtue of this reference it is always a real thought. The property of numerical identity belongs to it in so far as it is such a thought. This is to be understood as follows: the consciousness 'I think' is undifferentiatedly 'the same' in relation to all possible contents of thought. It can thus also oe said of it that it is 'permanent and abiding' in relation to these conteuts. And this can be interpreted harmlessly to mean that it is one and the same 'I' that is certain of its numerical identity in relation to all contents, when it forms the thought 'I think' in relation to all these contents. This 'I' is also a thought which is to be thought as the same in indefinitely many 'I think'-acts. It is in being able to have this thought, however, that the entire essence of this selfconsciousness consists. And this limitation explains why its identity is to be characterized as 'logical', in the manner described. If the Wolffian concept of numerical identity is applied to selfconsciousness then of course another problem of identity, which also has a long history, inevitably arises: that of the identity of an individual in the changing circumstances of its existence. What exists in time can change. And yet change as such does not in every case constitute a reason, let alone a compelling reason, for disputing the sameness of the thing that has changed. But because there are also cases in which the change obliges one to speak of another thing, it must be assumed that there are criteria which make it possible for us to distinguish sameness in change fronl change of identity. The question of how in general this is done is quite different from the question of the definition of the concept of numerical identity. Hobbes had raised this question in

The Identity of the Subject

265

relation to the identity of an object in space and time; and Locke raised it in relation to the identity, through time only, of a being that is conscious of itself. In Kant's time it was above all the philosophers in G6ttingen who were familiar with the British debate about such questions and who emphasized the difference between the two problems of identity.13 If one is speaking of the identity of apperception then this is something closely related to this kind of identity-problems debated, for the most part controversially, in the eighteenth century. For the identity of selfconsciousness is the identity of the 'I think' in all manner of representations. If one assumes, as seems obvious, that these representations succeed one another in time, then identity is to be attributed to the 'I think' of a kind which, according to the analysis of John Locke is to be attributed to the person who preserves continuity of consciousness throughout the succession of his states: a conscious being is the same person to the extent that it remerrLbers its earlier states of consciousness. This remembering goes together with self-consciousness inasnluch as there is only remembering when past states are not only known as past but also as one~ s own past states. In the chapter on the paralogisms Kant analysed the inference of rational psychology from the identity of self-consciousness to the continuity of the person as an (invalid) inference from the continpity of self-consciousness 'in every state of my existence' (A419), 'in the plurality of time' (A404) and 'in different times' (A362). This language differs from that used by Kant in the context of the deduction. The reason for this is that the chapter on the paralogisms has to present and criticize the inferences of rational psychology in their own context. They are of course unaffected by the theory, peculiar to Kant, that time does not belong to the conditions to which thought and self-consciousness as such ar~ necessarily subject. Thus Kant does not attribute change of states to 'self-consciousness when its identity is at issue in the context of the deduction. What cannot be deternlined in time has no state (AA XXVIII, 2,1,512). But as we shall soon see this in no way excludes the use of a meaning of identity in relation to selfconsciousness which is closet to that discussed in the paralogisms. Christian Wolff was also already familiar with Locke's problems concerning the identity of the person. Departing from the tradition which defines it as intelligent substance he defines 'person' in terms of the capacity for 'self-recollection': 'persona dicitur ens, quod memoriam sui conservat, hoc est~ memini se esse idem illud ens, quod ante in hoc vel isto fuit statu' (Wolff, 1734, §741). And this definition acquires all the more weight inasmuch as the capacity for remembering also belongs to the presuppositions of rationality as such; something which emerges even more clearly fronl Baumgarten's psychology than from Wolff's (Baunlgarten, 1739, §641; Wolff, 1732, §480). N3~!!_~0!_~~!1!,_~~

Dieter Henrich

266

presupposes all these Wolffian definitions when he disputes the claim that the personality of a substance can be inferred from self-consciousness and its continuity in time. The fact that self-consciousness genuinely exhibits 'logical' identity does not permit one to infer that a substance with the capacity for remembering underlies it. According to the Wolffian definition such a substance would be a person. In essence Kant offers two arguments in refutation of this inference: (a) an argument from the fact that self-consciousness does not exist in time, but time exists only in relation to self-consciousness (edition A) and (2) the general objection to the claim that knowledge can be got directly .from a merely logical or fornlal consciousness. Kant's rejection of the inference from self-consciousness to the continuity of a being that is identical and conscious of itself separates hinl from the tradition which gave weight to the concept of identity in metaphysics. And the fact that he denies that self-consciousness is subject to conditions of time also seems to set him apart fronl the tradition associated with Locke, in which the identity of the person is explained via the continuity of his self-consciousness. In opposition to this, however, it nlust be pointed out that in order to reject the paralogism of personality Kant had first to describe the reality of selfconsciousness in such a way that this paralogism could become intelligible. And in this context he made it more clear in what sense identity is genuinely to be attributed to self-consciousness. These attributions of identity must be taken into account by any attempt to explain and develop the transcendental deduction of the categories on the basis of the numerical identity of self-consciousness.

6

IDENTITY AS A FORMAL PROPERTY OF SELFCONSCIOUSNESS

The essential difference between an examination of self-consciousness in relation to unity and an examination of self-consciousness in relation to identity arises from a formal property of the identity of entities. If 'identity' refers not just to the logical property of substitutability in all contexts but to a property of entities, then it can only be attributed to sonlething if it is possible to distinguish a nlultiplicity of conditions or instances in which the something said to be identical can be given or come to consciousness. Thus Wolff's numerical identity can be asserted of a weight because it is the same in a multiplicity of instances of weighing. And Locke's person is the same in all phases of his selfconsciousness life. Unity is also essentially related to multiplicity. It unites a plurality of items in a certain way. But one will only speak of an identity of this

The Identity of the Subject

267

unity-complex when that which constitutes the unity can be considered from different points of view. Only then can the question arise of whether in this case of unity one has to do with the same individual instance of unity or with another. For this reason identity cannot be predicated of the unity of all things as such, where by definition such a question cannot arise - apart, that is, from logical identity, which consists in the determinateness and substitutability of its designations in all contexts. Kant attributes identity to pure self-consciousness. If he meant by this only the logical substitutabilty of the designations in use for it then he would not be saying anything of significance. The idea that this is what he has in mind when he speaks of the 'logical' identity of selfconsciousness is principally ruled out by the fact that this identity is supposed to provide the basis for the understanding and critique of the paralogism in which the personal substantiality of the self-conscious substance is inferred. Although this inference is invalid the manner in which it comes about is at least intelligible. And this already presupposes that the formal property of self-consciousness presupposed in this inference satisfies the condition of being the formal property of the identity of an individual. If one now asks how this condition is fulfilled one cannot avoid noticing a parallel between 'I think'-consciousness and the Lockian person in the succession of his life-phases which are connected by selfremembrance. I am the same in all my thoughts just as I am the same in all the conscious life-phases which I can remember. However the parallel must not be pressed too far. For remembering is a forn1 of knowing empirically; whereas Kant had to deny, and constantly did deny, that apperception in its self-relatedness is or includes an empirical cognition. Moreover the first edition of the Critique justifies its rejection of the paralogism by claiming that the relation of time does not touch the inner form of self-consciousness. On the other hand, this difference should not lead one to assert that there is no formal correspondence at all between the kind of multiplicities presupposed in personal identity and those presupposed in the identity of self-consciousness. It is also true of self-consciousness that identity can only be ascribed to it under the conditions which hold for the ascription of any identity not equivalent to mere substitutability. And furthermore a self-consciousness whose form is the Kantian 'I think' can only be thought as identical in so far as one can speak of the same 'I' in different instances of thinking. Kant also takes account of this by speaking of the identity of myself 'in all the manifold of which I am conscious' (B408). He also ascribes to self-consciousness itself, not to the transcendent person falsely inferred from it, the property of being 'one and the same subject at different times' (A404).

268

Dieter Henrich

On the other hand, caution is also recommended in reading these passages. For there is a tendency in Kant's thinking to consider this difference as a difference with respect to the manifold content of thoughts in a self-consciousness which is not itself differentiated with respect to instances of consciousness. And this way of considering the matter is connected with what was said about the concept of 'objective unity'. According to this the unity of the 'I think' which has a priori status is only a unity of particular thought-contents, not of states of the subject. We can actually conceive of a thought of a self-consciousness in which any number of particular thoughts are thought together without the self-consciousness as such being in any way differentiated. It would then, as a single thought of the being thought of everything that is thought by a subject, always without distinction accompany, and thus unite, the thoughts of this subject. This would be a latent '1'consciousness which, according to a certain form of phenomenology, can be shown to be present in all consciousness. And Neo-Kantians have interpreted Kant's unity of apperception in analogous fashion; except that they conceived of it not as an actual thought but as a merely forn1al property of thoughts which can itself never becorr ~ an instance of consciousness. But neither of these theories can be attributed to Kant himself; though he says things which could give rise to both of them. In contrast to the theory of a self-consciousness which cannot disappear at all he n1aintains that, although it is always possible for self-consciousness to become actual, it does not always have to be actual. And simply by speaking of the possibility of self-consciousness he construes this consciousness, despite its description as 'logical', as being not simply a formal property. It is to be conceived as a real act of that consciousness which has the form of the consciousness of an intelligent subject of itself in relation to a particular thought or a particular set of thoughts. According to the statement with which Kant introduces the thesis of the transcendental deduction 'It must be possible for the "I think" to accompany all my representations' (B131), he could only be speaking of a merely logical form in the sense of Neo-Kantianism if the one form of subject-thinking was coordinated with absolutely all thoughts. But although he speaks of a single 'I think' he also says of it that it can both accompany, and not accon1pany, individual thoughts. This can only mean that a consciousness of the form 'I think these thoughts' must be possible in relation to these thoughts and always in relation to each of them. The 'I', thus the subject of these thoughts, is the same in all these thoughts. And furthermore the thought of the. possibility of being able to accompany is also one and the same whenever a thought is accompanied by the consciousness that I think it. Thus the thought of the identity of the subject and of its relationship to possible thoughts is also included

The Identity of the Subject

269

in every'!'-thought. But yet the consciousness 'I think' can be actualized in an indefinite number of instances. It can accompany thoughts which previously were thought without the consciousness that they are mine. The form of this consciousness is constant and I can be certain of it a priori. And it belongs to its form that it is possible in relation to every thought. That it is actually achieved, and in relation to which thoughts, does not belong to what can be known a priori. But that it can occur in relation to every individual thought - this does belong to what is known a priori when its form is known. Thus the concept of an indefinite number of instances of its occurrence also belongs to the concept of self-consciousness itself. Thus a form is attributed to self-consciousness which could provide the basis for a transcendental deduction. The unity of self-consciousness is now no longer to be regarded simply as a unity of contents in selfconsciousness. Such a unity could be explained in terms of what makes thoughts compatible with each other and capable of being logically related to each other. It is difficult to see, on the basis of selfconsciousness, how far the conditions of the possibility of the forms of unity of thoughts could be derived fron1 the form of self-consciousness. In so far as self-consciousness is the consciousness 'I think' it must presuppose the compatibility of thoughts. Why should what is peculiar to their form be due to the form of self-consciousness or even just prefigured and postulated in it? Wherever it is possible for there to be thoughts in a thinking subject in some kind of relation to one another then it is possible for that subject to have the consciousness 'I think' in relation to them. Over and above this it can also accompany incompatible thoughts with the same act of 'I think', and, moreover, with or without insight into their incompatibility. An argument from self-consciousness which yields a form for all possible thoughts would have to be such that it takes as its point of departure a formal property of self-consciousness as such in order to arrive via the analysis of this property at a general concept of form for objects of thought. It has now emerged that self-consciousness could possess such a formal property simply by virtue of its identity. By virtue of its identity self-consciousness is also the principle of unity, which is how Kant always emphatically presented it. For to accompany thought-contents with the consciousness 'I think' means to think them with all other contents as thought by one and the same subject. Every manifold that is thought by a subject belongs by this very fact to the unity of the thoughts possible to this subject. And there is no single instance of 'I think'-consciousness in which the thought of this unity would not be implied. However it is not at all clear that this totality would have to be structured by properties over and above (a) all the properties which make thoughts as such possible and (b) the

270

Dieter Henrich

property of being thought by a subject. The identity of self-consciousness, by contrast, at least opens up the prospect of being able to derive a totality of thoughts from the form of self-consciousness which is not as empty as the mere unity of 'I' -consciousness and can also be determined with respect to its forn1 by reference to the formal constitution of 'I think'-consciousness itself.

7

THE DEDUCTION FROM IDENTITY

It is now time to recall the criteria for the construction of a transcendental deduction. Such a deduction has to show that self-consciousness itself implies a knowledge of principles for the combination of thoughts with one another; thoughts which are thoughts of what is given. And it must show this on the basis of properties of that self-consciousness which also knows a priori, with a certainty which is independent of all experience, of its own form and possibility of actually occurring in relation to any thought. Observing these conditions we shall now develop the outline of a deduction of the categories from the identity of self-consciousness. This will be done in ten steps of reflection. Each step, however, will only be carried out in the form of a sketch. In1portant special problems, in particular those concerning the mode of argumentation and the implen1entation of the idea in the form of a Kantian theory of knowledge, will be left for a later occasion.

1. 'I think'-consciousness is only possible in a particular instance of the thought 'I think'. Each such instance presupposes the given manifold which is inherent in and brought together in a thought. It constitutes the content of any thought that can become an instance of an 'I think'consciousness. In actual knowledge the elementary instance of an 'I think'-thought is a thought which problematically refers the content of an individual given perception to some object. 2. In any instance of 'I think'-consciousness self-consciousness is present, in so far as the gran1n1atical first-person singular, the reference to self in this consciousness, refers to that subject which the actual instance of self-consciousness knows can be the subject of any number of other instances of 'I think'-thoughts. The subject is not just the subject of actual self-consciousness. Rather it is only subject of this consciousness in so far as it is actually thought, in the thought being thought on a particular occasion, as the subject of indefinitely many other 'I think'-thoughts. 3. Self-consciousness, by virtue of its form, excludes the possibility that all instances in which it occurs, and may occur, can be thought as

The Identity of the Subject

271

definitionally conlbined through the unity of a single instance of 'I think' -consciousness. It is intrinsically nlost unlikely that such an 'I think'-instance could occur. In such an instance all possible thoughts, hence the thoughts not just of all possible worlds but of all possible perceptions and all possible mistaken beliefs would have to become the content of a single actual thought-complex which the self-consciousness correlates with a thought of itself and thus 'embraces'. Everything points to the impossibility of such a thought. But this impossibility need not be derived from the form of self-consciousness. For even if the thought of such an all-embracing thought were possible it would still only be one of the possible instances of 'I think'. For its content would have to be thought as analysable into component-contents, hence in such a way that each of these contents can become an independent instance of 'I think'-consciousness. Moreover it would certainly not belong to the elementary instances of such consciousness, the possibility of which it both presupposes and confirms by virtue of its being analysable into simpler instances of 'I think'-consciousness. It follows fronl this that the unity of all possible thoughts, which is, however, to be thought in relation to self-consciousness, can be thought only as the coordination of all possible 'I think'-instances and their contents and not as a content actualized in a thought that could be accompanied by a non-transitory 'I think'-consciousness. For Kant the totality of the contents of all cognitions of real objects of which a cognitive faculty capable of 'I think'-consciousness can think is the concept of a 'nature'. So now just as the subject of all thoughts which ~omes to consciousness in 'I think'-consciousness is only known in the individual instance of self-consciousness so too complete knowledge of nature is never achieved in an actual thought. Even less is nature given as a whole in a nlonstrously comprehensive perception. We also know ourselves in nature because in so far as we know at all we know in relation to nature. But nature itself is only a thought which reaches beyond every actual cognition, albeit a thought of the coordination of thoughts that can be true.

4. Thus in every instance of self-consciousness there is a reference to the totality of all other instances of self-consciousness. And it is in this reference that the knowledge of the identity of the subject consists; which knowledge thus likewise necessarily occurs with every instance of self-consciousness. But now although self-consciousness is not possible independently of all experience, it is possible independently of any particular experience. For in every case of actual self-consciousness we know that every thought can be acconlpanied by the consciousness 'I think'. And we know this quite independently of any particular circunlstances in which

272

Dieter Henrich

the thoughts actually occur. In precisely this sense we have a priori knowledge of our identity, in so far as this consists in the sameness of the subject referred to by'!' in indefinitely many instances of 'I think'consciousness. Everything that is implied in the knowledge of this identity is thus likewise an implication of self-consciousness itself, and this by virtue of its form.

s.

So if, as is the case, consciousness of the identity of the'!, in all its 'I think'-instances is included in 'I think'-consciousness, then in every instance of 'I think'-consciousness there is a reference to all possible instances of this consciousness. This, it should now be noted, happens in two ways. The one subject that is indicated by the'!, in all these instances of consciousness must be thought. But also every individual instance of 'I think'-consciousness must be so thought in relation to every other individual instance that a consciousness is possible that this one instance and every other individual instance are 'I think'-instances of one and the same subject. This is only made possible by the transition in consciousness from' the one instance to the other instance or by in some other way bringing together the one instance with the other instance to form a consciousness that they are instances of 'I think'consciousness of the same subject. Only through the consciousness of an instance of 'I think' that is a consciousness in relation to other instances of 'I think' does the consciousness that 'I think'-consciousness . as such is only present in an instance of the thinking of the same'!, acquire its sense within this consciousness itself. And of course it is also only in so far as instances of 'I think'-consciousness can occur in relation to one another that 'I think'-consciousness is able to apprehend the sequence, the development, of thoughts as the development of thoughts of one and the same subject. But then, despite the fact that not all 'I think'-instances can fuse into a single 'I think'-thought, both thoughts of the relation of any 'I think'instance to every other instance (as regards form) and the one thought of the totality of this kind of possible relations must be thought in the 'I think'-consciousness. And these thoughts are also implied in every individual instance of self-consciousness. They are furthermore explicitly co-thought in this thought through the thought of the identity of the subject. 6. In so far as self-consciousness is an a priori principle in the manner specified the consciousness of identity-implications of the 'I think' must also be possible purely a priori, including all the thoughts which according to (5) make possible the consciousness of the identity of the 'I'. But the question now arises: what must this consciousness and these thoughts be like prior to all experience of the relations of actual 'I think'-instances if they are to be thought as possible a priori? The

The Identity of the Subject

273

formal properties of this consciousness have already emerged: a totality of possible 'I think'-instances must be thought in such a way that from each of the instances the reference to all other instances is possible; that is, the reference both to the system as whole, whose content cannot be defined as that of a single 'I think'-thought, and to every other individual instance. And consequently all these individual 'I think'instances in the totality, and not just the currently actual one, must be thought in such a way that precisely the san1e reference from them to the system as a whole, and to every other individual 'I think'-instance in it, is thought as possible. For without the possibility of such a universal relation of all 'I think'-instances to one another which is independent of every actual transition and every actual reference, the identity of the 'I' for all 'I think'-instances would have no fixed a priori meanIng. The thought of such an a priori totality is fulfilled and made into a detern1inate thought with the same a priori constancy as the form of self-consciousness itself by the thought of rules for the coordination of everything that can be given and that is thinkable as such - rules which hold for this given without restriction, which can be thought a priori and which are actually thought in self-conscious thinking. And this totality of rules can in turn be understood as the system of rules which Kant called 'categories': categories are functions of the coordination of all possible thoughts of the given in a system which is independent of actual experience. 7. It is not possible to show by means of some sort of formal derivation or conceptual analysis that only a system of rules can fulfil the formal thought of a system of 'I think'-instances. Nor can the connection be made intelligible by Wittgenstein's method of reproducing processes of learning or by deriving it from the reproduction of the functioning of a linguistic usage that is grounded in the praxis of life. Such modes of ascertaining would be incompatible with the Cartesian status of selfconsciousness, according to which it can occur as a fact, and be known with respect to its form, independently of any particular experience. Consequently, all that analysis can do is to make clear the formal correspondences between implications of self-consciousness and implications of a system defined by rules; and, for the rest, simply make clear that without reference to such a system the identity of selfconsciousness, construed in a Cartesian way, has no determinate sense. In Kant's arguments too there is a gap between the analysis of selfconsciousness and the introduction of rules (in edition A) or forms of judgement (in edition B): the concept of a rule is not itself derived. But this gap would only be seriously damaging to the project of a theoretically transparent deduction if the analysis of self-consciousness had not been

274

Dieter Henrich

carried sufficiently far for the implications of form to emerge which make it necessary to postulate a totality of forms which can then for its part be occupied by the idea of the systen1 of rules. Rules and judgements are such basic features of all thought that they cannot be constructed from other elements. However, it is possible to determine the place which they occupy in a connection which embraces more than just themselves and which, unlike themselves, is in1mune to the doubts of the sceptic about a-priority and validity. This connection is that disclosed by self-consciousness in so far as it is analysed with respect to those properties of its form which can be known with Cartesian certainty. That such certainty is possible, thus that self-consciousness is also a state of affairs which, because it is a possibility that is fundamental to all thinking and knowing, can be considered by itself, must simply be presupposed here. But this is a presupposition which Kant shares with some important thinkers of the mid-eighteenth century. IS Although this is not the place to elaborate on this, it can be shown that this presupposition is perfectly justified. 8. However, it is possible to be more specific about the form of the totality of rules now that it has been shown that the implication of the form of self-consciousness is fulfilled as a system of rules. Here only a bare n1inimum of the formal properties of this system will be elaborated. A first rule must designate an object for the elementary 'I think'instances which as such is able to occupy the element-places in the system. This is the thought of something that corresponds to a simple perception. This something is not to be construed as the cause which underlies a n1anifold of sense-data synthesized in the perception. It is the perceptual datum itself in so far as it is thought of as qualified to occupy a place in the system of 'I think'-instances. And these 'I think'instances themselves are not to be construed as states of a thinking and sensing individual. Apart from their property of being occasions for an 'I think'-consciousness to occur, they are only specified by what is represented in them, thus by their 'objective' contents. This follows from the property of the 'I think'-consciousness itself. The analysis of its 'objective unity' had shown that the Cartesian certainty regarding the ability to achieve 'I think'-consciousness at any time extends only to the'!' in relation to its contents. A second rule must determine the way in which one is to proceed from one 'I think'-instance to another 'I think'-instance or in what other way such an instance, despite being a mere instance of 'I think', can be thought in relation to another instance; in such a way, namely, that the one instance as the original can be retained in the consciousness of the second instance. The sequence of 'I think'-instances must be thought as an implication of the order which is implied in the consciousness 'I

The Identity of the Subject

275

think' itself, hence independently of whether a particular sequence is actually thought as the sequenc.e of two actual 'I think'-instances. On the other hand, however, the sequence of 'I think'-instances must be thought in such a way that there can be actual consciousness of it. On the one hand, therefore, its structure must fulfil the property of being only a formal implication of the 'I think'-consciousness; but, on the other hand, it n1ust also satisfy the condition of being able to become the content of an 'I think'-consciousness that is a consciousness of the sequence as such a sequence. Finally, a third rule must be thought. For the totality of 'I think' instances which is implied in the 'I think'-consciousness is a system of possible 'I think'-instances. Consequently in this totality every thought which is a possible 'I think'-instance must be thought in relation to every other possible thought. At the same time it must be thought as that totality within which different possible sequences of 'I think'instances are possible in relation to one another. The third rule thus determines in what way 'I think'-instances and sequences of 'I think'instances can coexist independently of their actually being thought. And the set of such coexisting 'I think'-instances must be thought as coinciding with the totality of all that can be thought by a thinking that is capable of self-consciousness. These three rules correspond to the basic categories of the Kantian doctrine of categories - the relational categories of substance, causality and reciprocity. But they do not simply coincide with them. Nor do we wish to claim that the Kantian conception of causality can be confirmed by the set of rules developed here. What, however, is decisive for the basic idea of a deduction of categories is the property of the derived system of rules of coinciding with the thought of a system of a 'world' (or 'nature') which is independent of states of the subject and the actuality of individual 'I think'-thoughts. Also according to Kant's analysis this nature is nothing other than the totality of the multiplicity of 'somethings' ('objects') which taken altogether are detern1ined, firstly, in a one-to-one relation and, secondly, in a collective relation to one another. Initially it can even remain undecided whether this totality must first of all be derived as the totality of logical objects or whether it can and must be derived immediately as the totality of given objects. It could also be conceded that while retaining their basic form the basic rules enter into systems of rules of differing degrees of theoretical capacity. This would allow the concept of nature to change whilst remaining basically Kantian; though of course such a change would have to be understood as n1erely a further differentiation and development of the basic form. 9.

The totality of 'I think' -instances which is implied in the form of

276

Dieter Henrich

self-consciousness takes account of the distinction between mere thinking and actual knowing. The system of all possible 'I think'-instances is thought through the totality of rules. This totality constitutes the meaning of 'world' or 'nature'. And from the outset self-consciousness construes all its possible thoughts in relation to this world. It necessarily presupposes this 'world' as the sphere of reference of all its thoughts. But not all of its thoughts are therefore also true. A thought becomes true by virtue of coming about in a particular actual instance of 'I think' in which the rules which constitute the thought of world as such are correctly used. It is only through such a use that the actual 'I think'instance is effectively integrated into the system of all possible 'I think'instances. However this itself does not prove that self-consciousness also contains the ground for always also regarding actual 'I think'instances in relation to their integration into the system of rules of reference which is thought through the identity of the subject of 'I think'-consciousness, and thus as engaged in the cognitive enterprise. For this the Kantian deduction would have to develop an additional argument. It is also worth remarking that in relation to the distinction between instance and system a further distinction can be made in a deduction based on identity. It is interesting because it enables us to specify a possible point of contact between the structure of the deduction itself and the Kantian transcendental aesthetic. In the totality of the system of 'I think'-instances only the possible thoughts of a self-conscious being are thought. It at least nlakes sense to suppose that, in so far as they actually occur in relation to one another, 'I think'-instances must satisfy a further fornlal condition. This condition can only be that of the unidirectional relation of one instance to another particular instance, fronl which the formal minimum of temporal succession can be derived. But the formal condition of actual 'I think'-instances must also be brought into the thought of the totality of possible thoughts of the subject, in relation to· which totality all actual 'I think'-instances are actual. And this would enable one to derive both the temporal property of simultaneity in the world and the property of the world in relation to which simultaneity becomes definable; which would thus yield the formal minimum of the spatiality of the world. But this should only be taken as an indication of a perspective on a deduction which offers the prospect of uncovering and connecting by means of the analysis of arguments all the theorems advanced in Kant's text. 10. The distinction between thinking and knowing which is grounded in self-consciousness and its formal implications also applies to the knowledge which the self-conscious being has of itself and with respect to its own identity. By virtue of the anticipation of nat1.!I~__~hicb_js---------

The Identity of the Subject

277

inherent in the form of self-consciousness, a self-conscious being can '- n1ake the actual sequence in the world as a whole of its 'I think'instances, thus its states of belief and cognitive acts, the theme of one of its endeavours to acquire empirical knowledge. The special conditions under which it can acquire this particular kind of knowledge are not sufficiently determined by the formal implications of self-consciousness. Specific criteria of identity are also needed for the knowledge of the sameness of a self-conscious being in the world. If they are to be obtained by an analysis of Cartesian self-consciousness at all (~hich n1ay be doubted, but which is also a supposition worth investigating) they at any rate cannot be developed using only what the analysis of the form of self-consciousness has yielded so far. It is extremely important not to confuse the conditions of the actual knowledge which a self-conscious being has, or may have, of its identity in the world with the identity-implication which is already inherent in it in so far as it assures itself of itself in the evidence of the possibility of 'I think'-thoughts. 16 For this evidence yields only this: a subject's thought of itself, self-consciousness, is, by virtue of its form, only possible as an actual thought if it is at the same time thought as an instance of a thought, thus as the thought of a being of itself which is capable of indefinitely many other thoughts of itself of precisely the same formal character, and which, in so far as it construes itself as a principle of identity, also actually thinks the form of the relation of all these instances to each other. If such a being thinks an 'I think'-thought then in this thought, and by virtue of its form, it is also explicitly related both to its sameness in any possible thoughts of this kind and to the unity of all these thoughts in the same subject. Thus the unity of a nature is thought via the identity of itself in each of its selfconscious thoughts, and indeed simply on the basis of its form. It must also remain undecided, therefore, whether a particular selfconscious being in its actual conscious life thinks n10re than a single thought in which it is conscious of itself. It remains logically possible that a thinking that is capable of self-consciousness should exist for only a single moment, so that it cannot actually bring itself into continuity with any other 'I think'-instance of its consciousness and therefore can have no knowledge of any objective unities. Certainly this possibility lacks any kind of probability. It can confidently be ruled out that such a being has a mode of existence in which it could achieve self-consciousness. But this confidence does not have the status of Cartesian certainty which only extends to the fact of a particular 'I think' and to the form of 'I think' as such which is necessarily thought in this particular 'I think'. What can be certain in the Cartesian sense is therefore only this: that an 'I think'-instance is actual and, most in1portantly, so is everything which by virtue of the form of self-

278

Dieter Henrich

consciousness is so implied in this instance of self-consciousness that it can likewise come to consciousness in every instance of self-consciousness. It is on the structure of these implications alone that a transcendental deduction must be based. Descartes himself also based his argument solely on the currently actual instance of a self-conscious cogitatio, except that he also sought to draw unwarrantable inferences from it about the real identity of the referent of the first-person in the' cogito'. Kant's deduction-programme can and must base itself solely on the formal implications of an individual 'I think'-instance. Only when the identity of the subject in all 'I think'-instances is construed as such a formal implication can a deduction based on identity be also prevented from contravening the lin1iting conditions which Kant laid down in the chapter on the paralogisms of rational psychology. The fact that self-consciousness is a principle of identity must not be taken to mean that self-consciousness includes the knowledge that some thinking being actually endures in its existence. Purely from what it is possible to ascertain in self-consciousness itself it does not follow that any being is constituted by self-conscious thinking; nor that something or other persists which is acquainted with itself in this instance of 'I think'-consciousness. Viewed n1etaphysically self-consciousness could be derivative. And the being to which self-consciousness belongs could come abruptly into existence and equally abruptly go out of existence. The ascertaining of the formal connection between consciousness of the 'I' and consciousness of the world via the identity in the 'I think' would remain completely unaffected by this. The only thing that remains unavoidable, from a metaphysical point of view, is the assumption that if self-consciousness continues then this is a fact which must also be attributed to the real thing on the basis of which self-consciousness exists - whether self-consciousness characterizes it originally or only arises derivatively, and whether this reality is an individual thing or a sequence of events. Although no factual assertions which go beyond the actual instance of 'I think'-consciousness follow from the form of self-consciousness, this instance of consciousness is itself a fact and something in the totality of what is actual, although we cannot know it within this whole. Solely on the basis of this fact something can also actually be known about the form of self-consciousness. And only if this knowledge were such that it enabled one to establish that an 'I think'-consciousness n1ust be able to ascertain its own identity as an empirically determined being in the world could it be asserted that Kantian self-consciousness implies the availability of criteria for the identification of a person. All attempts to reconstruct Kant's argumentation from the resources of Wittgenstein's private language argument, such as those of Bennett and Strawson, have fron1 the very outset taken their leave fron1 the Kantian progran1n1e.

The Identity of the Subject

279

It therefore also follows fronl all this that the identity which is inlplied in self-consciousness by virtue of its form does not have the status of an hypothesis which could be, and would have to be, verified or falsified by the use of the categories. Recently the attempt has again been made to construe in this way the connection between self-consciousness and categories via the identity in the consciousness 'I think' .17 This, however, has the consequence that one can no longer understand how it is that self-consciousness's relation to the world arises with this selfconsciousness as such. It must first have doubted its actual identity before it can reflect that it has the lueans at its disposal for examining the correctness of these doubts - and the result of these reflections remains completely open. In this way the Rousseauian a-priority of knowledge of the world is lost through the very starting-point of the programme. It rapidly merges with the attenlpts in the Anglo-Saxon Kant literature to secure a basis for the deduction in the postulate of the possibility of self-knowledge. However, the Cartesian lineage of Kant's deduction demands that an argument be developed which derives the reference-system of possible knowledge as a whole from selfconsciousness. A relation of direct dependence must be shown to hold between the simple knowledge of oneself in every 'I think'-instance and certainty about the constitution of a system that can be interpreted as nature; and it must likewise be possible to understand this direct dependence directly in terms of the internal constitution of selfconSCIousness. The identity implied in self-consciousness is neither formal-logical identity nor that which can be exhibited on the basis of criteria for the identity of a type of entities in the world. The Kantian-Cartesian mode of achieving certainty demands that this identity be thought of neither as a universal logical form nor as the anticipation of a fact that can be tested according to criteria. If one confines oneself exclusively to the theory of identity already worked out in contenlporary philosophy then it is bound to appear as though the thought of such a place and status for the identity of self-consciousness were both enlpty and unoccupiable - the thought of an intermediate realm between unambiguous senses of identity, a thought to which no good and unambiguous meaning can be attached. If, however, having conceded the inlportance of the theory of senses of identity, one goes back to the Kantian deduction of the categories one reaches a completely different conclusion: the Kantian ideas about the transcendental deduction lead to a conception of the identity of self-consciousness which significantly supplements the theories of self-consciousness which have grown from the soil of logical positivism. Without this conception, and without continuous reference to it, the clarification of all the other senses of identity can scarcely be complete. 18

280

Dieter Henrich NOTES

1 AA XXIX 1, 2, pp. 781-2. Here and in what follows the Critique of Pure Reason is referred to in the usual way (the two editions as A and B); the volumes of the Akademieausgabe of Kant's work as AA with page numbers. 2 Kant, Metaphysische Anfangsgrunde der Naturwissenschaft, the long Note to the Preface. 3 The author has completed an investigation into the background of the meaning of 'deduction' which for reasons of space could not be included in this paper. For a sketch of the results see Henrich, forthcoming. The present paper connects up with the second part of the author's essay for the Heidelberg Academy (Henrich, 1976). In particular it carries out the deduction from the identity of self-consciousness, which was presented for the first time in the earlier study, in somewhat different fashion, albeit only in the form of a sketch. 4 A344, A404, B419. 5 See Ebbinghaus, 1968 and Reich, 1948. 6 See n.2. 7 This form of language also dominates the presentation of the deduction by Manfred Baum. See Baum, 1976. 8 See esp. Bennett, 1966 and Strawson, 1966. 9 See Henrich, 1979. 10 See Baumgarten, 1739, Part I, ch. III; also Kant, AA XVII, pp. 83 ff. 11 See ibid., §269. 12 In what follows Wolff's works are referred to by paragraphs §. 13 See Meiners, 1786, pp. 15 ff; J.G.H. Feder, 1771, Metaphysik, 1, Hauptstuck, §29. 14 See Gabe, 1954. 15 Merian argues forcefully against the Leibniz school that apperception is immediate and precedes all other knowledge. See Merian, 1749. 16 See Aquila, 1979, pp. 259 ff. 17 See Guyer, 1979, pp. 151 ff; 1980, pp. 205 ff. 18 This paper was written in 1981 for a colloquium which took place 200 years after the appearance of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft.

Bibliography

Allison, H.E. 1976: The non-spatiality of things in themselves. Journal of the History of Philosophy, 14,313-21. Allison, H.E. 1983: Kant's Transcendental Idealism. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Annas, J. and Barnes, J. 1985: The Modes of Scepticism. Carnbridge: Cambridge University Press. Aquila, R.E. 1979: Personal identity and Kant's refutation of idealisn1. KantStudien, 70, 259-78. Armstrong, D.M. 1973: Belie~ Truth and Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baum, M. 1976: Die transzendentale Deduktion in Kants Kriterien. Diss., Kaln. Baum, M. and Horstmann, R.P. 1979: Metaphysikkritik und Erfahrungstheorie in Kants theoretischer Philosophie. Philosophische Rundschau, 26, 62-91. Baumgarten, A.G. 1739: Metaphysica. Halle: Hemmerde. Bennett, J. 1966: Kant's Analytic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bennett, J. 1979: Analytic transcendental arguments. In P. Bieri, R.P. Horstmann and L. Kruger (eds), Transcendental Arguments and Science. Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 45-64. Bieri, P. 1987a: Evolution, Erkenntnis und Kognition. Zweifel an der evolutionaren Erkenntnistheorie. In W. Liitterfelds (ed.), Transzendentale oder evolutionare Erkenntnistheorie?, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, pp.117-47. Bieri, P. 1987b: Intentionale Systeme. Uberlegungen zu Daniel Dennetts Theorie des Geistes. In J. Brandstadter (ed.), Struktur und Erfahrung in der psychologischen Forschung. Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 208-52. Bird, G. 1962: Kant's Theory of Knowledge. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Bird, G. 1974: Recent interpretations of Kant's transcendental deduction, KantStudien, Sonderheft. Mainz, pp. 1-15. Bird, G. 1982: Kant's transcendental idealism. In G. Vesey (ed.), Idealism Past and Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 71-92. Bird, G. 1984a: Review of Stevenson, L., The Metaphysics of Experience, Philosophical Books, 25 (3), 169-73.

282

Bibliography

Bird, G. 1984b: Bemerkungen zu Barry Strouds Beitrag. In E. Schaper and W. Vossenkuhl (eds), Bedingungen der Moglichkeit. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, pp.230-5. Brittan, G. 1978: Kant's Theory of Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bubner, R. 1974-5: Kant, transcendental arguments and the problem of deduction. Review of Metaphysics, 28, 435-67. Burnyeat, M.F. 1980: Can the sceptic live his sceptism? In Schofield, Burnyeat, Barnes (eds), Doubt and Dogmatism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 20-53; reprinted in The Skeptical Tradition, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983. Campbell, D.T. 1974: Evolutionary epistemology. In P. Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of Karl Popper. La Salle: Open Court, vol. I, pp. 413-63. Cassam, Q. 1975: Transcendental Arguments and Necessity. Oxford D. Phil. thesis, unpublished. Cerf, W. 1972: Critical notice on The Bounds of Sense. Mind, 81, 601-17. Clarke, T. 1972: The legacy of skepticism. The Journal of Philosophy, 69, 754-69. Collingwood, R.G. 1940: Essay on Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davidson, D. 1975: Thought and talk. In S. Guttenplan (ed.), Mind and Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 7-23. Davidson, D. 1983: A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge. In D. Henrich (ed.), Kant oder Hegel? Ober Formen der Begrundung in der Philosophie. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, pp. 423-38. Davidson, D. 1984: Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Delekat, F. 1969: Immanuel Kant, 3rd edn. Hamburg: QueUe and Meier. Dennett, D.C. 1978: Brainstorms. Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology. Hassocks, Sussex: The Harvester Press. Dennett, D.C. 1981a: Three kinds of intentional psychology. In R. Healy (ed.), Reduction, Time and Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.37-61. Dennett, D.C. 1981b: True believers: The Intentional Strategy and why it works. In A.F. Heath (ed.), Scientific Explanation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp.53-75. Dennett, D.C. 1982: Beyond belief. In A. Woodfield (ed.), Thought andOhject. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 1-95. Descartes, R. 1897-1909: Meditation III. In C. Adam and P. Tannery (eds), Oeuvres de Descartes. Paris: Cerf. Dretske, F.!. 1970: Epistemic operators. Journal of Philosophy, 67, 1007-23. Dretske, F.!. 1971: Conclusive reasons. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 49, 1-22. Dretske, F.!. 1981a: Knowledge and the Flow of Information. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Dretske, F.!. 1981 b: The pragmatic dimension of knowledge. Philosophical Studies, 40, 363 78.

Bibliography

283

Dretske, F.!. 1987: Misrepresentation. In R. Bogdan (ed.), Belief. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 17-35. Ebbinghaus, ]. 1968: Gesammelte Aufsatze, Vortrage und Reden. Darnlstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Feder, ].G.H. 1771: Logik und Metaphysik. Reprint, Linz, 1788. Fodor, ].A. 1984: Semantics, Wisconsin style. Synthese, 59, 231-50. Forster, E. n.d. Kant's refutation of idealism. In A. Holland (ed.), Philosophy, Its History and Historiography. Dordrecht: Reidel, forthcoming. Friedman, M. 1985: Kant's theory of geometry. Philosophical Review, 94, 455-506. Gabe, L. 1954: Die Paralogismen der reinen Vernunft. Diss., Marburg. Goldman, A. 1967: A causal theory of knowing. The Journal of Philosophy, 64, 355-72. Goldman, A. 1976: Discrimination and perceptual knowledge. The Journal of Philosophy, 78, 771-91. Guyer, P. 1979: Re'view' of Henrich, D., Identitat und Objektivitat: Eine Untersuchung iiber Kants transzendentale Deduktion. Journal of Philosophy, LXXVI, 151-67. Guyer, P. 1980: Kant on Apperception and a priori Synthesis. American Philosophical Quarterly, 17, 205-12. Guyer, P. 1987: Kant and the Claims of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haldane, E.S. and Ross, G.R.T. (trs) 1911: Philosophical works of Descartes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harrison, R. 1974: On What There Must Be. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harrison, R. 1976: The only possible morality. Supp. Proc. Aristotelian Society, L,21-42. Harrison, R. 1982: Transcendental arguments and idealism. In .G. Vesey (ed.), Idealism Past and Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.211-24. Henrich, D. 1975: Die Deduktion des Sittengesetzes. In A. Schwan (ed.), Denken im Schatten des Nihilismus. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, pp.55-122. Henrich, D. 1976: Identitat und Objektivitat: eine Untersuchung zu Kants transzendentaler Deduktion. Heidelberg. Henrich, D. 1979: Identitat - Begriffe, Probleme, Grenzen. In O. Marquard and K. Stierle (eds), Poetik und Hermeneutik. Munchen: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, vol. VIII, pp. 133-86. Henrich, D. n.d. Kant's notion of a deduction and the methodological background of Kant's 'transcendental' strategy in the first critique. In E. Forster (ed.), Kant's Deductions In His Three Critiques And His Opus Postumum. Stanford, Conn.: Stanford University Press, forthcoming. Hintikka, ]. 1969a: Kant on the mathematical method. In L.W. Beck (ed.), Kant Studies Today. La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, pp. 117-40. Hintikka,]. 1969b: On Kant's notion of intuition (Anschauung). In Penelhum and Macintosh (eds), The First Critique. Belmont, Ca.: Wadsworth, pp.38-53.

284

Bibliography

Hintikka, J. 1972: Transcendental arguments: genuine and spurious. Nous, VI, 274-81. Horstmann, R.P. 1976: Space as intuition and geometry. Ratio, 18, 17-30. Hume, D. 1875: The Sceptic. In T.H. Green and T.H. Gross (eds), Essays Moral, Political, and Literary. London: Longman Green and Co., pp. 213-31. Hume, D. 1947: Dialogues concerning natural religion. In N.K. Smith (ed.), Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, 2nd edn. Edinburgh: Nelson. Hume, D. 1955a: An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. C.W. HendeL Liberal Arts Press. Hume, D. 1955b: A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, reprinted. Husserl, E. 1964: The Idea of Phenomenology. Transl. W.P. Alston and G. Nakhnikian. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. 1970: The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. D. Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. James, W. 1978: The Meaning of Truth, ed. I.K. Skruoskelis. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Kant, I. 1900-: Werke, Akademie Ausgabe, 29 vols. Berlin: de Gruyter and Co. Kant, I. 1933: Critique of Pure Reason (CPR), transl. N. Kemp Smith. London: Macmillan and Co., 2nd edn. Kant, I. 1953: Prolegomena, transl. P.G. Lucas. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kant, I. 1956: Critique of Practical Reason (CPrR), transl. L. White Beck. New York: Liberal Arts Press. Kant, I. 1963-4: Werke, ed. W. Weischedel, 6 vols. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Kant, I. 1972: Critique of Judgement (CJ), transl. J.H. Bernard. New York: Hafner Publishing Co. Kemp Smith, N. 1923: A Commentary to Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason', 2nd edn. London: Macmillan. Korner, S. 1966: -Transcendental tendencies in recent philosophy. Journal of Philosophy, 63, 551-61. Korner, S. 1967: The impossibility of transcendental deductions. The Monist, 51, 317-31; also in Beck, L.W. 1969: Kant Studies Today. La Salle: Open Court, pp. 230-44. Korner, S. 1971: Fundamental Questions in Philosophy. London: Penguin. Korner, S. 1974: Categorial Frameworks. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Lear, J. and Stroud, B. 1984: The disappearing 'We'. Supp. Proc. Aristotelian Society, LyIII, .219-58. Leibniz, G.W., 1714: Monadology. Low, R. 1980: Philosophie des Lebendigen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. McFarland, J.D. 1970: Kant's Concept of Teleology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Mackie, J. 1974: The Cement of the Universe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Malcolm, N. 1968: The conceivability of mechanism. Philosophical Review, 77, 45-72.

Bibliography

285

Martin, G. 1969: Immanual Kant: Ontologie und Wissenschaftslehre,4th edn. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co. Mathieu, V. 1967: Ather und Organismus in Kants Opus Postumum. In H. Heimsoeth, D. Henrich and G. Tonelli (eds), Studien zu Kants philosophischer En twick lung. Hildesheim: Olms, pp. 184-91. Meier, G.F. 1752: Auszug aus der Vernunftlehre. Halle. Meiners, C. 1786: Grundriss der Seelenlehre.·Lemgo. Merian, 1749: Sur l'apperception de sa propre existence. Histoire de l'Academie Royale des Sciences et Belles Lettres, vol. V, Berlin. Nagel, G. 1983: The Structure of Experience: Kant's System of Principles. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nagel, T. 1979: Mortal Questions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nagel, T. 1986: The View' from Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nielsen, K. 1972: On refusing to play the sceptic's game. Dialogue, 11, 348-59. Nozick, R. 1981: Philosophical Explanations. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Pappas, G.S. and Swain, M. (eds), 1978: Essays on Knowledge and Justification. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Pappas, G.S. (ed.), 1979: Justification and Knowledge. Dordrecht: Reidel. Parsons, C. 1969: Kant's Philosophy of Arithmetic. In S. Morgenbesser, P. Suppes and M. White (eds), Philosophy, Science, and Method: Essays in Honor of Ernest Nagel. New York: St Martins Press, pp. 568-94. Prauss, G. 1974: Kant und das Problem der Dinge an sich. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag. Prauss, G. 1983: Kant aber Freiheit als Autonomie. Frankfurt: Klostermann. Putnam, H. 1975: Mind, Language and Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Putnam, H. 1978: Meaning and the Moral Sciences. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Putnam, H. 1981: Reason, Truth and History. Canlbridge: Cambridge University Press. Putnam, H. 1983a: Models and reality. In Realism and Reason: Philosophical Papers. Cambridge: Canlbridge University Press, pp. 1-25. Putnam, H. 1983b: Convention: A theme in philosophy. Ibid., pp. 170-83. Quine, W.V. 1969: Epistemology naturalized. In Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York: Columbia University Press. Quine, W.V. 1975: The nature of natural knowledge. In S. Guttenplan (ed.), Mind and Language. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 67-81. Quine, W.V. 1981: Reply to Stroud. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, VI, 473-5. Reich, K. 1968: Die Vollstandigkeit der Kantischen Urteilstafel, 3rd edn. Hamburg: Meiner. Rorty, R. 1972: The world well lost. Journal of Philosophy, 69, 649-65. Rorty, R. 1979: Transcendental arguments, self-reference, and pragmatism. In P. Bieri, R.P. Horstmann and L. Kriiger (eds), Transcendental Arguments and Science. Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 77-103. Rorty, R. 1980: Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Russell, B. 1956: An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry. New York: Dover Publications. Schaper, E. 1972: Arguing transcendentally. Kantstudien, 63, 101-16.

286

Bibliography

Schaper, E. 1974: Are transcendentaldeductions impossible? In L.W. Beck (ed.), Kant's Theory of Knowledge. Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 3-11. Schaper, E. 1979: Studies in Kant's Aesthetics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Shope, R.K. 1983: The Analysis of Knowing. A Decade of Research. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Stadler, A. 1883: Kants Theorie der Materie. Leipzig: Verlag von S. Hirzel. Stevenson, L. 1982: The Metaphysics of Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stine, G.C. 1976: Skepticism, relevant alternatives, and deductive closure. Philosophical Studies, 29 (1976), 249-61. Stine, W.D. 1968: Transcendental arguments. Journal of Philosophy, 65, 241-56. Stine, W.D. 1972: Transcendental arguments. Metaphilosophy 3, 43-52. Strawson, P.F. 1959: Individuals. London: Methuen. Strawson, P.F. 1966: The Bounds of Sense. London: Methuen. Strawson, P.F. 1982: Review of Transcendental Arguments and Science, eds P. Bieri, R.P. Horstmann, L. Kriiger (Reidel, Dordrecht, 1979). Journal of Philosophy, LXXIX, 45-50. Strawson, P.F. 1985: Scepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties. London: Methuen and New York: Columbia University Press. Stroud, B. 1968: Transcendental arguments. Journal of Philosophy, 65,241-56; reprinted in Penelhum and Macintosh (eds), The First Critique. Belmont: Wadsworth, 1969, pp.54-69; reprinted in R.C.S. Walker (ed.), Kant on Pure Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 117-31. Stroud, B. 1984a: The allure of idealism. Supp. Proc. Aristotelian Society, LVIII, 243-58. Stroud, B. 1984b: The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stroud, B. 1984c: Die Transzendentalphilosophie und das Problem der Aussenwelt. In E. Schaper and W. Vossenkuhl (eds), Bedingungen der Moglichkeit. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, pp. 204-29. Vaihinger, H. 1892: Kommentar zu Kants Kritik der Reinen Vernunft. Stuttgart: Union Deutscher Verlagsgesellschaft. Walker, R.C.S. 1978: Kant. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Walker, R.C.S. 1981: Transcendental idealism: Kant's reply to Wittgenstein. In Ethics: Proceedings of the 5th International Wittgenstein Symposiunt. Vienna: H6Ider-Pichler-Tempsky, pp.391-8. Walker, R.C.S. 1983: Empirical realism and transcendental anti-realism. Supp. Proc. Aristotelian Society, LVII, 155-77. Watling, J. 1972: Kant's explanation of the necessity of geometrical truths. In Reason and Reality, Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures. London: Macmillan, vol. 5, 1970-71, pp. 131-44. Wilkerson, E.T. 1976: Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Oxford: O;-xford University Press. I'· Williams, B. 1984: Prasuppositionen der Moralitat. In E. Schaper and W. Vossenkuhl (eds), Bedingungen der Moglichkeit. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, pp. 251-61. Wittgenstein, L. 1922: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. ~~~~_~~~_IS~g~p_R'!1.!L__---

Bibliography

287

Wittgenstein, L. 1953: Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wolff, C. 1729: Ontologia. Frankfurt/Leipzig: Reuger. Wolff, C. 1732: Psychologia empirica. Frankfurt/Leipzig: Reuger. Wolff, C. 1734: Psychologia rationalise Frankfurt/Leipzig: Reuger. Wolff, R.P. 1963: Kant's Theory of Mental Activity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Wolff, R.P. 1973: The Autonomy of Reason. New York: Harper and Row. Wuketits, F.M. (ed.), 1984: Concepts and Approaches in Evolutionary Epistemology. Dordrecht: Reidel. Zweig, A. 1967: Kant: Philosophical Correspondence 1759-99. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Index of Names Note: Italicized page numbers refer to end-notes. Adickes, E. 239 Allison, H. E. 123, 125, 138, 155, 166, 169-70 Annas,]. 75 Aquila, R. E. 280 Armstrong, D. M. 110

Descartes, R. 66, 75, 110 Dretske, F. I. 90, 99-103, 105, 110-13 Ebbinghaus, ]. 280 Euclid 135

Barnes, ]. 75 Baum, M. 280 Baumgarten, A. G. 265, 280 Beck,]. S. 19,240-1,243-4,248 Beck, L. W. 248-9 Bennett, J. 110-11,278,280 Berkeley, G. 145-6, 166,225,227, 235, 237, 248 Bernard, ]. H. 213, 248-9 Bieri, P. 111 Bird, G. 38-9, 140, 142, 165 Brittan, G. 154-5, 166 Bubner, R. 75 Burnyeat, M. F. 75

Feder, J. G. H. 280 Fichte, ]. G. 168 Fischer, K. 158 Fodor, ]. 112 Forster, E. 19 Friedman, M. 166

Campbell, D. T. 111 Cassan1, Q. 75 Cerf, W. 19 Clarke, T. 111 Collingwood, R. G. 46 Copernicus, N. 4

Habermas, J. 47 Haldane, E. S. 75 Harrison, R. 48, 51, 163, 167 Hegel, G. W. F. 23 Heidegger, M. 219, 221 Henrich, D. 19, 280 Herz, M. 3, 18, 20 Hintikka, ]. 75, 129-30, 138 Hobbes, T. 264-5 Horstmann, R. P. 176 Hume, D. 23-4, 29-34, 37-8, 39, 57, 75, 166,224-6 Husser!, E. 219-21, 227-8, 248

Davidson, D. 9-10, 19,90,93-9, 101-2, 105-6, 111-12 Delekat, F. 19 Dennett, D. C. 85-6, 90-6, 99, 102, 105, 111, 113

Gabe, L. 280 Garve, C. 3 Goldman, A. 110-11 Green, T. H. 284 Gustitus, V. 195 Guyer, P. 165-6, 169-75, 176,280

290

Index

Jacobi, F. H. 168 Jakob, L. H. 248 James, W. 26, 39 Kemp Smith, N. 18,20, 138, 165, 167, 248 Kinsella, M. 195 Korner, S. 14-15, 19,46-9,53-5, 75-6 Lear, J. 38 Leibniz, G. W. 119, 151, 225, 227, 237-8, 249, 263-4 Locke, J. 145-6, 265-6 Low, R. 19 Lucas, P. G. 18, 248-9 McFarland, J. D. 19 Mackie, J. 19, 48 Maimon, S. 168 Malcolm, N. 9-10, 19 Martin, G. 166 Mathieu, V. 19 Meier, G. F. 182 Meiners, C. 280 Merian 280 Nagel, G. 141-2, 165-6 Nagel, T. 111, 113 Nielsen, K. 51 Nozick, R. 85, 110-11 Pappas, G. S. 110 Parsons, C. 166 Prauss, G. 214, 248 Putnam, H. 90, 104-10, 110-11, 113, 142-6, 165-6, 217, 235, 248-9 Quine, W. V. 71, 76, 111, 165 Reich, K. 280 Reichard, J. F. 193

Reinhold, K. L. 168 Rorty, R. 15, 19, 46-8, 54, 75, 111 Ross, G. R. T. 75 Russel, B. 171, 176 Ryle, G. 113 Schaper, E. 48, 76, 213 Schelling, F. W. 168 Schmidt, R. 165 Shoemaker, S. 16 Shope, R. K. 110 Stevenson, L. 38 Stine, W. D. 51, 111 Stoecker, R. 113 Strawson, P. F. 8-13, 15-17, 19-20, 26, 38-9, 44, 49-50, 55-6, 72, 75-6, 121, 123-4, 132-3, 138-9, 140, 165,239-40, 249, 278, 280 Stroud, B. 16-17,20,36-8,38-9, 51-2, 55-6, 66-8, 73-4, 75-6, 111, 113 Swain, M. 110 Trendelenburg, A. 158, 161 Vaihinger, H. 167, 171, 176 Walker, R. C. S. 75-6 141-2 165-6 ' , Watling, J. 136-7, 139 Weischedel, W. 213, 248 Wilkerson, E. T. 9, 19, 75 Williams, B. 26, 39 Wittgenstein, L. 9, 11, 19 43 51 54, 113, 248, 273, 278' , Wolff, C. 151, 263, 265-6, 280 Wolff, R. P. 19, 249 Wuketits, F. M. 111 Zweig, A. 20, 248-9